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.

And almost every big firm in Silicon Valley has joined the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF), which commits them to open, interoperable technical standards, so that an avatar designed for use in one company’s virtual world should work without trouble in another’s. (A notable exception is Apple, which has long prioritised keeping users within its own “walled garden” over compatibility with other firms’ products.

But the industry that is furthest along is the video-games business, which has been selling virtual worlds for decades.

Meta’s ambition is not just to produce VR hardware but also to build the sort of virtual worlds that, it hopes, VR users will want to inhabit.

metaverse

One is virtual- (VR) and augmented-reality (AR) headsets

This promises to fundamentally redefine human-machine interaction.

This new wave of AI will redefine what computers can do for their users, unleashing a torrent of advanced capabilities into existing and radically new products.

We’re now seeing impressive performance from small models that are a lot cheaper to run.

Parameter count”

language translation, summarization, information retrieval, and, most important, text generation

Transformers are neural networks designed to model sequential data and generate a prediction of what should come next in a series.

This geopolitical vantage point and the ethos of inclusivity, harmony, embracing diversity and promoting dialogue, enshrined in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family), will be the essence of our much-anticipated G20 presidency.

the need to approach development with inclusivity and universality.

the Unified Payments Interface, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity and the CoWIN platform for vaccinations.

Global supply chains are witnessing unprecedented disruptions.

India rose to the occasion as a sound leader, a meticulous solution provider and a collaborative consensus builder through its positive and constructive approach.

The Indian narrative in the Bali declaration focussed on the message of dialogue, diplomacy and solidarity.

The G20 communique, Bali Leaders’ Declaration, was adopted and India contributed significantly to this document

India’s G20 Presidency is an opportune time to set a new gold standard for data. A gold standard which emphasises nations to invest in self-evaluation of their data governance architecture, calls for modernisation of national data systems to incorporate citizen voice and preferences regularly, advances principles of transparency for data governance and finally brings to the forefront the need for strategic leadership on data for sustainable development.

the National Data Analytics Platform (NDAP).

This plaque comes from databases being inaccessible and siloed, and data platforms being cluttered with complexity without any flexibility to innovate.

As we enter India’s techade, data must be accessible to all citizens.

less than 20% of low- and middle-income countries have modern data infrastructures such as colocation data centres and direct access to cloud computing facilities

The World Development Report 2021 asserts that there is a need for forging a new social contract for data which accelerates data use and reuse to realise greater value, creates equitable access to benefits, integrates national data systems, and finally fosters trust such that people are protected from the harms of data misuse.

In its G20 presidency, India will call for modernisation of data systems and advance principles of transparency to better use data for development

Looking ahead to 2023, we will start witnessing the legal and regulatory impact of these tools as courts, regulators, and policymakers begin to make decisions and take action on the practical implications of AI and ML technologies on existing IP laws and regulations

the Study notes that “the AI-generated output is not protected under copyright in the absence of human creative choices.”

Shutterstock announced a partnership with OpenAI to offer text-to-image generation services, while simultaneously prohibiting the sale of generative works from third-party AI tools, given the inability to validate the models, and underlying training data sets, that were used.

In June, GitHub announced Copilot, an OpenAI-powered tool that can be used to auto-generate code output ranging from a simple autocomplete to an entire function.

In October, the White House published the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which contains a technical companion “that should guide the design, use, and deployment of automated systems to protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence.”

In August, the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) published a request for comment on international AI policies, regulations, and related measures that could impact U.S. exports of AI technologies.

“As AI technology continues to evolve and questions arise about how copyright laws apply to the creation of AI-generated works,”

the USCO continued its efforts to address registrations of generative works through a cancellation notice sent to Kristina Kashtanova in connection with her recently registered graphic novel, “Zarya Of The Dawn.”

2022 has seen significant legal, regulatory, and policy developments around the world across the fields of intellectual property law that will impact and shape the future uses and developments of AI and ML technologies.

The initial request of ChatGPT was the prompt: “Explain the social impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies over the past year.”

It is a shifting concept, a promise, an illusion, and an amorphous one at that, at least for now. We need not accept Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse or Stephenson’s or anyone else’s, for that matter. Instead let us be as bold as they are, and imagine a future of our very own.

brought together over 40 scholars from different disciplines all around the world to take stock of the metaverse “beyond the hype,” once again pointing out that although it doesn’t yet exist, discussion of its transformative power is unavoidable.

“despite its democratic overtures, the Metaverse is still dominated by wealth,” as less than 1 percent of the world’s population can afford the hardware to get online.

This is Stephenson’s conception in its most hopeful iteration. Zuckerberg and other advocates including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speak of the metaverse in similarly rosy terms.

At present the metaverse is nothing more than a trendy prompt in marketing copy.

The only thing they appear to agree on in this adoption is to use the term with abandon; what the metaverse actually is or will be is another question altogether. Seemingly any entity can claim a place in the metaverse.

As a result, AI initiatives are viewed by top executives as exercises in damage avoidance

More importantly, data classified as "noise" often contain valuable clues that offer AI algorithms context.

Companies cannot install data-driven cultures overnight, but now is the best time to begin.

there’s been a “perfect storm” of crisis conditions:

Writers argued that excessively focusing on democracy might alienate rather than persuade voters, or even corrupt institutions by intertwining constitutional and partisan concerns.

There are deep versions of this debate, and reductive ones you catch a glimpse of in Instagram comments or in an opinion column that just gets it all wrong. This can even be a debate you have with yourself.

we’re actually witnessing that the system holds, that democracy prevails, that the danger is fading.

A much more productive strategy is to think about futures; rather than “prediction,” it pays to think probabilistically about a range of potential outcomes and evaluate them against a range of different sources.

But very rarely do we hear the voices of the populations governed by the decisionmakers.

the approach of the forecaster

to model a set of possibilities

Followers of this approach search not for patterns, but for emergent variables from which futures can be extrapolated.

Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Tonynbee, Nicolai Kondratiev, and, of course, Turchin.

war-gaming.

It then requires careful interpretation, whether based in quantitative (like polls of voter intention) or qualitative (like the Rand corporation’s DELPHI technique) analysis.

By the 1970s, the Club of Rome could turn to the World3 computer simulation to model the flow of energy through human and natural systems via key variables such as industrialization, environmental loss, and population growth.

oracles, shamans, and prophets

between individuals who have an intrinsic gift or ability to predict the future, and systems that provide rules for calculating futures

the results of computer programs are, after all, only as accurate as their data input.

Rulers from Mesopotamia to Manhattan have sought knowledge of the future in order to obtain strategic advantages

In 2023, more and more countries will accelerate the building of such nationwide digital architectures, allowing them to deliver more AI-powered responsive services that cater to the individual and help the population at large. In 2023, bold governments will be making this move—and they will be examples to follow for the rest of the world.

In Finland, a similar platform called AuroraAI

the Estonian government launched a new AI-based virtual assistant called Bürokratt.

OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s MINERVA, and DeepMind’s Gato

talk about media literacy interventions, primarily to help the less politically sophisticated.

as labeling posts as misinformation

for independent audits, including tools that assess social media algorithms.

Social media platforms have morphed into public information utilities

The research paper from February 2022 is called Learning to Summarize from Human Feedback.

the new InstructGPT (a “sibling model” of ChatGPT).

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)

This church has always been regional and existed in different periods on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. Following the Second World War, the Soviet government decided to abolish the Greek Catholic Church and transfer its parishes to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Minister of Culture of Ukraine Alexander Tkachenko later denied this information, calling the incident not a transfer, but a “registration of a legal entity of the OCU on the territory of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra Reserve.”

“someone just taking that minute to be a human being and connect,”

that the presence of alt text is an important step toward making the internet more accessible.

“Lots of information about identity is communicated visually, but that information is often filtered through guesswork, interpretation and bias,” Coklyat and Finnegan write. “When and how do we describe race, gender, disability status, age, height, weight, etc.?”

Alt Text Reminder, another Twitter bot, notifies followers when they have tweeted an image without alt text. (The bot’s creator, Hannah Kolbeck, has also built a tool to quickly generate alt text for Wordle results that can be shared on social media.)

“You don’t need to describe every leaf and detail. Write one or two sentences describing the main point of the image,” the caption of one of her Instagram posts reads.

It “does a good enough job” for CloudSight’s clients, he said. (The company still offers human-reviewed services at a premium.)

“Alt text needs to be short and succinct, so we have to make a call on which details that we choose to highlight.”

One analysis of a million homepages, by WebAIM, a nonprofit organization affiliated with Utah State University that focuses on web accessibility, found that as of February 2021, 60.6 percent had instances of missing alt text.

The text boxes above are examples of alt text, which people who are blind or have low vision often rely on when navigating the web. When it’s available, the text can be detected and read aloud or translated into Braille through screen readers, assistive technology that can be accessed in the form of software programs, apps or even browser extensions. For these users, alt text is essential to the online experience.

Even though quantum computers can't do most computing jobs, they hold strong potential for changing our lives, enabling better batteries, speeding up financial calculations, making aircraft more efficient, discovering new drugs and accelerating AI.

What are prompts? These are simply words, phrases, questions, keywords, etc., entered into AI tools to generate results.  What is promptology? The art of creating the most effective prompts to achieve your desired result.

Ukraine says it has neutralized more than 4,500 cyberattacks this year

Tech firms worldwide have announced more than 150,000 job cuts so far in 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website. Meta alone accounts for 11,000 of those.

Supply-chain hiccups have weighed on the world’s most valuable company, which despite outperforming its peers has still lost more than a quarter of its market value in the past 12 months.

Semiconductors have been another sore spot in the tech world

Part of the reason for Meta’s pain was that new rivals, particularly TikTok, caused the first-ever drop in user numbers at Facebook, its flagship social network.

The next change is competition.

Take advertising, the lifeblood of Alphabet and Meta, and a growing sideline for Amazon, Apple and Microsoft

digital markets are maturing