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

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

Three examples of topic clusters in the wild

How to Create Pillar Pages

Atomize your content

Different types of anchor text

this is because people prefer to get this kind of information from sites that rank organically, rather than those that pay to be featured.

the 33rd consecutive year that Africa has been the destination of Chinese foreign minister's annual first overseas visit

Crean un juego de aventuras para enseñar a detectar y combatir los bulos

which may explain why the island is accelerating efforts to develop its own satellite constellation

In future, service will be possible even in places with no convenient ground stations nearby; the next generation of satellites is intended to be able to pass messages between themselves, rather than sending them back down to the nearest ground station, creating a network which could be much more unevenly tethered to the Earth.

Some countries do not want Starlink services making the internet uncontrollable, and so do not allow the company to operate within their borders.

Meanwhile other launch systems are either unavailable, undersized or have yet to get up and running. American rules stop Western companies from buying launch services from China, and since the war began launch contracts with Russia have been cancelled. OneWeb, which relied on Russian launchers for its launches until this year, now uses SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and a launcher developed by India.

fully reusable spacecraft called Starship which would be capable of launching some 400 Starlinks at a time, and thus taking the constellation from thousands of satellites to tens of thousands. The long-delayed first attempt to get a Starship out into space and back is expected this year.

SpaceX’s launch capacity. SpaceX has the world’s best satellite-launch system, the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. That allows it to launch satellites at an unmatchable rate. There were 61 Falcon-9 launches in 2022. The company is talking of getting its Falcon-9 launch rate up to two rockets a week this year, with one a week devoted to Starlink. Each such launch will add another 50 or so satellites.

In November 2022 the EU agreed to begin developing its own low-orbit communications system, IRIS2

In 2020 China filed documents with the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body, for a 13,000-satellite constellation of its own

Starlink’s use in Ukraine marks “the beginning of the end” for the value of anti-satellite missiles. “[It] turns out they’re only useful if your adversary relies on small numbers of really large/expensive satellites.”

And then there are the satellites themselves. America, China, India and Russia have missiles that can shoot satellites out of the sky. Again, though, using them would seem a severe escalation. It would also be a lot less useful against a constellation like Starlink than against older systems. Knocking out a single Starlink would achieve more or less nothing. If you want to damage the space-based bit of the system, you need to get rid of lots of them.

Starlink satellites relay signals they receive to fairly nearby “ground stations”

Most satellite communications make use of big satellites which orbit up at 36,000km. Perched at such a height a satellite seems to sit still in the sky, and that vantage allows it to serve users spread across very large areas. But even if such a satellite is big, the amount of bandwidth it can allocate to each user is often quite limited. The orbits used by Starlink’s much smaller satellites are far lower: around 550km. This means that the time between a given satellite rising above the horizon and setting again is just minutes. To make sure coverage is continuous thus requires a great many satellites, which is a hassle. But because each satellite is serving only a small area the bandwidth per user can be high. 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. High latencies can prevent software from working as it should, says Iain Muirhead, a space researcher at the University of Manchester. With software, rather than just voice links, increasingly used for tasks like controlling artillery fire, avoiding glitches caused by high latency is a big advantage.

Cyber-attacks like the one aimed at Ukraine’s legacy satellite system on February 24th are one possibility. So far, though, similar sallies against Starlink appear to have been ineffective, in part thanks to SpaceX’s ability to quickly update the system’s software. Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defence, has said the speed of the software response he witnessed to one attack was “eye-watering”.

In September the Russian delegation to a UN working group on space security hinted that, despite its status as a nominally civilian system, Starlink might be considered a legitimate military target under international humanitarian law—which is probably a fair assessment.

Russia’s armed forces have lots of electronic-warfare equipment that can locate, jam or spoof radio emissions. But the Starlink signals are strong compared with those from higher flying satellites, which makes jamming them harder. And the way that the dishes use sophisticated electronics to create narrow, tightly focused beams that follow satellites through the sky like invisible searchlights provides further resistance to interference.

Each hop added time and confusion. In today’s Ukraine, he notes, he could simply have accessed the live drone feed himself. Such frustrations led the Pentagon to start talking of “Joint All-Domain Command and Control” (JADC2, for those keeping score at home)

An hour before Russia launched its attack, its hackers sought to disable thousands of modems associated with the terminals which provide access to the main satellite used by Ukraine’s army and government, among many other clients

By May around 150,000 people were using the system every day

off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries

The Starlink constellation currently consists of 3,335 active satellites; roughly half of all working satellites are Starlinks

However, Russia voluntarily submitted itself to this stress test, and its future depends on the outcome. At this juncture, it is no longer possible to reverse course.

2023 Citrin Center Conference: Misinformation and Its Consequences for American Democracy

Meta’s advertising-based business model is already under pressure after Apple introduced a privacy change that required app developers to seek user permission to track their online activity in order to serve them personalised ads.

“This is a huge blow to Meta’s profits in the EU,” he said. “People now need to be asked if they want their data to be used for ads or not. They must have a ‘yes or no’ option and can change their mind at any time. The decision also ensures a level playing field with other advertisers that also need to get opt-in consent.”

it said on Wednesday it had to follow the binding recommendations of the bloc’s European Data Protection Board,

the EU’s data authority rejected the company’s argument that users agree to receive ads based on their personal data when they enter into a “contract” with its social media platforms via the terms and conditions they sign.

OpenAI is developing a tool for “statistically watermarking the outputs of a text [AI system].” Whenever a system — say, ChatGPT — generates text, the tool would embed an “unnoticeable secret signal” indicating where the text came from.

he expressed the belief that, if OpenAI can demonstrate that watermarking works and doesn’t impact the quality of the generated text, it has the potential to become an industry standard.Not everyone agrees. As Devadas points out, the tool needs a key, meaning it can’t be completely open source — potentially limiting its adoption to organizations that agree to partner with OpenAI. (If the key were to be made public, anyone could deduce the pattern behind the watermarks, defeating their purpose.)But it might not be so far-fetched. A representative for Quora said the company would be interested in using such a system, and it likely wouldn’t be the only one.

“If [it] becomes a free-for-all, then a lot of the safety measures do become harder, and might even be impossible, at least without government regulation,”

Aaronson acknowledged the scheme would only really work in a world where companies like OpenAI are ahead in scaling up state-of-the-art systems — and they all agree to be responsible players. Even if OpenAI were to share the watermarking tool with other text-generating system providers, like Cohere and AI21Labs, this wouldn’t prevent others from choosing not to use it.

Unaffiliated academics and industry experts, however, shared mixed opinions.

OpenAI also declined, saying only that watermarking is among several “provenance techniques” it’s exploring to detect outputs generated by AI.

Watermarking AI-generated text isn’t a new idea

OpenAI’s watermarking tool acts like a “wrapper” over existing text-generating systems, Aaronson said during the lecture, leveraging a cryptographic function running at the server level to “pseudorandomly” select the next token. In theory, text generated by the system would still look random to you or I, but anyone possessing the “key” to the cryptographic function would be able to uncover a watermark.

“We want it to be much harder to take [an AI system’s] output and pass it off as if it came from a human,” Aaronson said in his remarks. “This could be helpful for preventing academic plagiarism, obviously, but also, for example, mass generation of propaganda — you know, spamming every blog with seemingly on-topic comments supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without even a building full of trolls in Moscow. Or impersonating someone’s writing style in order to incriminate them.”

the hope is to build it into future OpenAI-developed systems

why it is working on a way to “watermark” AI-generated content

will fund musical curricula focused on conflict resolution and foreign exchange programs for young musicians across the globe

Alongside funding for military jets and naval warships, the new $857.9 billion US defense spending bill includes a program to fund musical exchanges around the globe. Dubbed the PEACE Through Music Diplomacy Act, the legislation funds US State Department cultural exchange projects that encourage artistic collaboration across borders.

Covid misinformation spikes in wake of Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse

The ideal for which Schwab is aiming, judging from his speeches and writings, is something akin to a globalised EU, with its supranational and ingrained bureaucratic ways being transposed to an international level, and the levers of power vested in the hands of reliable Davos men and women.

short-hand description of ‘academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs’

embodies supreme confidence in the imperative of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down.

the EU’s governance structures – and the democratic deficit which they personify – exemplify such arrangements.

disenfranchise voters and put an ever-growing number of important decisions in the hands of unaccountable bureaucracies

On an economic level, corporatism discourages innovation, produces inflexible labour markets dominated by unions whose priority is maintaining the status quo, and riddle the marketplace with privileges for well-connected businesses.

the model reflects a positive distrust of bottom-up initiatives because these are harder to control and less likely to buy into the established consensus.

corporatist-style stakeholder capitalism is decidedly ambivalent about democracy.

Insiders are those companies who sign up to the consensus, play the corporatist game, and consequently do very well out of their cosy relationships with governments.

Another problem is the collusion and cronyism fostered by corporatism.

It encourages the marginalisation of those who dispute the consensus. 

For what matters is the harmonisation of views, no matter how absurd the idea and or how high the cost in liberty.

corporatism doesn’t cope well with dissent.

maintaining a consensus on economic and social policies.

a process overseen and, if necessary, enforced by government officials for the sake of the common good.

the necessity of limiting market competition in order to preserve social cohesion.

All forms of corporatism, however, share some common themes.

There was a strong linkage between companies and their community.

Schwab’s core commitment is to political and economic arrangements which used to be known as corporatism.

they are ‘governments,’ ‘companies,’ and ‘civil society’

By value-creation, Schwab partly has in mind economic prosperity. But he also calls for the promotion of three other values: ‘People,’ ‘Planet,’ and ‘Peace.’

to coordinate the reorganisation of 8 billion souls, 195 countries, international relations, social policy writ-large, and a $104 trillion global economy

The entire planet needs a new ‘social contract’ to reshape ‘the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of a global commons.’

Chief among these is the neoliberal ideology. Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition.

To encourage travel by tGV, France in 2021 banned flights between cities that are under two and a half hours from each other by train.

Mr Macron won a huge share of votes in big cities linked by the TGV, such as Rennes (84%), Nantes (81%), Bordeaux (80%) or Lyon (80%).

this focus on centralised moderation rules his “biggest mistake”

demolish the notion that a centrally controlled entity can write down a set of rules to facilitate the control of a public digital space in which hundreds of millions of users send billions of messages a day.

Speaking and listening do not mean much without each other.

fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

Data in storage and transit are normally encrypted,

it has become a fixture of corporate cyberspace, with more than 800m registered users worldwide

Emirates operates 118 A380s and no 747s. More recently, carriers have been lured by new ultra-long-range, super-efficient planes such as Airbus’s A350 and Boeing’s own 777

But AI based on deep learning is developing fast, as recent brouhaha about ChatGPT, a program that can turn out passable prose (and even poetry) with only a little prompting, shows.

Unlike electrons, photons (which are electrically neutral) can cross each others’ paths without interacting, so glass fibres can handle many simultaneous signals in a way that copper wires cannot.

Photons carry data around the world and electrons process them.

to support effective altruism, a philosophical movement that purports to use rigorous cost-benefit analysis to do good.

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.

With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy. He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.

“rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking

The most well known is Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor. The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.

As Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, memorably put it, “Move fast and break things.”

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Some of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment.

the msf’s progress, or lack of it, will be one way to gauge whether the metaverse is an idea that has legs.