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[TokenClub Live] ForTube Lei Yu & Chu Kang: The continuing future of Blockchain and Open Finance _ Binance Block 101

-This may be the 67th__ conversation of #block 101#- Another preview: Coco_�m__Huang Lingbo: How does capital capture unicorns in industries such as for example DeFi? �n_ On July 28, 2020, Binance Yingge talked with Lei Yu, co-founder of The Force Process & ForTube; and Chu Kang, co-CEO of ForTube & BN Capital, founder of BN Capital. Lei Yu and Chu Kang shared this content of blockchain talent training and DeFi monitor related content material in the live life broadcast, and distributed to the viewers the see of the central bank's issuance of DCEP. Lei Yu and Chu Kang mentioned that liquid mining will be the new wealth program code. Lei Yu and Chu Kang believe that blockchain has begun to get attention in domestic university education. Blockchain isn't just a technology, but more is highly recommended to integrate economic theory and education in the economic climate with blockchain. At the same time, the growth of the industry must focus on the, highly integrate creation, education and analysis, subdivide research instructions to put into action an interdisciplinary teaching model, and combine concept with practical tasks to market blockchain talent training. Regarding the recent very hot DeFi track, Lei Yu stated that DeFi is a classic case of paradigm change. DeFi is based on cryptocurrency to subvert the traditional financial design and successfully improve transaction performance. In addition, Chu Kang believes that it is still too early to state that DeFi will replace centralized finance, but the advantage of DeFi is based on the relatively fair and equitable use of time and funds. Over time, DeFi and centralized finance will mutually advertise typical prosperity and development, and obtain prosperity. Block 101: Lei Yu & Chu Kang "The monetary theory itself, blockchain technology is inseparable, so it's a good idea to inspire learners to use blockchain technology for financial innovation to cultivate this type of talent echelon." "Actually, in the 2017 crypto asset bull marketplace, many people are usually actually eager for the financial qualities of the blockchain, but the real implementation of the blockchain requires constant technological updating and iteration and repeated practice, especially for the entire blockchain industry inside 2019. Since this type of strategy to rise to the united states, a lot more universities have begun to pay attention to and vigorously promote it." "I think that the early launch of the main bank's digital currency is definitely good and no harm. The team that is working on the Chinese version of the stable currency on Ethereum or Binance Chain can in fact consider how to collaborate following the central bank's digital foreign currency is released. The near future will definitely It will expand between your central bank's electronic currency and Libra." "Now I've used Huabei's non-repayment record meeting to collect credit. I think this is not directly linked to the issuance of DCEP. Last year, Director Mu Changchun said that DCEP is really a replacement for M0 money. For DCEP, It is equivalent to encouraging everyone to take the cash at hand or portion of the bank deposit to exchange for DCEP in the future." "DeFi completely breaks the barriers in between different CeFi platforms and makes the flow of funds in the chain smoother, and we know that now even CeFi systems have invested part of the funds in DeFi to get profit optimization." "China is quite pragmatic and makes use of blockchain to empower the real economy. I think it is spring when a hundred plants bloom. In accordance with your personal characteristics, it is possible to lay out your preferred blockchain projects. I believe I'll look back in two or three years. There will be great gains." MC Yingge inside this issue Guests Lei Yu & Chu Kang A total of 14121 words Estimated reading time: 36 minutes 1 Binance Yingge: Nowadays, our first guest of "Block 101"-Lei Yu, may be the CEO of The Pressure Protocol and the co-founder of For Tube. The second is Chu Kang, the co-CEO of For Tube and the founder of Benrui Capital. Hello two bosses. Lei Yu (left) Ying Ge (best) Chu Kang (bottom part) Chu Kang: Hi everyone, I'm Chu Kang. Binance Brother Ying: Hi, boss Chu Kang. Hello, boss Lei Yu. Lei Yu: Hi there everyone. Binance Brother Ying: Let's say hello there to everyone initial, Lei Yu shows up first. Lei Yu: Many thanks. I am happy to become a live broadcast of Binance's "Block 101" today. I am the co-founder of The Drive Process and ForTube. Binance Brother Ying: Let's talk about Boss Chu Kang. Chu Kang: Hi there, everyone. I'm Chu Kang. I am the founder of Benrui Funds. We have sent many excellent co-workers to Binance. We are furthermore the co-CEO of For Tube, which was officially introduced today. 2 Binance Brother Ying: Applaud. Both guests have completed the intro first, let me first arrived at a hot spot questioning session. I'd like to ask both big men. Let's start discussing entering the. When did the two sign up for the blockchain sector, and from which channel do they 1st hear about Bitcoin? Boss Lei Yu, come first. Lei Yu: The very first time I arrived to contact with Bitcoin was relatively early. I studied for a master's degree at Tsinghua from 2009 to 2012. In 2011, I graduated from 2nd to third in graduate college. I loved to go over the walls and go to Twitter at the time. Some content material and progress in computer technology. In those days, there was several big men in China. I recall there were keso and others like Li Xiaolai. At that time, they shared various technical items on Twitter. What amazed me the most was that Li Xiaolai kept discussing how good Bitcoin is. I thought to myself the facts? Just started to read some information regarding Bitcoin. After reading it, I felt that Bitcoin was in line with Hayek's liberal economic philosophy, and that private individuals could issue currency, that was actually cool. In those days, there were hardly any domestic individuals who understood this point, and I furthermore understood that I thought this thing had been very fashionable, and it would have been digging Bitcoin for a time period. Because of the technical complex, I didn't purchase it in the market. I simply dig using the pc and didn't dig very much. After graduation, We was busy and didn't pay attention, so I let it go. In 2016, I arrived to contact with Bitcoin once again and discovered that this issue had been 10,000 RMB. I understand that it'll only cost several yuan in 11 years. When I saw, I almost broke my thigh at the time. This is one way much prosperity I skipped. Later on, starting in 2016, he systematically started to research Bitcoin and blockchain, technology, products, and ecology, etc., and came into connection with representative tasks such as for example Ethereum. Binance Brother Ying: What about the coins it is possible to dig, can't you find it? Lei Yu: I dug on the computer in the laboratory at the time. After graduation, the personal computer was gone. In those days, I dug such as a sport each day, and no one cares. Binance Brother Ying: Next Mr. Chu Kang. Chu Kang: Actually, I started to get in touch with Bitcoin in 2014, but I remember the bull market that year quite clearly. The boost from RMB 800 to RMB 4,000 or RMB 5,000 was also very crazy. At that time there is Bitcoin China, etc. And so forth these sites. In fact, there was no particularly systematic information to comprehend Bitcoin in those days. There are not many blockchain press and self-media, therefore in those days, just from Baidu Blog post Bar, Weibo, and some forums. Learn in a few small offline actions. I was even now studying Internet financing at China UnionPay, therefore the complex and financial features of Bitcoin actually aroused my strong attention. I remember that what was particularly interesting at that time has been that I had been with my good friends at the time. I took my pocket money to buy BTC. I furthermore bought BTC every day. He didn't purchase it himself. Afterwards in the huge bull marketplace in 2017, he delivered me a note. I skip the scene you told us about Bitcoin before. In 2016, I did so in-depth research on the representative blockchain tasks of Bitcoin and Ethereum from the technology product ecology and so forth, including its decentralized attributes, which completely subverted some of my previous knowledge and understanding of Web products, especially ours What I've learned about Internet platform strategy is completely different from that of system strategy, because I have experienced system strategy in the web boom of 2014, 2015, and 2016. It was also in 2014 that I acquired the initial Bitcoin deal in my life. Binance Ying: Next, I wish to ask. At present, our major universites and colleges have started to offer courses on blockchain technologies and programs. Blockchain customers and investors may also be developing right into a young team. Two bosses Have you got any opinions and suggestions about the country's advanced schooling when it comes to talent trained in the blockchain market? It is possible to chat separately. Chief Lei arrive first. Lei Yu: There is a phenomenon now. If you seek out blockchain technologies on station B, you can find some blockchain programs from universities in China, like the Computer Division of Peking University. This demonstrates, in terms of domestic advanced schooling training, blockchain has already been becoming deployed and receiving corresponding attention. But because I'm currently working on the blockchain project, I have observed a problem. In fact, this blockchain also includes cryptocurrency, that is inseparable from financial innovation. Today some overseas tasks, such as for example DeFi, may be mentioned later on. If overseas, these areas are actually revolutionary and R&D. It could be described as modifying with each moving day, new things turn out every day. Aspects such as financial theory and financial thinking are all in the field of cryptocurrency, combined with blockchain technologies to get innovative procedures. What will it reflect? It displays that in addition to technology, overseas blockchain practitioners already have a deep financial theory. Blockchain is not just a technologies. It really is some sort of advancement in creation relations. We contact it a paradigm shift, which involves many major monetary improvements, both technically and theoretically. Therefore, if only the blockchain technology is emphasized, there may be too little research and innovation in neuro-scientific theory within China. I have a suggestion. This is a good thing for universites and colleges to develop courses such as for example blockchain technology, but I would recommend that more should consider combining education such as financial theory and economic climate with blockchain technologies. Everyone should see the development pattern of foreign DeFi and so forth. It is far less simple compared to the current hot projects, and it will definitely be a very important trend and improvement later on. The financial theory itself, blockchain technology is inseparable, so it is necessary to inspire students to use blockchain technology to handle financial innovation such a thinking, to cultivate this type of talent echelon. Binance Brother Ying: Okay, then Mr. Kang is here. Chu Kang: In fact, in the big bull market of encrypted assets in 2017, lots of people are actually looking forward to the financial qualities of blockchain, but the real implementation of blockchain requires continuous update and iteration of technologies and repeated practice, specifically in the blockchain industry in 2019. Since rising to the nationwide core strategy, a lot more colleges and universities have started to pay attention and vigorously promote it. I just talked about Tsinghua University. Tsinghua University has already been at the forefront in the areas of internet and computer. Everybody knows that a lot of of the well-known domestic tasks have got Tsinghua backgrounds. Tsinghua includes a systematic education of specialized talents. But I think that the development of commercial blockchain technologies demands universities to get greatly in scientific research money, including concentrated study on technology. They should also concentrate on the industry and integrate creation, education and study right into a high degree. Simultaneously, I think there's an interdisciplinary training model. Why can you state that? Because numerous majors in universites and colleges have become subdivided, especially the research direction. If the industrial blockchain will probably land and create, it isn't enough to rely on the so-called encryption algorithms, so-called encryption, timestamps, and distributed ledgers that people usually discuss. Blockchain technology should form an interdisciplinary subject matter with artificial intelligence, big data, G, etc., and at the same time use market-oriented solutions to inspire learners and talents, and present them some practical tasks for exploration in community, such as authorities affairs such as traceability. When training them, it could be truly integrated with their actual tasks, and I'll sense that the complete country will make greater improvement in the cultivation of blockchain talents. Binance Yingge: We saw that Mr. Kang proved helpful for a core organization like UnionPay for a long time. What possibility did you get from the original financial market to the field of encrypted possessions to start out a business? Chu Kang: I used to truly have a one job and career. To state single is usually to be even more devoted to the work. After graduating, I have been employed in the China UnionPay system for more than a decade, and I have time to really understand the blockchain business in a comprehensive and systematic manner. After the big market situation in 2014, I was responsible for the construction of the payment talent training system at UnionPay, so I integrated the data of blockchain into a talent training system. There were no teaching components and no Any articles to make reference to. We searched the marketplace for many publications on blockchain, developed it into an electronic course, and wear it the official website of the Financial Coaching Center. Because of this, many practitioners from banks and finance institutions go through me systematically and seriously. Such a set of teaching components compiled at that time. Because throughout writing the program, I was really systematic and learned to comprehend the blockchain. Furthermore, I committed to some good projects in 2017 and 2016, so in 2018, I made a lot of dedication to depart I became a member of China UnionPay and devoted myself to becoming a Fund. Recently, I was furthermore the co-CEO of For Tube simultaneously. Why did I prefer to get the co-CEO of For Tube? First, I have a background in the economic industry. I have some useful and profound understanding of debt, technology and finance, like the securities marketplace. If blockchain technologies really must be practically applied, I think the mix of blockchain and financing itself is really a direction I'm thinking about, and blockchain + financing itself is DeFi. Of course, in 2020, we will have the true DeFi funding rise, from 1 billion US dollars to 6 billion US bucks. I always think that it will reach 15 billion US dollars by the end of the entire year. I believe some related tasks will be at least 3 to 5 5 times larger. This is exactly what I think I can see at the end of this year. The DeFi platform For Tube is a financial service platform developed by The Force Agreement, and the entire For Tube team has known it really early. From starting to end, I think the entire For Tube group is a very practical group in Asia and also the planet. For Tube items may also be very revolutionary, not only with mortgage agreements, but also for issuing bonds. It is precisely because I've self-confidence in the product, including the entire group, that I have talked about with the building blocks on the basis of capital, and lastly became a member of For Tube, wishing to become the top DeFi task in Asia , This is a extremely original idea in my own heart. Binance Brother Ying: After discussing this, I still desire to ask Boss Lei, when did you begin your business here, and what was your original intention of starting your organization? Was it really optimistic about the blockchain sector at that time? Lei Yu: I resigned from the market position of a multinational medical device company where I actually worked at the earliest in 2015. After leaving my work, I went to work as an entrepreneurial group in the Internet medical industry in China. Later on, in more than half per year, this entrepreneurial group was Tencent invested in WeDoctor Team acquired. Later, in 2016, I visited another startup business in the field of Internet rehabilitation and medical care. Then this startup firm was bought out by an A-share pharmaceutical company. After the takeover, we transformed right into a rehabilitation hospital Investment and construction function. In complete, there have been three entrepreneurial experiences before the Force Agreement. Although these were not their very own bosses, they were all close to the management plus some of the core of the company, so that they knew what sort of survival condition startups are usually. For instance, where will be the shortcomings or advantages of an entrepreneurial team, which includes how to begin a company, and what pitfalls you have to pay attention to in the entrepreneurial process, these have grown to be the foundation for me and several business school classmates to create the Force Contract. . The key reason why I started my business was not at all hard in the beginning, that is, I hope to realize a value in my own life through entrepreneurship. It sounds like I am a little more idealistic sometimes, not to mention I am hoping to be able to gain monetary freedom incidentally. It's just that when i re-exposed to the blockchain in 2016, I was still doing preparations for the reason that hospital, so I had some free time to review the blockchain. Once We was fascinated with the research, We felt that this industry definitely has good potential later on and has the power to subvert the original financial system. Even I thought at that time that it may affect the entire human society in the future. From all areas of politics and economy, blockchain will penetrate and play its role. Later, in 2017 and 2018, there have been plenty of thunderstorms in domestic Internet financing. In fact, two or three people in our team directly invested in Internet financing, or had worked well in it. Everybody knows that Internet finance actually has serious and deep pits in it. of. But after everyone came into contact with blockchain, they found that this thing can fundamentally alter most of the flaws of Internet finance. We thought from the perspective of financing at that time that investors and debtors can achieve lending procedures in a fair, open and transparent investing environment. Therefore, we hope to use the blockchain to contribute a little to the forwards development and reform of the economic climate, and we jointly produced the task of The Push Agreement, that is the original purpose of entrepreneurship. For future years of blockchain, I'm firmly bullish. 3 Binance Brother Ying: You mentioned The Push Agreement at the moment. The brand of Force Contract can be very popular. I wanted to understand about it last year. I would like to ask you what sort of company the Force Contract is? Can you reveal about your company's team history, main company, including corporate eyesight and so forth. Lei Yu: The title of the force of our Force Agreement originates from "Superstar Wars", which is The Pressure. At that time, the name was selected for the international market. It is relatively simple for everyone to contact, and it is more international. Once you expose it to foreigners , It'll know this concept. Later I found out that it didn't appear to be the case, but the title had recently been used, and that was it. We have been now predicated on Ethereum. Later on, we have plans to dock the public chain systems of popular blockchains such as Binance Chain. We develop encrypted open up financial protocols based on these open public chains. The current The Force Process comprises a couple of DeFi technology parts and a tokenized process. Our current technical element of DeFi is that we see that along the way of Dapp development on Ethereum, your smart contract can't be upgraded once it is deployed, and the data structure is relatively solidified. Simultaneously, the quickness of conversation on your chain, everyone understands that gas expenses are high today, and the conversation speed is slow. Last year, an individual experience was not good, the necessary financial infrastructure is lacking, and security problems are also emerging. So we came up with a couple of technical components, a couple of expansion components and financial components, three types of DeFi components, the three forms of components are collectively called the initial force, this is the articles of the DeFi component, you can observe for information Official website and white paper. On the basis of DeFi technology, we developed a tokenized protocol. Tokenized protocols consist of debt funding, cryptocurrency current financing, and decentralized stablecoins, etc. We have integrated these tokenized protocols right into a one-stop lending, investment, and financing assistance called ForTube. Platform, it is a positioning of ForTube. Our ForTube provides personal and corporate customers with expense financing in direction of encrypted electronic asset lending, along with transactions between bond token users. That is an introduction to our ForTube and The Pressure Agreement products. Talking about the team, we has been originally founded by me, my partner Allen, and some business school classmates from Chaoge. Allen has a background inside traditional financial expense. He's got successfully invested in several Internet boat loan companies and provides a solid judgment on the advancement of the. Brother Chao has an engineering background. After graduating, he worked as a cloud computing architect and important account manager at ZTE Team. , So he is more experienced in product procedure, and at the same time has stronger business capabilities. Later, our team gradually joined technical talents. Before 94, the CTO of the world-renowned swap Yunbi.com also joined our team. His technical strength is very strong. Nowadays Gangguan Xuan Kang Shao furthermore joined up with, and our strength is constantly increasing. Simultaneously, the structure of overseas communities and the recruitment of groups are also underway. We now have corresponding full-time or part-time workers in Singapore, Europe, and the Americas that are working about our FOR token and ForTube systems. We now have slowly become an international team. Lastly, the vision is similar to this. We have been committed to providing an inclusive, innovative and protected programmable encrypted economic service to users all over the world. Through the solutions provided by ForTube, we are able to really do inclusive financing. Blockchain can perform this. . Throughout the procedure for realizing our vision, we still prioritize items, do item and technology research and development first, rather than do air tasks. We are in charge of our customers and token holders. We pursue excellence in item and technology growth. We realize that we are actually The product continues to be extremely inadequate, and the technology still has several areas worthy of improvement, but the team will continue to work hard to offer you better services. This is a value orientation. Binance Brother Ying: Many thanks, Mr. Lei. There's one more question. I'd like to inquire two guests. Mr. Lei has been interviewed by way of a reporter from China Periods. Once, he explained that the new version of Libra will continue for US$8,000 and the DCEP test is in full swing. Talking on the event to analyze the modifications Libra has brought to the planet, the two will talk to the buddies about the distinction and contest between Libra and DCEP, which is more powerful. Lei Yu: Once the China Occasions interviewed me before, it just happened that Facebook released the next edition of Libra's white papers. The design of the second edition was different from the first edition. In the initial edition of the whitened document, Facebook pursued Libra as Super-sovereign currencies are usually independent of the lawful currencies of varied countries and also have their own exchange prices to operate. Consequently, we later discovered that it was beaten by Europe and in addition beaten by america, and it became a sovereign foreign currency system. In the next edition of the look, the U.S. dollar was anchored to launch the U.S. dollar Libra. This style is the same as the popular USDT or USDC stablecoins available. However, the next edition of the Libra whitened paper leaves a mouth area for the super-sovereign currency. He stated Problem a super-sovereign currency that can be exchanged with a variety of mainstream currencies for trade with the swap rate of weaker countries. Libra should be a US dollar version at the beginning. From this viewpoint, Libra assists the US dollar to continue the so-known as US dollar hegemony in the field of digital currency. It has turned into a defender or a vassal of the US dollar system. I understand that Zuckerberg and his team have a liberal ideal, but the resistance of conventional forces is too strong. Libra was created like this. NEO Going back to the main bank digital currency, the central bank's digital foreign currency competitors aren't so-called cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. They are actually Libra, because the user foundation behind Facebook reaches minimum one billion, with this type of large numbers of users. If Libra turns into global After being widely adopted, people utilize the Libra system to ostensibly anchor the legal currency of varied countries. If you need to use rmb abroad, if you want rmb to enter the market, you must go to dock with Libra. To put it nicely, the marketplace is kept in the hands, and rmb should be negotiated with others as well as begged by you. Opening Libra's RMB foreign currency depends upon its face. For RMB internationalization, this sort of result will be unwilling to see.

Therefore, at this time, whether it is the central bank digital foreign currency or other domestic stable foreign currency teams, it must not be taken gently. Libra is really a relatively huge mountain while watching internationalization of RMB. There could be a comparatively large marketplace for RMB, however now that Facebook hasn't entered China, the forex market is not available to Facebook, also it does not matter abroad. Because of this situation, the near future still needs to look at Libra's face. So I think the first release of the central bank's digital currency is definitely good no harm, and when there are other Chinese version of stable foreign currency tasks in the united kingdom, such as our stable currency on the chain, as the central bank's digital foreign currency is not on the Ethereum chain, etc., I haven't heard about it. To create a team like the Chinese version of the steady currency about Ethereum or about the Binance Chain, you can actually consider how exactly to collaborate after the main bank's digital currency is launched to market the internationalization of rmb in different marketplaces, and the internationalization of rmb will be promoted everywhere. Occupying various marketplaces, that is my personal viewpoint, the potential future will definitely be the central bank electronic foreign currency and Libra. Chu Kang: Actually, Mr. Lei has already spoken in great details, but I believe there is absolutely no such matter as a contest and who is more powerful. You can find more differences in the organizational structure, distribution system, and technical routes. What requirements special interest? The DCEP issued by the People's Lender of China is actually RMB electronic and is lawful currency. Libra itself is in fact issued by business organizations, and at exactly the same time anchors a lot of legal currency digital currency, it generally does not have a certain degree of legal compensation itself, this is actually the most fundamental difference in credit endorsement. Due to such a difference in itself, it is destined that the entire development path, including the background duties of the period it carries, is totally different. I very much buy into the possibility that Mr. Lei simply pointed out. The issuance of DCEP will form an exterior RMB electronic foreign currency zone, which will form an internal circular optimistic incentive mechanism for the economy, and can resist the interference of several external plans to keep independence and endogenousness. It is extremely beneficial to the internationalization of RMB. Actually, RMB accelerates the procedure of internationalization in the form of digital RMB. Somewhat, in fact, we may be able to see this type of process of rmb internationalization in a relatively short time of time. Just like the colleagues of the entire Central Bank Digital Currency Analysis Institute, they're right now in Meituan, Are you currently hungry, Die Didu offers carried out the internal tests of the national legal digital currency, that is doing perfectly. The ordinary people are getting nearer and closer to the digital currency. The spread, use, and media of digital currency itself are inseparable from Internet application products. We simply discussed Ele. Meituan, and Didi. It really is an app with an extremely large user experience. How about To realize the internationalization of RMB? We also have many, several app applications overseas. Of course, it is a pity that people are viewing instability because of the uncertainty of the entire global political economic climate. Some countries are now going to suppress a few of our country's Internet products. This may be a far more obvious trouble before us. I really believe that with the improvement of China's national strength, rmb's worldwide voice may also increase. The bigger, including DCEP to help its internationalization is merely nearby.

4 Binance Brother Ying: Okay, many thanks two bosses. Somebody asked, is Huabei's credit score investigation a prelude to the issuance of DCEP? Will any guest desire to answer? Lei Yu: Let me share briefly. Given that Huabei will not repay, your record will be called for credit. I don't think this is directly linked to the issuance of DCEP. Last year, Director Mu Changchun stated that DCEP will replace M0 and replace cash. For DCEP, , Which is equivalent to encouraging everyone to get the cash at hand or area of the bank deposit to switch for DCEP in the future. Of training course, this is actually a cash-level behavior. Huabei is at the credit degree, which is equal to not repaying with a debit card. There is currently no direct relationship between the two. Binance Yingge: Will Mr. Kang have anything to include? Chu Kang: Actually, there is currently no exclusive relationship between your two. Huabei is still an work of credit lending. Huabei is really a financial item provided by the centralized organization Ant Financial. It is mainly predicated on your normal usage of Alipay. The situation comes to a thorough credit assessment. Then give a certain amount of credit score, and you may benefit from the financial services out of this institution as a centralized economic service. However the credit it offers you or the money it gives you belong to the existing legal foreign currency, and you will point out it to the lender cards by withdrawing. If we have been issuing DCEP throughout the country, the entire application situation becomes quite rich, and you can consume in various places in e-commerce. Simultaneously, if the main body of Ant Financial Huabei can be part of DCEP. For huge pilot units, it's possible that what Huabei borrowed is the statutory DCEP, but between the two, it might be a mapping on the use scenario, in fact it is not particularly linked to the growth and advertising of DCEP. 5 Binance Ying: Let's get down to company. Next, let's discuss the recent sizzling DeFi topics. Everyone thinks DeFi is the future and is very optimistic. It doesn't appear to be an especially easy task to displace centralized finance institutions in the short term. What do the two bosses think may be the benefit of DeFi? What are the dangers of DeFi, you two can talk about. Lei Yu: I simply mentioned a expression called paradigm change. In human history, every major paradigm shift provides about a change in society and sector. We know DeFi, and looking at it now is an example of a paradigm change. To begin with, the generation of blockchain and encrypted electronic currency is really a main technological or paradigm innovation. The initial DeFi application based on the blockchain has subverted numerous traditional financial versions. Now the typical application situation of DeFi is decentralized exchanges, decentralized transactions, Binance, Huobi, etc. are CeFi, following a order book transaction design, DeFi jumped out of this type of gameplay, it changed to AMM One way, automated market makers. In the AMM design, the counterparty of the deal is a smart agreement, and the marketplace price is usually solved by an algorithm. The algorithm and the offer and demand connection determine the marketplace price of a token collectively, that is a subversion of the traditional order book model. Then comes the improvement of deal efficiency. Provided that I have a pool of money there, as long as the swimming pool of money is deep good enough, I could get estimates to trade tokens anytime, and the amount of independence of transactions will increase accordingly. Today uniswap isn't shown. Any threshold, so long as this is a intelligent contract, it is possible to go to DEX. The initial exchange for most projects isn't as laborious as discussing an IEO before, and also some trade cards will withdraw money and card funds. Now it is called IUO. They are new adjustments to the industry after the entire paradigm shift. Let's take another example in the field of lending. The latest innovative task in the field of lending is called yearn. Through its own ytoken, it could implement smart agreements and invest in the investment targets with the highest return on user asset search. Following the release of yearn, you can view the impact of the current period. The allocation ratio of resources to the underlying Compound and AAVE's fund swimming pool. In traditional CeFi, which exchange or platform where user funds are put, it is difficult to flexibly invest in the subject of various other platforms. I have never heard about which company puts funds in its solutions and instantly finds the most ideal interest rate for you. Investment, it is impossible. DeFi totally breaks the barriers between different CeFi platforms and can make the stream of money on the chain smoother, and we realize that also CeFi platforms and companies today invest part of their money in DeFi to get optimization of revenue. Let us give an example, such as Binance, Binance can find BNB wealth management or BUSD prosperity management services inside DeFi. It is difficult for Binance to put its BNB or BUSD on some other CeFi platforms. What if that system runs aside? But also for DeFi, the intelligent contract is here. Following the audit, everyone understands that it is safe. Centralized exchanges such as this are furthermore willing to put assets previously for financial administration. DeFi and CeFi will integrate with each other in the future. From the perspective of user needs, users desire to be in a position to configure funds more efficiently across platforms. Therefore, the openness and mix of DeFi will normally attract users to participate. As long as users understand the truth, they will give priority to selection DeFi. DEX such as for example Uniswap, which does not require permission to establish investing pairs on the foreign currency, is well-liked by various tasks. You can view the inherent benefits and characteristics of DeFi, and there is absolutely no question that it will continue steadily to gain even more room for advancement. And the marketplace share will definitely continue to increase, also it may even make the idea of cryptocurrency really from the circle. Moving away from the field of cryptocurrency to obtain more from traditional funds, the large amount of money in the traditional field may also be in the future. May enter the DeFi industry. But DeFi, you can't just talk about its benefits, it will be has dangers. DeFi is composable. In the event a particular DeFi process or DeFi application has security problems, it'll affect not only itself, but also other protocols combined with it. Everyone provides complications together. This degree of harm, From top to bottom, from underneath to the very best, and the even more you go directly to the bottom part, the higher the scope of harm caused by problems with the underlying protocol, the greater losing, and the wider the scope. For DeFi, everyone is in a stage where it has only begun to build up. The developer's first priority must be security. Simultaneously, they must focus on the code, including the security of the code, including the security of the business logic. When you match others, the complexity of the mixture should be controllable.

The even more DeFi protocols combined jointly, the greater the likelihood of security vulnerabilities, since it is impossible to ensure that other DeFi protocols value security just as much as you do. Everyone offers high technology and low technology. The more vulnerabilities, the higher the potential reduction. . Along with paying attention to the security of your code, you must also pay attention to the complexity of the composition and keep it inside a safe variety. This is one aspect that I think DeFi needs to be strengthened now.

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jbaquerot · 7 years

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Big Data’ (BD) refers to the accumulation of data that cannot be processed or handled using traditional data management tools and processes. It is a data management architecture challenge characterised succinctly by the ‘four-V’ model (Volume: size of data, Variety: data in multiple forms, Velocity: data in motion, Veracity: data accuracy). Google revolutionised the IT approaches in this domain and popularised the importance of handling voluminous data as ‘information currency’ for competing in today’s markets; the term ‘Big Data’ has come to represent the simple yet seemingly revolutionary belief that data are valuable.

In this new competitive paradigm, the agents responsible for liberating and creating meaning out of raw [big] data are the Data Scientists (The Data Science Association, 2013). In contrast to popular belief, ‘Data-Science’ was suggested as far back as 2001 as a rebranding of the field of ‘Data-Mining’ to reflect advances in computing with data (‘Data Science: an action plan for expanding the technical areas of the field of statistics’, W.S. Cleveland). That same year saw the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley audit reforms (following the Enron scandal) that forced businesses to systematise their controls for financial reporting and invest in large-scale data processes to support performance planning.

Despite two decades of intensive IT investment in data [mining] applications, recent studies show that companies continue to have trouble identifying metrics that can predict and explain performance results and/or improve operations. Data mining, the process of identifying patterns and structures in the data, has clear potential to identify prescriptions for success but its wide implementation fails systematically. Companies tend to deploy ‘unsupervised-learning’ algorithms in pursuit of predictive metrics, but this automated [black box] approach results in linking multiple low-information metrics in theories that turn out to be improbably complex.

There is no better case in point than Google’s Flu Trends. Back in 2008 the Internet colossus launched a web service that claimed to trace the spread of influenza by finding correlations between web-searches and whether people where exhibiting flu symptoms. The original success of the platform was pronounced by its theory-free, fast-processing predictions; a whole week faster than the Centre of Disease Control’s approach that relied on reports from medical check-ups. The search engine algorithms would become emblematic of a new data-processing paradigm that businesses could aspire to and compete on, since with ‘enough data the numbers speak for themselves’ (Anderson, 2008, Wired).

This trend was only set to grown exponentially from a recent rebranding of data-mining into ‘Data-Science’ in this era of Big-Data. This is powered by a multi-billion dollar industry of software-vendors that offer specialist tools for data-discovery, data-mining, and predictive-analytics (Qlik Sense, Wave Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, etc.). IT departments view this trend as an evolutionary step in the information ecology and act as catalysts in the adoption of such technologies, typically managing such programs as another MIS implementation.

But no matter how scalable and capable the implemented data technology or how sophisticated the Artificial Intelligence (AI), the human factor is an essential prerequisite for the successful implementation of algorithms and data-analysis processes. It is simply impossible to identify data metrics high in information content and impact [on explanations and predictions] without hypothesis-driven learning. To put this in perspective, the totality of the world’s supercomputers and AI with access to unlimited data would be unable to replicate the fundamental structure of an economy like the system of 100+ equations that comprise the UK macroeconomic model (www.budgetresponsibility.org.uk/pubs/Final_Model_Documentation.pdf). Such models are the culmination of deep insight into the workings of a complex system that has been purely gained by data-hypothesis strategies prescribed by scientists such as statisticians, econometricians, and business-analysts.

This was very undoing of Flu Trends, as Google’s engineers only cared about correlations rather than causations in the data. The finding of patterns was easier and cheaper, but a theory-free analysis of correlations is inevitably fragile and prone to collapse with a constant refresh of data. In Google’s case, flu scare stories and an inappropriate linguistic processing increased the frequency of related-searches to the point where the Flu-Trend algorithms artificially exacerbated the predicted spread of the disease.

Hypothesis-testing, the process of analysing data to explain and check the validity of specific ideas, is the essence of Analytics. It is an exercise of problem-solving using data and science consistent with the ethos of A.Einstein’s quote ‘if I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55min. defining the problem, and only 5min. finding the solution’. By extension, the offering of Analytics-as-a-Service reflects the provision of consulting services across the chain of Analytics-related activities (Understanding of the client problem→ Data-management and processing→ Data-investigation techniques→ Statistical analysis to quantify ‘uncertainty’ in the data→ Model deployment→ Implementation of solution). In this context, Big-Data is just an auxiliary process in a series of analysis activities. The correct definition of a client problem might not even require ‘big’ data. Datasets will invariably ‘shrink’ in dimensions as the analysis work is on subsets of variables that have statistical significance, and sampling techniques promote the use of compact yet generalisable datasets.

When it comes to data, size isn’t everything because big data on their own cannot just solve the problem of ‘insight’ (i.e. inferring what is going on). The true enablers are the data-scientists and statisticians who have been obsessed for more than two centuries to understand the world through data and what traps lie in wait during this exercise. In the world of analytics (AaaS), it is agility (using science, investigative skills, appropriate technology), trust (to solve the client’s real business problems and build collateral), and ‘know-how’ (to extract intelligence hidden in the data) that are the prime ‘assets’ for competing, not the size of the data. Big data are certainly here but big insights have yet to arrive.

#big data

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sustainabilitysarah · 4 years

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Introduction: Navigating the Food/Water/Energy Nexus: Synergizing for Sustaining

Greetings and welcome to Episode 1 in our new Sustainability Series, “Navigating the Food/Water/Energy Nexus; Synergizing for Sustainability”.

In this course we will take you on a journey into the complex interrelationships between 3 essential sectors in our environmental solutions portfolio that dominate our lives and yet continue to be poorly understood and whose mismanagement now arguably threatens the very existence of billions of people.

According to the United Nations World Water Development Report from 2014, “Recognizing the synergies [between food, energy and water], and balancing the trade-offs engendered by dealing with any one of them in isolation, is “central to jointly ensuring water, energy and food security.“

Security.

Water security. Energy security. Food Security. Homeland security. It’s a hot topic. For millions of people around the globe it is literally a matter of life and death.

Approached in isolation, each problem’s solution has historically created still more problems for the other sectors. As the United Nations World Water Development Report from 2014 reminds us:

” The global community is well aware of food, energy and water challenges, but has so far addressed them in isolation, within sectoral boundaries. At the country level, fragmented sectoral responsibilities, lack of coordination, and inconsistencies between laws and regulatory frameworks may lead to misaligned incentives” .

When trying to solve issues related to how and what and when people can eat and drink healthy food and water, and where they will get the energy to keep from heat or cold exposure, or to move away from trouble and toward opportunity, misalignment creates debilitating chaos. And yet, we’ve been well aware of the problem the sectoral approach creates.

This course seeks to address that by giving you a synergistic, holistic approach to problem solving. We need leaders in systems thinking, in sectoral integration. We need leaders who will bring insights from each domain where dysfunction is being dealt with and combine them into a broad suite of interleaving overlapping, combinatorially dynamic best practices. We need leaders who cross the boundaries and create industrial and natural ecologies that work together for the betterment of all.

You have just entered... the Food Energy Water NEXUS.

The UN report states, “If water, energy and food security are to be simultaneously achieved, decision-makers, including those responsible for only a single sector, need to consider broader influences and cross-sectoral impacts. A nexus approach to sectoral management, through enhanced dialogue, collaboration and coordination, is needed to ensure that co-benefits and trade-offs are considered and that appropriate safeguards are put in place”.

Safeguards from what, you may ask?

The UN report stresses that there are hidden costs to every benefit. That each forward step we take along a given path can simultaneously move us backward along another axis in our journey. It can be frustrating, and it is anything but obvious.

This graphic animation illustrates the point – you can try it yourself. The graph shows a sphere in a 3 dimensional Cartesian space, the kind 3D animators at Pixar use to create movies like Toy Story. We can let the x axis represent food, the y axis water. The z-axis would be energy. The zero point would be stagnation and anything below the 0 in negative number space would be, well, negative. Dysfunctional. Any points away from Zero in the positive direction would be a good thing. Think of it like a game. Can you keep the ball moving in positive direction in all three axes simultaneously?

When all you can see is one or two axes it is easy to be fooled. With only one dimension you have no idea where the ball is in the other dimensions. You wave your hand and move the mouse and drag the ball forward in, say the food dimension, only to find that you catastrophically decreased the amount of water available. In two dimensions, your typical X-Y space graph from economics, the kind we use with supply and demand curves, you can check out how movement in the food axis affects the water axis but still have no idea what is happening along the energy axis.

Anybody who has struggled to learn a 3D mesh modelling or animation or architectural program knows this effect two well. The mental ability to visualize in 3D space is also something scuba divers, submarine drivers, airline pilots and astronauts train for. We can learn to think this way on a computer through visualization programs like the one I am using here, “Blender 3D” a free open source physics engine used in the gaming industry. Despite the fact that we live in a 3 dimensional world, it is hard for most people to visualize motion in three dimensions at once. Computer simulations can help if we can look at different perspectives simultaneously with more than one 2 dimensional representation of space.. What most of us do when we want to manipulate an object in three D on a computer is open 4 windows with different viewpoints, as I illustrate here.

Three of them are two dimensional two axis views, one a flat plane looking down the Z axis so that we can see the X and Y just like in your high school geometry class, the other two looking down the X and Y axes respectively. The third view, the user view or camera view, is the nexus.

It shows how any move on one axes affects the position of the object on each of the other two axes.

It is a powerful conceptual tool, and once your mind has embraced the concept and skill of thinking along three axes simultaneously, you can make moves with confidence. And then you can apply this way of seeing the world to complex problem solving that involves many overlapping and interconnected parameters.

Of course, in real life, even if you appreciate the complexities in moving along different axes, there are tradeoffs and antagonisms as well as synergies, many interventions require value judgements and our ability to model reality is filled with uncertainties even if we could agree on what is “good” and what is “bad”. The law of unintended consequences always rears its ugly head, Murphy’s Law, stating that whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment, usually applies, and nature can behave in a capricious manner at times. And then there are competing visions of the world and competing political forces to factor in.

The UN report tells us,

““There are many synergies and trade-offs between water and energy use and food production. For example, Using water to irrigate crops might promote food production but it can also reduce river flows and hydropower potential. Growing bioenergy crops under irrigated agriculture can increase overall water withdrawals and jeopardize food security. Converting surface irrigation into high efficiency pressurized irrigation may save water but may also result

in higher energy use. Recognizing these synergies and balancing these trade-offs is central to jointly ensuring water, energy and food security.

“

Ay, and there’s the rub. We want to JOINTLY ensure the elements necessary for our survival and well being are always available, sustainably used, creating health and welfare benefits and justice for all. But it is quite a challenge to figure out how.

All we can console ourselves with is the notion that more information is often better than less – although economist Daniel Kahneman’s work on Fast and Frugal Heuristics, based on ideas from Gigerenzer and Todd’s ecological rationality research, calls even that assumption into question.

But at least we can say that having a bird’s eye view of a landscape, having a fish-eye lens to take it all in, having a multi-dimensional perspective, is arguably better than being stuck on a single axis, like the square in Edward Abbey’s classic math parable “Flatland” who has to learn how limited his perspectives and world view were when suddenly visited by a sphere and taken above his world to see how much more there is to reality.

The Food-Energy-Water Nexus provides that all-encompassing view from outside the flatland of single subject assumptions. We call it the FEW Nexus as a convenient acronym, but might also be thought of as the MORE Nexus – the place where more and more things are brought together and their interconnections made manifest.

FEW stands for Food Energy and Water. MORE could stand for “Multidimensional Omniperspectival Relationship Ecology”, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well, does it?

But while we are on the topic of the acronym we use for this course, let’s address the obvious “sin of omission”.

Where did all the waste go?

We all know that the process of growing, delivering and consuming food, and capturing, storing, delivering and using water, and producing, transforming, transmitting and consuming energy generate WASTE. And we know that these wastes – in the form of disease causing, foul smelling, water eutrophying and water and air polluting substances, are the primary reason that humanity is in such trouble these days, and that waste is the source of environmental injustices, habitat and species loss, illness and climate change.

So why isn’t WASTE in the title? Why don’t we call our course the “FEWW Nexus : Food Energy, Water and WASTE?”.

It is a good question, but we think we have an equally good answer.

The fact is, we want to eliminate WASTE. We don’t waste in our title as a reflection of our commitment to see waste disappear from both

our world and our worldview.

In the food-energy-water nexus, there is no room for waste. Waste is simply “the right thing in the wrong place at the wrong time or in the wrong concentration.” Waste is often a form of food for another process that has simply been denied a role as an input to that process.

The FEW Nexus takes an Industrial Ecology perspective.

Industrial Ecology, made popular by the architect William McDonough in his book Cradle to Cradle, remaking the way we make things, is an applied philosophical framework in which the output of every process should be the input of another process.

For example, in Reykjavic in Iceland I visited a thermal spa called the Blue Lagoon. It’s healing sulfur hot springs where merely the wastewater from the adjacent geothermal power plant.

Nothing wasted there. In coal country, fly ash from the burning of the coal is reprocessed into concrete blocks. In Cairo Egypt I visited a factory in the desert that took plastic bags from the city garbage collectors, heated and melted and crushed them into forms to make everything from park benches and palettes to manhole covers. Sometimes they mixed them when sand for weight and rigidity, and there are now companies making building block materials out of recycled plastic. In fact the entire world of recycling is moving toward a form of industrial ecology. At Mercy College we have the BLEST Japanese Plastic—to-oil machine that takes Styrofoam, polypropylene, polyethylene and other waste plastics and uses computer controlled pyrolysis/gasification to transform them back into oil and then into fractional products like kerosene, diesel fuel, gasoline and paraffin. After all, plastic was made from oil, and it is a simple procedure to turn it back into the substance from which it came.

But while all of this seems straightforward, the NEXUS teaches us both the limitations and the opportunities.

For example, we can talk about recycling all day, but most recycling takes prodigious amounts of water and energy, and these determine the economic limits to what almost all of us agree is an otherwise obvious solution to our waste problems. Because of the energy involved, for example, much would-be recycling is actually better classified as “Down-cycling”.

Down cycling means that we may not immediately being throwing things “away” but the secondary or third hand use may be severely downgraded from the first. In this way, for example, clothing may make it to a second-hand or thrift shop when it is a bit threadbare, and then, when it is no longer acceptable to wear it, it can be downcycled into cloth strips which are then woven into ornamental quilts or carpets. Further down in the life cycle, these items may end up being torn into strips and used as rags to clean up spills or mop up oil. At some point they make their way to a waste disposal site to be put in a landfill or incinerated. In these cases downcycling is preferred to simply throwing the clothes away, but it is part of an inevitable linear progression from “Cradle to Grave”.

What Mcdonough and Braungart took up the flag for industrial ecology in their book “From Cradle to Cradle”. Cradle to Cradle processes are TRUE recycling, where there is no grave, not landfill, no carbon sink. A worn out carpet is shredded, processed and turned back into a carpet. A plastic water bottle is turned back into a water bottle, and aluminum can into an aluminum can... or they are transformed into other goods of high value in such a way that the molecules in them never end up in the air or water or landfill.

But this process only works economically and environmentally and socially – the three axes of the sustainability paradigm – if the energy costs and water costs and labor costs (driven by the consumption of food, don’t forget) are taken into account and managed in a win-win-win way.

The FEW nexus lets us do that. It asks at every step of the life cycle – “how is this impacting the water? How is this impacting energy? How is this impacting food?” And it assumes a goal of ZERO WASTE.

The Nexus assumes an explicit understanding of systems integration, and draws its strength from the holistic approach successfully employed by NASA engineers working together in interdisciplinary teams to keep human beings alive in the forbidding environments of outer space. As the movie pitch slogan goes “In space, no one can hear you scream” – and in addition, nobody can make home deliveries of food or water while energy has to be very carefully managed.

The reductionist approach to problem solving that was the bedrock of the early scientific revolution, approaching systems in isolation, was fine for drilling down to basic principles and

developing early theories and models of the universe. But when it comes to surviving in that universe its limitations can become debilitating. The Nexus, with its theory-meets-practice approach, which we call PRAXIS, demands multiple disciplines working in synergy and harmony, demands mutual respect and understanding for multiple perspectives. It is a application of the ancient “blind men around the elephant” metaphor, where one touches the trunk and thinks it’s a hose, another touches the tusk and thinks it’s a spear, another thinks the tail is a rope and another the leg is a tree trunk. Only when they integrate their limited observations can they begin to reconstruct the whole elephant.

The NEXUS is the coming together of observations, theories, disciplines and sectors. It disciplines us to always pay attention to what the other blind man is seeing and to follow the threads as we tug on each strand of our understanding to see what impact it is having on another part of the system.

The food water energy nexus is also iterative and self-correcting. In its DNA is a kind of genetic algorithm that says “if a gain in parameter A causes a loss in B or C such that the entire system starts collapsing, correct A for maximum sustainable yield, even if it means bringing A down now in order to help it increase later. Then learn from that experience to make better finer adjustments in the future.”

The musician activist Pete Seeger, famous for his song “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” and for his work on the ClearWater Sloop sailing ship studying water pollution issues on the Hudson River, told me the following when I was in his activist club when I was in high school studying sustainability.

He said, “You have to think like Sailors... when we want to go forward we don’t simply set a course for our target. We are working in a complex environment with many forces – the current, the waves, the tides, the winds, eddies and swirls and backwash and turbulence, heat and cold, all these things affect the speed and direction of the boat. But when the wind is blowing against us, we don’t give up or go where it wants to push us. We learn to “tack against the wind” and use the energy in that gust or gale to push us in another direction, to nudge us upstream even though it may be blowing downstream. That is how we succeed, by understanding the flows of energy and water and harnessing them to a positive goal.”

This had a lot of influence on me as a kid because it too is an endorsement of the nexus concept that helps us operate in multi-dimensional space. The Nexus can be very subtle. Sometimes it is like a mixing board in a recording studio. There is a whole bank of sliders and knobs and buttons for every aspect of food production and transport and consumption and waste, another one for

the myriad parts of the energy mix, yet another for all the things associated with water, from the hydrologic cycle to irrigation and sewer systems. Each affects the other. As a good producer understanding the nexus, you begin to feel how a given action will affect the entire mix. It is much more complex than merely blending bass, midrange and treble; as any good studio engineer or musician knows, sounds, like the parameters of sustainability, have their own special properties that go beyond tone and volume, beyond frequency and wavelength, and they blend differently, blend in unique ways, depending on the particular song or symphony.

A FEW Nexus expert is somewhat like a symphony conductor, calling in different instruments with a deep awareness of the intended structure and dynamism of the whole song which the individual player may not be able to grasp from inside the orchestra pit.

So those are some of the more colorful metaphors for the FEW Nexus. We need to play our understandings of food and energy and water like a conductor so that we conduct ourselves sustainably and with justice in this world.

One of the easiest places to start down this road to mastery, as far as I am concerned, is to explore the simple process of “Biodigestion” which is an area of research we are exploring here at the Patel College and which arguably forces integration of our knowledge of food, energy and water.

Biodigesters take food waste – whether the food has been discarded uneaten or passed through the body of an animal – and transforms it in an anaerobic tank of water through microbial action, into liquid fertilizer for further food production and into useful clean renewable energy in the form of biomethane gas. Since biodigesters involve food energy and water and integrate them into a recycling system that turns food consumption back into a system for food production and preparation the digester acts as an ipso facto and tangible nexus. So I will be using the biodigester as a potent and real symbol of the FEW Nexus which we can return to in our studies again and again as we explore other examples of the Nexus approach and how it applies to other parts of the three sectors.

As a perfect case study for the FEW NEXUS, WE can look at the most recent one from the General Electric Foundation titled “flower-power-energy-from-plant-waste-helps-farmers-grow- weapons-against-pests”.

The story here is that Kenyan farmers in the cut flower industry, which is one of the largest agricultural export markets in the world, particularly those who grow roses, are plagued by a spider mite known as Tetranychus urticae. This pest, which causes millions of dollars in

damages and is one of the reasons that the flower industry uses so many pesticides, which contaminate water and cause cancers and birth defects and wildlife loss, has a natural enemy , Amblyseius californicus, a predatory mite used as a biological control against the red red spider mite. Ambylseius is also affected by pesticides, so to do sustainable pest management no pesticides can be used.

The predatory mite could make organic growing of flowers with no water contamination possible, but the flower growing region in Kenya is in the highlands where it is cold, and Amblyseius needs lots of heat to breed. Once it is an adult it is pretty hardy and can feed on Tetranychus, but it needs help getting established.

The solution funded by General Electric, an energy company, was to use “an anaerobic digester to convert plant matter into biomethane for generating electricity and high quality natural liquid and solid fertilizers, which help displace synthetic options.

The Austrian Jenbecher gas engines they installed also recover waste heat generated by the burning of the biogas. The heat produces a stream of hot water, a valuable commodity in the farm’s location some 2,000 feet above sea level, some of which is used to heat greenhouses where the Amblyseius predatory mites are incubated, hatched and grown for release in the flower fields.”

And best of all for our purposes, the website for GE actually uses the word NEXUS to describe what they are doing.

“The good bugs will breed inside a nearby greenhouse that will be kept cozy with excess heat from a unique new power plant serving the farm. “We’re rethinking the whole agriculture- energy nexus,” says Mike Mason, chairman of Tropical Power, the company that built the plant. “Gorge Farm’s system is the first step in that process.”

This explicit mention of the Nexus on a corporate website in an interview with a company building power plants shows how deeply the concept is penetrating our society and this is a very hopeful thing. The isolation of sectors that the UN Report was concerned about is increasingly being challenged and the challenge being met. There is deep awareness now of how systems integrate for maximum efficiency and economic benefit.

Mason continues with specifics saying,“This power system brings a new dimension to agriculture because it doesn’t just produce food,” “It also produces electricity, heat, fertilizer, compost and, indirectly, pest control for the crops growing in the field. All of these benefits are coming off the land in a closed loop.”

So, as they say in the Marines, we invite you to be part of the few and the proud, students at the Patel College of Global Solutions studying and applying the FEW Nexus. We hope you will carry this knowledge out into the world so that the FEW will become many, and the world will shift its economy from one based on scarcity to one based on plenty. The FEW Nexus can help us do this, and soldier, we are counting on YOU!

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testinbeta · 5 years

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The Ecstasy of Communication

There is no longer any system of objects. My first book contains a critique of the object as obvious fact, substance, reality, use value. There the object was taken as sign, but as sign still heavy with meaning. In this critique two principal logics interfered with each other: a phantasmatic logic that referred principally to psychoanalysis - its identifications, projections and the entire imaginary realm of transcendence, power and sexuality operating at the level of objects and the environment, with a privilege accorded to the house and automobile axis and a differential social logic that made distinctions by referring to a sociology, itself derived from anthropology.

Behind these logics, in some way descriptive and analytic, there was already the dream of symbolic exchange, a dream of the status of the object and consumption beyond exchange and use, beyond value and equivalence. In other words, a sacrificial logic of consumption, gift, expenditure (dépense), potlatch, and the accursed portion.

In a certain way all this still exists, and yet in other respects it is all disappearing. The description of this whole intimate universe projective, imaginary and symbolic - still corresponded to the object’s status as mirror of the subject, and that in turn to the imaginary depths of the mirror and “scene": there is a domestic scene, a scene of interiority, a private space-time (correlative, moreover, to a public space). The oppositions subject/object and public/private were still meaningful. This was the era of the discovery and exploration of daily life, this other scene emerging in the shadow of the historic scene, with the former receiving more and more symbolic investment as the latter was politically disinvested.But today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and network. In place of the reﬂexile transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a no reflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold - the smooth operational surface of communication.

Something has changed, and the Faustian, Promethean (perhaps Oedipal) period of production and consumption gives way to the “proteinic” era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication. With the television image - the television being the ultimate and perfect object for this new era - our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen.

If one thinks about it, people no longer project themselves into their objects, with their affects and their representations, their fantasies of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy: the psychological dimension has in, a sense vanished, and even if it can always be marked out in detail, one feels that it is not really there that things are being played out. Roland Barthes already indicated this some time ago in regard to the automobile: little by little a logic of “driving" has replaced a very subjective logic of possession and projection.“ No more fantasies of power, speed, and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control, and command, an optimalization of the play of possibilities offered by the car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as object of psychological sanctuary. The subject himself, suddenly transformed, becomes a computer at the wheel, not a drunken demiurge of power. The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen (instead of a live - in projectile as it was before).

(But we can conceive of a stage beyond this one, where the car is still a vehicle of performance, a stage where it becomes an information network. The famous Japanese car that talks to you, that “spontaneously” informs you of its general state and even of your general state, possibly refusing to function if you are not functioning well, the car as deliberating consultant and partner in the general negotiation of a lifestyle, something - or someone: at this point there is no longer any difference - with which you are connected. The fundamental issue becomes the communication with the car itself, a perpetual test of the subject’s presence with his own objects, an uninterrupted interface.

It is easy to see that from this point speed and displacement no longer matter. Neither does unconscious projection, nor an individual or social type of competition, nor prestige. Besides, the car began to be de-sacralized in this sense some time ago: its all over with speed - I drive more and consume less. Now, however, it is an ecological ideal that installs itself at every level. No more expenditure, consumption, performance, but instead regulation, well - tempered functionality, solidarity among all the elements of the same system, control and global management of an ensemble. Each system, including no doubt the domestic universe, forms a sort of ecological niche where the essential thing is to maintain a relational decor, where all the terms must continually communicate among themselves and stay in contact, informed of the respective condition of the others and of the system as a whole, where opacity, resistance or the secrecy of a single term can lead to catastrophe.) 4

Private “telematics”: each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an inﬁnite distance from his universe of origin. Which is to say, in the exact position of an astronaut in his capsule, in a state of weightlessness that necessitates a perpetual orbital flight and a speed sufficient to keep him from crashing back to his planet of origin.

This realization of a living satellite, in vivo in a quotidian space, corresponds to the satellitization of the real, or what I call the “hyperrealism of simulation” 5 : the elevation of the domestic universe to a spatial power, to a spatial metaphor, with the satellitization of the two-room-kitchen-and bath put into orbit in the last lunar module. The very quotidian nature of the terrestrial habitat hypostasized in space means the end of metaphysics. The era of hyperreality now begins. What I mean is this: what was projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor, as mental or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation.

This is only an example, but it signiﬁes as a whole the passage into orbit, as orbital and environmental model, of our private sphere itself. It is no longer a scene where the dramatic interiority of the subject, engaged with its objects as with its image, is played out. We are here at the controls of a micro-satellite, in orbit, living no longer as an actor or dramaturge but as a terminal of multiple networks. Television is still the most direct preﬁguration of this. But today it is the very space of habitation that is conceived as both receiver and distributor, as the space of both reception and operations, the control screen and terminal which as such may be endowed with tele-matic power—that is, with the capability of regulating everything from a distance, including work in the home and, of course, consumption, play, social relations and leisure. Simulators of leisure or of vacations in the home like flight simulators for airplane pilots - become conceivable.

Here we are far from the living-room and close to science fiction. But once more it must be seen that all these changes - the decisive mutations of objects and of the environment in the modern era - have come from an irreversible tendency towards three things: an ever greater formal and operational abstraction of elements and functions and their homogenization in a single virtual process of functionalization; the displacement of bodily movements and efforts into electric or electronic commands, and the miniaturization, in time and space, of processes whose real scene (though it is no longer a scene) is that of inﬁnitesimal memory and the screen with which they are equipped.

There is a problem here, however, to the extent that this electronic “encephalization” and miniaturization of circuits and energy, this transistorization of the environment, relegates to total uselessness, destuetude and almost obscenity all that used to ﬁll the scene of our lives. It is well known how the simple presence of the television changes the rest of the habitat into a kind of archaic envelope, a vestige of human relations whose very survival remains perplexing. As soon as this scene is no longer haunted by its actors and their fantasies, as soon as behavior is crystallized on certain screens and operational terminals, what’s left appears only as a large useless body, deserted and condemned. The real itself appears as a large useless body.

This is the time of miniaturization, tele-command and the microprocession of time, bodies, pleasures. There is no longer any ideal principle for these things at a higher level, on a human scale. What remains are only concentrated effects, miniaturized and immediately available. This change from human scale to a system of nuclear matrices is visible everywhere: this body,our body, often appears simply superﬂuous, basically useless in its extention, in the multiplicity and complexity of its organs, its tissues and functions, since today everything is concentrated in the brain and in genetic codes, which alone sum up the operational deﬁnition of being. The countryside, the immense geographic countryside, seems to be a deserted body whose expanse and dimensions appear arbitrary (and which is boring to cross even if one leaves the main highways), as soon as all events are epitomized in the towns, themselves undergoing reduction to a few miniaturized highlights. And time: what can be said about this immense free time we are left with, a dimension henceforth useless in its unfolding, as soon as the instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants?

Thus the body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of the social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many heads. Advertising in its new version~which is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocuters and the social virtues of communication - advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it monopolizes public life in its exhibition. No longer limited to its traditional language, advertising organizes the architecture and realization of super-objects like Beaubourg and the Forum des Halles, and of future projects (e.g., Parc de la Villette) which are monuments (or anti-monuments) to advertising, not because they will be geared to consumption but because they are immediately proposed as an anticipated demonstration of the operation of culture, commodities, mass movement and social ﬂux. It is our only architecture today: great screens on which are reﬂected atoms, particles, molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but gigantic spaces of circulation. Ventilation and ephemeral connections.

It is the same for private space. In a subtle way, this loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with the loss of private space. The one no longer a spectacle, the other no longer a secret. Their distinctive opposition, the clear difference of an exterior and an interior exactly described the domestic scene of objects, with its rules of play and limits, and the sovereignty of a symbolic space which was also that of the subject. blow this opposition is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media (the loud family in the United States, the innumerable slices of peasant or patriarchal life on French television). In-adversely, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world. like a microscopic pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno ﬁlm): all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space, according to a secret ritual known only by the actors.

Certainly, this private universe was alienating to the extent that it separated you from others - or from the world, where it was invested as a protective enclosure, an imaginary protector, a defense system. But it also reaped the symbolic beneﬁts of alienation, which is that the other exists, and that otherness can fool you for the better or the worse. Thus consumer society lived also under the sign of alienation, as a ‘society of the spectacle.‘ But just so: as long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action. scene. It is not obscenity - the spectacle is never obscene. Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.

We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look, every image. The obscene puts an end to every representation. But it is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in pornography; today there is a whole pornography of information and communication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all functions and objects in their readability, their fluidity, their availability, their regulation, in their forced signiﬁcation, in their performativity, in their branching, in their polyvalence, in their free expression…

It is no longer then the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure: on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-the-visible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication.

Marx set forth and denounced the obscenity of the commodity, and this obscenity was linked to its equivalence, to theabject principle of free circulation, beyond all use value of the object. The obscenity of the commodity stems from the fact that it is abstract, formal and light in opposition to the weight, opacity and substance of the object. The commodity is readable: in opposition to the object, which never completely gives up its secret, the commodity always manifests its visible essence, which is its price. It is the formal place of transcription of all possible objects: through it, objects communicate. Hence, the commodity form is the first great medium of the modern world. But the message that the objects deliver through it is already extremely simpliﬁed, and it is always the same: their exchange value. Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation. This is what I call (potentially) ecstasy.

One has only to prolong this Marxist analysis, or push it to the second or third power. to grasp the transparence and obscenity of the universe of communication, which leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension,that of communication. That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity.

The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today. The former clearly implied a type of promiscuity, but it was organic, like the body’s viscera, or again like objects piled up and accumulated in a private universe, or like all that is not spoken, teeming in the silence of repression. Unlike this organic, visceral, carnal promiscuity, the promiscuity that reigns over the communication networks is one of superficial saturation, of an incessant solicitation, of an extermination of interstitial and protective spaces. 1 pick up my telephone receiver and it’s all there; the whole marginal network catches and harasses me with the insupportable good faith of everything that wants and claims to communicate. Free radio: it speaks. it sings, it expresses itself. Very well, it is the sympathetic obscenity of its content. In terms a little different for each medium, this is the result: a space, that of the FM band, is found to be saturated, the stations overlap and mix together (to the point that sometimes it no longer communicates at all). Something that was free by virtue of space is no longer. Speech is free perhaps, but I am less free than before: I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard.

I fall into the negative ecstasy of the radio.

There is in effect a state of fascination and vertigo linked to this obscene delirium of communication. A singular form of pleasure perhaps, but aleatory and dizzying. If we follow Roger Caillois 7 in his classification of games (it’s as good as any other) - games of expression (mimicry), games of competition (agon), games of chance (alea), games of vertigo (i'lynx) - the whole tendency of our contemporary “culture" would lead us from a relative disappearance of forms of expression and competition (as we have remarked at the level of objects) to the advantages of forms of risk and vertigo. The latter no longer involve games of scene, mirror, challenge and duality; they are, rather, ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic. The pleasure is no longer one of manifestation, scenic and aesthetic. but rather one of pure fascination, aleatory and psychotropic. This is not necessarily a negative value judgment: here surely there is an original and profound mutation of the very forms of perception and pleasure. We are still measuring the consequences poorly. Wanting to apply our old criteria and the reﬂexes of a “scenic" sensibility, we no doubt misapprehend what may be the occurrence, in this sensory sphere, of something new, ecstatic and obscene.

One thing is sure: the scene excites us, the obscene fascinates us. With fascination and ecstasy, passion disappears. Investment, desire, passion, seduction or again, according to Caillois, expression and competition - the hot universe. Ecstasy, obscenity, fascination, communication, or again, according to Caillois, hazard, chance, and vertigo - the cold universe (even vertigo is cold, the psychedelic one of drugs in particular).

In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extroversion of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies. There also, one can perhaps make use of the old metaphors of pathology. If hysteria was the pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject, a pathology of expression. of the body’s theatrical and operatic conversion; and if paranoia was the pathology of organization, of the structuration of a rigid and jealous world; then with communication and information, with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia. No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking. but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.

The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world’s obscenity. What characterizes him is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.

Jean Baudrillard

1988

Translated by John Johnston

References

1. Le Systéme des objets (Paris: Gallimartl, l968). [Tr.]

2. Baudrillard is alluding here to Marcel Mauss‘s theory of gift exchange and Georges Bataille‘s notion of dépense. The “accursed portion" in the latter’s theory refers to what- ever remains outside of society’s rationalized economy of exchanges. See Bataille’s, La Parte Maudite (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1949). Baudrillard’s own conception of symbolic exchange, as a form of interaction that lies outside of modern Western society and that therefore “haunts it like its own death is developed in his L'échange symbolique et la morte (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). [Tr.]

3. See Roland Barthes. “The New Citroën,“ Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp.88-90.[Tr.]

4. Two observations.

First, this is not due alone to the passage, as one wants to call it, from a society of abundance and surplus to a society of crisis and penury (economic reasons have never been worth very much). Just as the effect of consumption was not linked to the use ‘value of things nor to their abundance, but precisely to the passage from use value to sign value, so here there is something new that is not linked to the end of abundance.

Secondly, all this does not mean that the domestic universe - the home, its objects, etc. - is not still lived largely in a traditional way - social, psychological, differential, etc. It means rather that the stakes are no longer there. That another arrangement or lifestyle is virtually in place, even if it is indicated only through a technologistical discourse which is often simply a political gadget. But it is crucial to see that the analysis that one could make of objects and their system in the '60s and '70s essentially began with the language of advertising and the pseudo-conceptual discourse of the expert. “Consumption,” the “strategy of desire,“ etc. were ﬁrst only a metadiscourse, the analysis of a projective myth whose actual effect was never really known. How people actually live with their objects - at bottom, one knows no more about this than about the truth of primitive societies. That’s why it is often problematic and useless to want to verify (statistically, objectively) these hypotheses, as one ought to be able to do as a good sociologist, As we know, the language of advertising is ﬁrst for the use of the advertisers themselves. Nothing says that contemporary discourse on computer science and communication is not for the use alone of professionals in these ﬁelds. (As for the discourse of intellectuals and sociologists themselves…)

5. For an expanded explanation of this idea, see Baudrillard’s essay ”La précession des simulacres,“ Simulacre: et Simulation (Paris: Galilee, 1981). An English translation appears in Simulations (New York: Foreign Agent Series. Semiotext(e) Publications,1983). [Tr.]

6. A reference to Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, I968). [Tr.]

7. Roger Caillois. Le jeux et les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). [Tr.]

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Remember when the possibility of nuclear war seemed remote? The fact that it doesn’t anymore shows how quickly threats to humanity can change and how important they are to pay attention to.

The Global Challenges Foundation, which works to reduce the global problems that threaten humanity, compiles an annual report on global catastrophic risks. The group released the 2018 edition in September, and the litany is harrowing: Chemical warfare, supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid collisions, and the looming effects of climate change threaten to cause everything from civilizational collapse to human extinction.

Some of these risks sound like science fiction, but so did weapons of mass destruction and climate change 100 years ago. As Allan Dafoe and Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute write, our brains aren’t good at thinking about catastrophic risk because they either “completely neglect or massively overweight” things that are low probability. So the report, overseen by a team at GCF but with each section written by leading experts, combines historical evidence and scientific data to determine the biggest threats.

The good news for us is that scientists think the world will be habitable for at least a few hundred million more years. The bad news is there’s a lot that could change that. The risk of the threats highlighted in the report actually causing mass casualties are still small, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important to pay attention to — especially when the worst-case scenario means human extinction.

Here’s what should be keeping you up at night and what, realistically, might cause humans to go the way of dinosaurs.

A nuclear detonation from one of today’s more powerful weapons would cause a fatality rate of 80 to 95 percent in the blast zone stretching out to a radius of 4 kilometers — although “severe damage” could reach six times as far.

But it isn’t just the immediate deaths we need to worry about — it’s the nuclear winter. This is when the clouds of dust and smoke released shroud the planet and block out the sun, causing temperatures to drop, possibly for years. If 4,000 nuclear weapons were detonated — a possibility in the event of all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia, which hold the vast majority of the world’s stockpile — an untold number of people would be killed, and temperatures could drop by 8 degrees Celsius over four to five years. Humans wouldn’t be able to grow food; chaos and violence would ensue.

A big worry here is the arsenal of nukes. While numbers have fallen over several decades, the United States and Russia have just under 7,000 warheads each, the largest collections in the world. The UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel all have nuclear weapons.

Hundreds of nuclear weapons are ready to be released within minutes, a troubling fact considering that the biggest threat of nuclear war may be an accident or miscommunication. A few times since the 1960s, Russian officers (and, in 1995, the president) narrowly decided not to launch a nuclear weapon in response to what they’d later find out were false alarms.

Unlike nuclear weapons, which require complex engineering, biological and chemical warfare can be developed at a relatively low cost and with relatively attainable materials.

In the past few years, the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in the civil war that has ravaged the country. These chemical attacks using sarin and chlorine have appalled the international community, and underscored the damage chemical weapons can do. Weaponized toxic chemicals could do tremendous harm to a localized target — say, if the toxins were released into the air or into the water supply.

Biological weapons represent a greater catastrophic threat. Advances in synthetic biology have made very real the possibility of malicious actors creating harmful pathogens for weaponization — or innocent researchers accidentally releasing a lethal infectious bug out into the world. In the event of a fast-moving pandemic, the world would be pretty vulnerable.

A United Nations panel of scientists released a report last week saying that we only have 12 years to keep global warming to moderate levels.

Projections of the effects of climate change vary depending on how much the Earth warms (usually modeled on an increase of 1 to 3 degree Celsius). None of the scenarios look good.

At best, we’re looking at more frequent and severe tropical cyclones. Midrange predictions include the loss of the majority of global agricultural land and freshwater sources, with major coastal cities like New York and Mumbai ending up underwater. At worst, human civilization would come to an end.

Even if current global commitments to reduce carbon emissions are kept, there is a one-third chance of the Earth’s temperature increasing by 3°C, which would cause most of Florida and Bangladesh to drown.

Catastrophic climate change is also not something we’re dedicating nearly enough attention to. The author of this section in the report, Dr. Leena Srivastava, the acting director of general at the Energy and Resources Institute, points out that we’ve put enough time and resources into airplane safety that only 27 planes crash a year. But “if dying in a flight accident was as likely as a 3°C global temperature increase, then the number of people dying in airplanes every year would be 15 [million].”

A tree killed by rising saltwater is seen beyond a mud flat at dawn on the east shore of the Salton Sea on October 22, 2005. across the lake from Salton City, California. David McNew/Getty Images

Ecosystems are the delicate community of living organisms, like humans and animals, interacting with their nonliving environment, like air and water. Ecosystems can recover from a certain amount of impact from humans, like temperature increases or habitat loss, but there’s a tipping point at which they can’t — and according to the report, we might be reaching that tipping point.

Lake Chad in West Africa is an example of ecological collapse. Sixty years of drought, overuse of water, and the impacts of climate change have reduced the lake by 90 percent. Its massive reduction has adversely affected the livelihoods of more than 40 million people in Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon that depend on it.

Scholars believe this moment in history constitutes a new geological era, called the Anthropocene. In this new era, humans are the primary change agents, rapidly degrading what makes the planet habitable, intensifying greenhouse gas concentration, and damaging the health of marine ecosystems.

Twice in modern history, plagues have swept across the world, killing an estimated 15 percent of the population in a few decades. They occurred way back in the fifth and 14th centuries, respectively — but there is a serious risk that a new infectious disease could cause another outbreak, especially with today’s urban and mobile global population.

Luckily, deadly diseases with the capacity to spread globally are rare. But they do happen — a century ago, the Spanish flu killed more than 50 million people. Outbreaks of SARS and Ebola in recent years also ring alarm bells.

Antibiotics, our greatest defense against disease, are becoming less effective as some strains of bacteria become resistant to them. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are responsible for an estimated 700,000 annual deaths. If we don’t develop new advances against antibiotic resistance, that number is estimated to reach 10 million by 2050.

Asteroids are rocks that revolve around the sun and that occasionally collide with the Earth. An asteroid large enough to cause a global catastrophe hits Earth every 120,000 years, scientists estimate. It’s likely what killed the dinosaurs, and if an asteroid even one-tenth the size of the one that caused their extinction hit Earth today, the results would be devastating. Scientists estimate it could release enough particles to block the sun for months and cause a famine killing hundreds of millions.

NASA announced in 2011 that it had mapped more than 90 percent of objects in space larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, and that none of them are likely to hit Earth. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about smaller objects that, while unlikely to cause a global catastrophe, could have a big enough local impact to disrupt social and economic systems.

Onlookers and media gather as lava from a Kilauea volcano fissure erupts in Leilani Estates, on Hawaii’s Big Island, on May 26, 2018. Mario Tama/Getty Images

A supervolcanic explosion 74,000 years ago ejected so much debris into the atmosphere that scientists believe it caused the Earth to cool by several degrees Celsius. Some experts believe this caused the greatest mass plant and animal extinction in human history, bringing the species to the brink of extinction.

How likely is that to happen today? It’s hard to say since we don’t have much to compare it to, but data suggests a supervolcanic eruption occurs on average every 17,000 years. If that’s true, then we’re overdue — the last one we know of was 26,500 years ago in New Zealand.

We don’t have a way to anticipate eruptions more than a few weeks or months in advance, and we don’t really have any way to reduce the likelihood of eruption right now, but scientists are monitoring several areas of risk, including Yellowstone in the US.

There’s a dramatic option for stopping, or even reversing, rising global temperatures, but it comes with significant possible risk.

Solar geoengineering would reflect light and heat away from Earth and back into space by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere. For now, it only exists in computer models, but the first experiment is being planned by Harvard researchers.

Solar geoengineering is one of two emerging technologies that could manipulate the atmosphere and reduce climate risk. The other is directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which doesn’t currently exist on a big enough scale.

If solar geoengineering were deployed, it would affect the entire atmosphere and be humanity’s largest-ever global endeavor. While it is the only known technique that could stop rising temperatures, there’s still a lot we don’t know, including whether it could destabilize local and global climate or ecosystems. Manipulation on this scale without understanding the effects could turn out to be catastrophic for the human race. The technology could also be cheap enough (as low as $10 billion a year) that it could be wielded by one country or a wealthy individual, introducing the possibility of reckless use.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. Surveyed scientists estimate, on average, that there is a 50 percent chance of AI being able to perform most tasks as well as, or better than, humans by 2050, with at least a 5 percent chance of surpassing human intelligence a couple of years after that.

There’s a common misconception that the risk of AI is that it will become malevolent. The bigger concern is that it will become too good at its job. As the report says: “If you ask an obedient, intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for.”

The implications become much more frightening when you consider AI weapons in the hands of the wrong person, or an AI arms race leading to an AI war.

It wasn’t that long ago that climate change and nuclear warfare were largely unheard of. Today, they’re risks we’ve already seen the devastating effects of — and that we worry could get much worse. Because of this, there’s a possibility that we haven’t even conceived of what is most likely to kill us.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

Original Source -> 10 ways the world is most likely to end, explained by scientists

via The Conservative Brief

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gmmadrid-blog · 6 years

Text

PMA - BI Glossary

New Terms

Business Process Modeling

The analytical representation or illustration of an organization’s business processes.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/business-process-modeling

Process Simulation Modeling (PSIM)

Process Modeling and Design involves visual models of activities, resources, inputs, outputs, and business rules. The outcome of the as-is process model is a shared understanding of how the current business process works. This reveals information that is otherwise difficult to document and comprehend. As a result of this step, it is not uncommon for process owners, suppliers, and customers to identify process improvement ideas. Process models proposed to-be processes provide visualizations of future-state alternatives.

http://www.technologymultipliers.com/process-simulation-modeling-and-analysis

Decision Support Systems (DSS)

A specific class of computerized information system that supports business and organizational decision-making activities.

https://www.informationbuilders.com/decision-support-systems-dss

Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.

https://www.klipfolio.com/resources/articles/what-is-a-key-performance-indicator

AB Testing

Is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. You compare two web pages by showing the two variants (let's call them A and B) to similar visitors at the same time.

https://vwo.com/ab-testing/

Balanced Scorecards

A management system aimed at translating an organization's strategic goals into a set of performance objectives that, in turn, are measured, monitored and changed if necessary to ensure that the organization's strategic goals are met.

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/balanced-scorecard-methodology

Stand-Alone Simulation vs Integrated Simulation

Stand-Alone Simulation agrees with the notion that you train as you learn where Integrated Simulation is based more on experience and observation (experiential learning) used to enrich and support real world systems

Sokolowski J., Banks C. (2012) Real World Applications in Modeling and Simulation, John Wily & Sons, Inc.

Complicated and Complex Systems

Complicated and Complex Systems the main difference between complicated and complex systems is that with the former, one can usually predict outcomes by knowing the starting conditions. In a complex system, the same starting conditions can produce different outcomes, depending on interactions of the elements in the system.”

http://www.businessofgovernment.org/article/managing-complicated-vs-complex

Fidelity and Validity

Validity generally means how closely the simulated results match the data collected from real life case. Fidelity generally means how closely the simulation replicates the environment, responses, and controls.

https://www.quora.com/The-difference-between-validity-and-fidelity-in-simulation

Discrete-Event Simulation (DES)

The process of codifying the behavior of a complex system as an ordered sequence of well-defined events. In this context, an event comprises a specific change in the system's state at a specific point in time.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/discrete-event-simulation-DES

The System Dynamics (SD)

System Dynamics is a computer-aided approach to policy analysis and design. It applies to dynamic problems arising in complex social, managerial, economic, or ecological systems–literally any dynamic systems characterized by interdependence, mutual interaction, information feedback, and circular causality.

http://lm.systemdynamics.org/what-is-s/

Discrete vs Continuous Simulation Paradigms

Discrete event simulation is appropriate for systems whose state is discrete and changes at particular time point and then remains in that state for some time. Continuous simulation is appropriate for systems with a continuous state that changes continuously over time.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/what_is_the_exact_difference_between_Continuous_discrete_event_and_discrete_rate_simulation

Deterministic vs Stochastic Simulation Paradigms

"In deterministic models, the output of the model is fully determined by the parameter values and the initial conditions initial conditions. Stochasticmodels possess some inherent randomness. The same set of parameter values and initial conditions will lead to an ensemble of different outputs."

https://www4.stat.ncsu.edu/~gross/BIO560%20webpage/slides/Jan102013.pdf

Static vs Dynamic Simulation Paradigms

A static model is one which contains no internal history of either input values previously applied, values of internal variables, or output values. The defining feature of a dynamic model is that unlike the static model, it does maintain an internal 'memory' of some combination of prior inputs, internal variables, and outputs.

http://www.edscave.com/static-vs.-dynamic-models.html

Monte Carlo Simulation

Also known as “probability simulation” is a technique used to understand the impact of risk and uncertainty in financial, project management, cost, and other forecasting models."

https://www.riskamp.com/files/RiskAMP%20-%20Monte%20Carlo%20Simulation.pdf

Recognition-Primed Decision Model (RPD)

The RPD Process highlights the three simple steps that we go through, often subconsciously, when we need to make a quick decision. This is based on “pattern recognition,” and on how we can use our past experiences of similar situations to make decisions. The three steps are: Experiencing the situation, Analyzing the situation, Implementing the decision.

https://www.mindtools.com/blog/corporate/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/03/Recognition-Primed-Decision-Process1.pdf

Finite State Machine

Online a computation model that can be implemented with hardware or software and can be used to simulate sequential logic and some computer programs. Finite state automata generate regular languages. Finite state machines can be used to model problems in many fields including mathematics, artificial intelligence, games, and linguistics.

https://brilliant.org/wiki/finite-state-machines/

Neural Networks

An information processing paradigm that is inspired by the way biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. The key element of this paradigm is the novel structure of the information processing system. It is composed of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements (neurones) working in unison to solve specific problems.

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol4/cs11/report.html#What is a Neural Network

Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Inference

Fuzzy inference is the process of formulating the mapping from a given input to an output using fuzzy logic. The mapping then provides a basis from which decisions can be made, or patterns discerned. Fuzzy logic is an approach to computing based on "degrees of truth" rather than the usual "true or false" (1 or 0) Boolean logic on which the modern computer is based.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/fuzzy-logic

https://www.mathworks.com/help/fuzzy/fuzzy-inference-process.html?requestedDomain=true

Agent-Based Modeling

In agent-based modeling (ABM), a system is modeled as a collection of autonomous decision-making entities called agents. Each agent individually assesses its situation and makes decisions on the basis of a set of rules. Agents may execute various behaviors appropriate for the system they represent—for example, producing, consuming, or selling. Repetitive competitive interactions between agents are a feature of agent-based modeling, which relies on the power of computers to explore dynamics out of the reach of pure mathematical methods (1, 2).

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_3/7280

Object-Oriented Programming

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming language model organized around objects rather than "actions" and data rather than logic. Historically, a program has been viewed as a logical procedure that takes input data, processes it, and produces output data.

http://searchmicroservices.techtarget.com/definition/object-oriented-programming-OOP

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