Asteroid miners prepare for launch. AstroForge, which wants to pluck platinum-group metals from near-Earth objects, plans to launch a payload in April that will demonstrate the ability to mine metals in space. The company also expects to launch another spacecraft onboard Intuitive Machines’ lunar mission later this year that will fly to a target asteroid and assess its viability for future mining.

training for women, with a special focus on digital expertise.

The focus is to be increasingly on software solutions (digital health),

stimulating the creation of jobs offering decent working conditions. It fo-cuses in particular on the promising industries of the future, such as information and communica-tion technologies (ICT),

Support digitalisation of the African economyThe BMZ aims to effectively support the rapidly developing digital economy, for example through the Make-IT in Africa initiative, the establishment of digicentres and activities to assist African initiatives including the Smart Africa Alliance. It helps African partner countries to enhance the economic and political framework for digital transformation, to create digital markets, provide secure, universal internet access and bridge the “digital divide” within the population. It is also fostering legal standards and data privacy regulations, for example through Team Europe Initiatives such as the African European Digital Innovation Bridge Network and the EU-AU Data Flagship

digital infrastructure and health infrastructure, the BMZ aims to mobilise invest-ment –

Support the AfCFTA and ensure trade agreements are pro-development

German development policy faces the challenge of finding differentiated and flexible responses that take account of the fact that African states have their own interests, and that each state has its own view of the world and its own vision of the best economic, political and social order.

digital transformation

Pillar 2: Human Capital Development

Pillar 1: Digital Economy and Infrastructure

DTA will foster an inclusive and resilient African digital ecosystem, led by African communities and built on an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet

invest over $350 million and facilitate over $450 million in financing for Africa

The Department of State will support capacity building and technical assistance, to encourage enabling environments for innovation, cybersecurity, and digital capacity building in consultation with African partners. 

Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership

a whole-of-government

Digital Enabling Environment

the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.

to empower women and other marginalized people

open, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet.

an inclusive and resilient African digital ecosystem

economic recovery, promote opportunity, advance social equality and gender equality, and create jobs.

digital ecosystem

digital enabling environments

Digital Transformation

Another divide is between rural and urban India. The internet penetration rate is 103% in cities (because of individuals with multiple connections) and 38% in the countryside.

Only a quarter of Indian women did.

estimates that half of adult Indian men owned a smartphone in 2021.

The government is enthusiastically promoting digital payments through its Unified Payments Interface, a cashless system that has gained widespread popularity. Its biometrics-based national identity system now covers nearly every Indian resident and is all but mandatory when interacting with the state. A covid-tracking app was also voluntary in name only.

In October last year, the latest month for which figures are available, the telecoms regulator counted 790m wireless broadband connections, barely exceeding the previous peak of 789m, which was recorded in August 2021.

just peace

Based on my experience, talks succeed only if in the end the most powerful figures from each side are bold enough to meet and reach agreement.

History is filled with examples of peace negotiations failing because the right people or groups were not involved in the negotiations.

Many peace processes require quiet diplomacy, especially to get started.

channels of communication should be established as early as possible.

it is never too early to prepare for potential talks

We, the international community and the UN, should help provide a “tunnel” for Russia and Ukraine. We need to prepare now so as to be ready to provide effective support for eventual peace when the two sides want to negotiate.

In physical meetings you can entertain yourself by looking around the room or whispering to colleagues. In virtual meetings whoever has the floor has all your attention: their face fills your screen, their voice fills your ears (particularly if you’re wearing headphones) and their attention-seeking soul occupies your whole computer, sucking away your life-force.

Zoom removes all such mechanisms. The audience is muted.

In the physical world all sorts of micro-signals keep all but the most resolute speakers under some sort of control. The chairperson can raise an eyebrow, ostentatiously look around for someone else to interject, or, if the bore continues to plough on, interrupt to say “I’d like to bring Sarah in on this one”

The bore’s co-workers must stand in for the publican, shopkeeper, subordinate, neighbour or whomever routinely gets the benefit of their banality.

They take ten minutes to make a simple point. They raise their virtual hands at every possible occasion.

But above all there are Zoom bores – Zoombies? – who turn every meeting into a marathon of self-important tedium.

Writing is the business of turning time into words: the more time you have the more words you should be able to produce.

That seems likely to change in the next few weeks, when an uncrewed lander becomes the first commercial vehicle to touch down on the Moon

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, space law’s foundational text, is showing its age. It dates back to the era when only governments had access to space. And it states that no claims of sovereignty can be made, on the Moon or elsewhere. Efforts to update the treaty to establish rules around resource extraction have run into the lunar regolith. America has refused to sign the Moon Agreement, adopted by 18 countries in 1984, whereas China and Russia have rejected America’s latest proposal, the Artemis accords of 2020.

Peregrine lander built by Astrobotic Technology, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also operates under the CLPS programme

“commercial lunar payload services” (CLPS) programme

Nova-C, created by Intuitive Machines, a startup in Houston, Texas

One vehicle, HAKUTO-R Mission 1, operated by ispace, a Japanese firm, is already on its way and is scheduled to land in late April

Of 178 successful missions in 2022, 90 were by companies (in many cases subcontracted by governments), and of those 61 were by one firm, SpaceX.

there is no international agreement on the legal status of the Moon.

Many of NASA’s CLPS payloads are intended to pave the way for the return of people to the Moon, for example by scouting possible landing sites or searching for resources

Being able to put things into orbit around Earth has made all sorts of things possible, from GPS navigation and satellite TV to better internet access and weather monitoring, as well as military uses

the Peregrine lander built by Astrobotic Technology, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also operates under the CLPS programme

The first of these is Nova-C, created by Intuitive Machines, a startup in Houston, Texas.

HAKUTO-R Mission 1 was launched on December 11th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Of 178 successful missions in 2022, 90 were by companies (in many cases subcontracted by governments), and of those 61 were by one firm, SpaceX. When it comes to sending things to the Moon, however, governments retain a monopoly of success.

False outrage

MyData

One vehicle for co-ordination is the Three Seas Initiative (3Si), a forum of 12 EU countries spanning the Adriatic, Baltic and Black seas, founded in 2015. Its investment fund, set up in 2019, says it has raised at least $1.2bn.

What matters more is the extent to which America and its allies blacklist China, where TSMC has a fab in Nanjing making mainstream chips for domestic use. The company may be right to believe that cool heads will prevail. But if it is wrong, at least it has started the long process of hedging its bets.

In that case, eventually TSMC may outgrow Taiwan, whose population is shrinking. Accessing more global brainpower, in America or elsewhere, will become an imperative.

Though construction costs in the United States are, officials said, up to five times higher than in Taiwan, they indicated that customers who wanted their chips to be made in America would pay a higher price, protecting profits

TSMC will bear the losses as a gesture of goodwill to the country

For the foreseeable future, though, most R&D is likely to remain in Taiwan. So will at least four-fifths of TMSC’s capacity.

Its biggest customer in Phoenix will be Apple. Beyond America, it plans to build its first fab in Japan for Sony, another gadget-maker. This looks like a strategy to move closer to its customers, which if you are sitting in Taiwan might look suspiciously like abandonment.

Yet it is thinking about a long-term future in which one day there may be a premium on geographical flexibility. In short, it is playing a subtle game of diplomacy in which its business interests come first.

Last year America strengthened its stranglehold on certain “choke-point” technologies, such as artificial-intelligence chip design, chip software and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, in order to stymie China’s ambitions.

Many of its fabrication plants are on the west coast of Taiwan and perilously exposed to a Chinese invasion across the Taiwan Strait. Yet it refuses to be panicked. “If there is a war then, my goodness, we all have a lot more than just chips to worry about,”

growing support for a ban on anti-satellite weapons tests as one sign of progress, but that effort came after a series of particularly messy orbital tests, and can be seen as an effort to limit Chinese and Russian weapons development.

What might change that, the report suggests, is a disaster

most influential actors in the space economy, whether nation-states or companies, are still happier with a free hand than an insurance policy

global governance: Rules for space traffic management, protocols for space debris mitigation and removal, and norms for economic activity in space, from resource extraction to property rights.

Africa in digital geopolitics and geoeconomics

What geopolitical analysts have more recently come to call the “free and open Indo-Pacific” now takes in America and Australia as partners in the grouping known as the Quad, which seeks to counterbalance the rise of China.

Even the “Asian values” promoted by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder, are best understood in opposition to Western ones.

Bosses are the most visible people in a firm; when they point fingers, others will, too. If your company has a blame culture, the fault lies there.

Power and punitiveness went together.

Blameless postmortems have long been part of the culture at Google, for instance, which has templates, reviews and discussion groups for them.

people “are not punished for actions, omissions or decisions taken by them that are commensurate with their experience and training”

promotes individual blame instead of collective learning.

not to assign blame or liability but to find out what went wrong and to issue recommendations to avoid a repeat.

Pointing fingers saps team cohesion. It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organisations can learn from them

when a third of the world’s economies are projected to go into recession, Russia’s war on Ukraine continues unabated and countries are struggling with a global debt crisis.

India does not have a data protection law, but recently introduced a revised draft that would curb how companies can use personal data.

“Earlier, you had small pilots. But now these are big enough projects across the population — income, education and age group — that it can work.”

This includes the country’s 13-year-old digital ID scheme Aadhaar, which is linked to an individual’s biometrics, as well as schemes such as UPI, which was launched in 2016.

the India Stack is an important element of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s soft-power push, as New Delhi seeks to present itself as a democratic, business-friendly counterweight to China.

Countries including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Nepal are already adopting elements of India’s payments infrastructure.

to facilitate cross-border transactions for Indians overseas

other nations about making their payments systems “interoperable” with the technology.

the “India Stack”,

would make “special presentations” about its digital infrastructure

to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.”

they would speak in reverse order of seniority, so that less experienced judges wouldn’t tailor their opinions to fit those of senior ones.

The longer people talked to each other, the dumber they became. Meetings didn’t open minds, it closed them.

But the Talmudic principle embodies an important insight about the perils of consensus: if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may well have missed something important.

As well as giving people a sense that their voice matters, consulting a wider group gives leaders access to a collective judgment that – as a large body of literature on the wisdom of crowds shows – is likely to be a good one.

But perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge that, in getting people to vote for his preferred outcome, Satan was simply really good at meetings.

The result wasn’t always the right one, but the procedure was represented as admirable.

Moloch advocates “open Warr”. Belial, whom Milton describes as an artful and cynical speaker, suggests that they do nothing and hope God sees fit to forgive them. Mammon argues for abandoning any idea of returning to Heaven and instead building an empire in Hell. And Beelzebub counsels sending a demon to Earth to seduce or destroy this “new Race call’d Man”. The issue is put to a vote.

Meetings without order don’t achieve anything except the entrenchment of powerful personalities, as Piggy learned the hard way

We seem to assume that people speak because they have something useful to say.

Studies show that the more someone contributes in a meeting, the more they are likely to be asked questions

people tend to think of them as influential by default

It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”

inds it impossible to translate talk into action

Meetings become central to their attempt to structure their mini-society, and they adopt a rule that anyone can speak if they’re holding the group’s conch shell (a prefiguration of Zoom’s yellow halo).

“Even in egalitarian Denmark, we very rarely observed meeting participants challenge their leaders’ right to speak as much as they please.”

leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates.

But Cordelia, his youngest – and the only one who genuinely loves her father, as the play goes on to demonstrate – refuses to flatter him (“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”).

The real purpose of the meeting, it becomes clear, is for the old king to be lavished with “opulent” praise.

they are confident in their own judgment and willing to assert themselves.

But getting the view from the floor isn’t just good for employees’ morale; it’s a way to gather useful information and different opinions.

Encouraging junior staff to voice their opinions is one of the biggest difficulties modern managers face.

Homer makes clear that the Greeks did not believe in a frank exchange of views.

turns on arguments between key individuals

the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive.

“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting.

people have been gathering to discuss decisions since Adam and Eve

a mini-industry in management books

In many office cultures, a meeting is a byword for a tedious, time-wasting exercise.

moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries

The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s

Climate change denial is making a ‘stark comeback’ on social media, study finds

12-15 June 2023Washington, D.C.

Using the term “smart contract” can lead to confusion and potential equalization with the contract in the general legal sense of the term used in everyday commerce.

The Fourth Annual National News Literacy Week

04 - 08 December 2023

The company made no outreach to Getty Images to utilize our or our contributors’ material so we’re taking an action to protect our and our contributors’ intellectual property rights

nce on Cyber Conflict:Meeting Reality 30 May – 2 June 2023, Tallinn, Estonia Agenda and registration information coming in early 2023 CyCon 2022 joined together more than 800 onsite as well as online participants and speakers from over 50 countries around the globe. → Proceedings → Gallery → Videos About CyCon The annual International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon, hosted by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence addresses the most relevant issues concerning the cyber defence community. Entering its second decade, CyCon has established itself as a prominent multidisciplinary conference and community-building event for cyber security professionals from around the world, while at the same time adhering to the highest standards of academic research. Throughout the years, CyCon has presented keynotes and panels focusing on the technical, legal, policy, strategy and military perspectives of cyber defence and security. Each year, around 600 decision-makers, opinion-leaders, law and technology experts from the governments, military, academia and industry of nearly 50 countries meet at CyCon to address current cyber security challenges in an interdisciplinary manner. CyCon is organised by NATO CooperativeCyber Defence Centre of Excellence More information about CCDCOE Follow us on Twitter

Business leaders are often adept at adapting their organizations to new political realities

cyber leaders must present security issues in terms that board-level executives can understand and act on.

a security-focused culture requires a common language based on metrics

Cyber executives are now more likely to see data privacy laws and cybersecurity regulations as an effective tool for reducing cyber risks across a sector. This is a notable shift in perception from the 2022 Outlook report.

Leaders struggle to balance the value of new technology with the potential for increased cyber risk in their organizations

by strengthening controls for third parties with access to their environments and/or data

influenced by the quality of security across their supply chain of commercial partners and clients

The data protection and cybersecurity concerns created by geopolitical fragmentation

43% of organizational leaders think it is likely that in the next two years, a cyberattack will materially affect their own organization

with 91% of all respondents believing that a far-reaching, catastrophic cyber event is at least somewhat likely in the next two years

Hearing is not the same as listening.

Finland’s THL leaves Twitter, citing volume of disinformation

The best part, you don’t need any additional add-ons to make the tables fully responsive. The plugin itself has the capability to create responsive tables that would adjust to multiple screens size, be it mobile, tablet, or desktop.

to make mobile responsive tables.

Though the plugin is mostly responsive, you might have to add an add-on to make it totally responsive. Also, if you have decent HTML/CSS knowledge, you can create visually appealing tables by doing some minor modifications.

you can export/import tables to be used on multiple websites.

As a way to inspire media organizations and independent journalists, we will have a webinar before applications open, with with Sérgio Spagnoulo and Natália Leal, moderated by Cristina Tardáguila, about innovative ways to combat disinformation in Brazil.

And the system’s latency—the time taken for signals to get up to a satellite and back down to Earth—is much lower than for high-flying satellites

is offering it as a way of providing off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries. A million or so have become subscribers.

Japan, America, Australia and India, leading to the revival of that dormant “Quad”

mental maps matter

the “East Asian hemisphere”, “Pacific Basin” or “Asia-Pacific” were until recently more compelling.

Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda, the hedge fund Mr Bankman-Fried founded and majority-owned, and Gary Wang, a co-founder of ftx, both of whom are now co-operating with the authorities.

Europe, China and Russia are all racing to build their own mega-constellations. China and Russia are trying to come up with ways to attack or disrupt Starlink should the need arise. The race is on. For now, though, America, thanks to SpaceX, has a huge lead.

The second is its resistance to attack.

One is the sheer amount of capacity it offers. Previously, satellite links were largely reserved for senior officers, headquarters and drone pilots, with the bulk of lower-level communication handled by radio. Starlink means front-line troops can sling around videos, images and messages in real time, even as they advance beyond the reach of mobile networks. That provides the sort of tactical agility vital to modern warfare.

In three years SpaceX has launched around 3,500 Starlink satellites, roughly half the total number of active satellites now in orbit. It plans to launch as many as 40,000.

lunar resources for itself,

There is still time for that to happen before the system collapses completely, damaging countless livelihoods and imperilling the causes of liberal democracy and market capitalism.

Today its share of output has fallen to 25% and America needs friends more than ever. Its ban on exports to China’s chipmakers will work only if the Dutch firm ASML and Japan’s Tokyo Electron also refuse to supply them with equipment. Battery supply chains will likewise be more secure if the democratic world operates as one bloc. Yet America’s protectionism is irking allies in Europe and Asia.

Others, more wisely, focus on increasing America’s economic resilience and maintaining its military edge

As China became more deeply integrated into the global economy at the turn of this century, many in the West predicted that it would become more democratic. The death of that hope—combined with the migration of a million manufacturing jobs to Chinese factories—caused America to fall out of love with globalisation.

American courts are yet to complete a significant crypto restructuring. This poses problems. Crypto has been around for 15 years, but nobody can agree on what it is. Token swaps are recorded on virtual ledgers by software on a blockchain, which no single person controls. This does not fit with property law, which assumes people own things because the law says they do or they physically have them in hand. Stocks have certificates of ownership; chairs are sat on by their owners. In contrast, the law does not enforce crypto ledgers and recording something on a blockchain does not conjure a physical coin.

A video: Display the title message and a video you upload.

- 12 May 2023

Three examples of topic clusters in the wild

How to Create Pillar Pages