a set of tools that include locking users out of searches and preventing some users’ tweets from trending—which is how countless other users discover what’s popular or being talked about on Twitter.

visibility filtering

What “shadow banning” has long meant to lay critics of Twitter was not that no one on the platform could see their posts, but that far fewer people could. They meant something fishy was happening, screens were being thrown up, the air let out of their tires, so that posts by conservative or non-woke thinkers never seemed to reach as many eyeballs as those that espoused left-approved ideas.

shadow banning.

Tweets or accounts or hashtags that offended the powers that be were not publicly shamed, but quietly throttled, meaning users frequently did not know they were being deprived of arguments or data that did not support the prevailing wisdom or the politically favored narrative.

5 Fantastic WordPress Footnotes Plugins

usage guidelines, enforcing those guidelines, documenting known vulnerabilities and weaknesses and proactively disclosing harmful behavior and misuse scenarios.

choose the smallest model that will provide the accuracy and performance needed to reduce operational complexity, lower energy consumption and optimize total cost of ownership.

Use cases where output is reviewed by humans are preferred.

owever, they also pose risks and ethical concerns, including those associated with: 

Success depends on identifying the applications for these technologies that offer meaningful benefits to the organization.

two current ‘hot’ AI topics: chatbots and GPT3.

are still a work in progress

In The Tangle, each network participant has to validate others’ transactions before their own transactions can be validated. This means there is no need for “miners” and no cost for participating.

t does not use the proof-of-work validation system that has led to bitcoin’s soaring energy consumption.

So far, the best bet is a blockchain called EW Chain, developed by Energy Web Foundation, a Swiss non-profit organisation.

the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

“I think everyone five years ago assumed that blockchain was the answer, but I don’t think they knew what the question was,”

“The hype surrounding blockchain technology will recede sharply in 2018 as the cost and complexity of implementing blockchain solutions becomes apparent,”

were surfing on a wave of interest created by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

By March 2018, analyst firm GTM Research (now Wood Mackenzie) was tracking 122 energy-related blockchain start-ups

a digital platform that would cheapen energy by bypassing the complexities of electricity trading, tracking transactions with nimble blockchain technology instead of bulky centralised trading systems.

Some analysts claimed blockchain could revolutionise everything from finance to democracy.

Some analysts claimed blockchain could revolutionise everything from finance to democracy.

emrush is a very powerful tool for SEO but it won't do the job itself, you have to play around with it yourself.

Check if the main source of your new site’s traffic is either your old links or direct traffic recorded when users type your old URL into their browsers. If this is the case for you, then it’s highly advisable to keep the 301 redirect forever. It would be too risky to suddenly get rid of your old domain especially if your old links are bringing in so much traffic from users who still find them relevant.

Themes of the OECD Digital Economy Ministerial Meeting 

The so-called request for consultations is the first step in a long procedure at the global trade body. The United States has blocked appointments to the WTO's top ruling body on trade disputes, meaning some rows never get settled.

The so-called request for consultations is the first step in a long procedure at the global trade body.

"China takes legal actions within the WTO framework as a necessary way to address our concerns and to defend our legitimate interests,"

o have signed all five of the core space treaties

the use of gender-neutral language such as ‘piloted’ or ‘automated’ rather than ‘manned’ or ‘unmanned’ when referring to spacecraft

on gender mainstreaming in all security issues,

Australia is already known as a leader in advancing the WPS agenda

There is increasing evidence that women’s participation in decision-making results in more durable peace agreements, increased trust and collaboration across political agendas, and more comprehensive and nuanced information gathering to better inform decision-making.

Australia is a signatory to the WPS agenda, first codified in 2000 by UN Security Council resolution 1325.

UN women, peace and security (WPS) agenda

From Australia’s participation in the UN open-ended working group on reducing space threats,

Australia signed a bilateral security agreement with Vanuatu on Tuesday which will include cooperation over cybersecurity matters, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) announced. The agreement was signed as Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited the island nation in the wake of a severe ransomware attack in November. The attack left the Pacific island’s government in disarray; internal systems were completely unavailable impacting a host of emergency services, alongside schools and hospitals. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that officials from the Australian Cybersecurity Centre assisted Vanuatu’s government in rebuilding the systems following the attack. The two countries have historically had strong diplomatic ties. The pact involves cooperation in a range of areas, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, as well environmental and resource security, maritime and aviation safety and security, as well as defense and policing, according to DFAT. It “reflects Australia and Vanuatu’s ongoing commitment to working together as members of the Pacific family to address shared security challenges,” said Australia’s deputy prime minister Richard Marles. Australia, which is rewriting its own national security strategy following the ransomware attack on health insurance business Medibank, has ramped up its diplomatic work in the region as it competes with China. Beijing attempted — although ultimately failed in May — to sign regional trade and security agreements with the 10 Pacific Island states it has diplomatic relations with. An unexpected security deal between China and the Solomon Islands in April provoked enormous concern — particularly plans that would permit China to create a military base just 2,000 km from Australia itself.  Following the announcement of the agreement, the Solomon Islands’ prime minister Manasseh Sogavare stressed that he would not allow a Chinese military base in the country. He said the agreement covered the contingency of “a gap” in the kinds of security that Australia can provide: “When it comes to security issues in the region, we will call on them [the Australians] first.” The details of China’s agreement with the Solomon Islands have not been published, although a leaked draft was posted online revealing broad access to the Solomon Islands was being offered to China’s military and police. Australia’s agreement with Vanuatu “will be publicly available,” said Wong on Tuesday, because both nations are “committed to democracy, accountability and transparency.”

73rd Annual ICA Conference Theme Call for Papers

Twitter dissolves Trust and Safety Council

If a search engine sees a glut of raw AI content, then the page will receive a penalty point.

Google is paying more and more attention to video content, this is a truth that you just need to come to terms with

the U.S. intelligence apparatus has made quantum decryption a priority, regardless of market fluctuations.

Even the most optimistic analysts believe that quantum computing will not earn meaningful profits in the next five years, and pessimists caution that it could take more than a decade.

The Quantum Insider, an industry trade publication, has tallied more than six hundred companies in the sector, and another estimate suggests that thirty billion dollars has been invested in developing quantum technology worldwide.

“We have good reason to believe that a quantum computer would be able to efficiently simulate any process that occurs in nature,” Preskill wrote, a few years ago.

Kitaev’s error-correction scheme is one of the most promising approaches to building a functional quantum computer,

Entanglement is to computing what nuclear fission was to explosives: a strange property of the subatomic world that could be harnessed to create technology of unprecedented power. If entanglement could be enacted at the scale of everyday objects, it would seem like a magic trick. Imagine that you and a friend flip two entangled quarters, without looking at the results. The outcome of the coin flips will be determined only when you peek at the coins. If you inspect your quarter, and see that it came up heads, your friend’s quarter will automatically come up tails. If your friend looks and sees that her quarter shows heads, your quarter will now show tails. This property holds true no matter how far you and your friend travel from each other. If you were to travel to Germany—or to Jupiter—and look at your quarter, your friend’s quarter would instantaneously reveal the opposite result.

​Earlier this year, the Biden Administration announced that it was moving toward new, quantum-proof encryption standards that offer protection from Shor’s algorithm.

the physicists realized that whether an electron behaved more like a particle or more like a wave depended on whether or not someone was observing it.

A full-scale quantum computer could crack our current encryption protocols, essentially breaking the Internet.

Quantum computers, like the ones Google is building, use qubits, which can take a value of zero or one, and also a complex combination of zero and one at the same time.

Concern as US media hit with wave of layoffs amid rise of disinformation

Outer space talks are a welcome addition to the US-Africa Leaders Summit - what’s on the table

“The Banshees of Inisherin”

from rule-breaker to rule-maker, he will need to defy both the business challenges to his super-app ambitions and expectations of what he might do as the boss of one.

it is neither as vast as Meta nor as staid as Microsoft.

requires trust from regulators, consumers and the developers who choose to operate their businesses within a platform

Another obstacle is trust

to bypass the Apple ecosystem in the first place.

According to The Information, a news website, Microsoft has considered building its own super-app, a platform combining shopping, messaging and web search that would dip further into consumers’ wallets as its business customers slow spending.

By contrast it is hard to imagine WeChat’s users abandoning the app if it was removed from Apple’s iPhones in China.

Twitter will need to be far bigger before it can begin giving orders to the rule-makers.

any attempt to expand Twitter to integrate a payments system or create a platform for “mini programs” to run within the app would ignite a more fundamental conflict.

The total fees it collects from its app store are not disclosed but are thought to make up a large chunk of a services segment with revenues of $78bn a year.

Apple, which makes more than half of America’s smartphones, is the incumbent gatekeeper to the country’s eyeballs

The greatest impediment to super-apps are, unsurprisingly, app stores

Most involve fitting as many closely related services inside the same app as possible.

in 2017 cemented the platform as the real operating system of the Chinese internet

Launched in 2011, WeChat rode the wave of Chinese smartphone adoption. Today it boasts 1.3bn users and stunning ubiquity

provides a surprisingly upbeat history of death

The Equality Machine. By Orly Lobel. PublicAffairs; 368 pages; $30 and £25

she argues that the answer is

This author agrees with

Beyond Measure. By James Vincent. W.W. Norton; 432 pages; $32.50. Faber; £18.99

An Immense World. By Ed Yong. Random House; 464 pages; $30. Vintage; £17.99

this book lifts the shroud on

Elusive. By Frank Close. Basic Books; 304 pages; $26. Allen Lane; £25

A compelling account of

A tour d’horizon of cell theory, by

Papyrus. By Irene Vallejo. Translated by Charlotte Whittle. Knopf; 464 pages; $35. Hodder & Stoughton; £25

The author makes a powerful case

clear thinking is the key.

A novel about

The Serpent Coiled in Naples.

how close to inhumanity humanity always is

The broad subject of this poignant book is what happens

Mostly it confirms the view that

An elegant account of

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Its story makes clear how

A monumental study

it provides insights into how

Written with wit, style and a formidable command of detail

A magnificent history of corporations

For Profit. By William Magnuson. Basic Books; 368 pages; $32 and £25

In this authoritative book a former journalist

Books about

This timely book

Chip War. By Chris Miller. Scribner; 464 pages; $30. Simon & Schuster; £20

The author, a journalist at the Financial Times, was

The dramatic story

A fortuitously timed history of

It is striking

It reads like

A meticulous narration

A chronicle of the lif

A look at why

personal account

The author shows

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But that analysis underestimates how deeply neoliberal ideas took root across both the left and the right, at least in the Anglosphere.

In Mr DeLong’s version of history, key events are often the product of chance rather than structural forces.

a duel between the insights of Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist who extolled the power of the free market, and Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian thinker who warned that the market was there to serve man, not man the market.

Yet building harmonious societies out of material abundance has proved maddeningly difficult.

a land of plenty that prior generations could scarcely have imagined.

the modern corporation, the research laboratory and globalisation

Mr DeLong, by contrast, argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 is best seen as a coherent whole: the first era, he argues, in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economic ones.

It turns out that gpus, which were first designed in the 1990s to improve video games, are also excellent at running artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Intel recently launched its first set of stand-alone gpus to compete with Nvidia as well as amd, which also makes them.

But there was a twist: the number of tweets about protests and rallies increased. Like death, taxes are certain. Their effects are not.

This kind of messy bargaining could eventually strengthen the contract between citizens and states.

In Uganda the total value of mobile-money transactions dropped by a quarter when the state imposed a 1% tax on them in 2018, taking 18 months to recover

Ghana’s e-levy, in force since May, imposes a 1.5% tax on most electronic money transfers, such as those that citizens zap through their phones. Cameroon brought in a similar charge in January. Nigeria is considering a 5% levy on calls, messages and mobile internet.

African countries have proposed that a tax convention be developed at the un, where they hope to have more of a say.

But many African countries worry it is too complex and would be difficult to implement in countries with low administrative capacity, says Thulani Shongwe of the African Tax Administration Forum, a network of tax officials.

A global tax deal was agreed to by 130 countries last year with the aim of forcing multinational companies to pay more tax in the places where they make their sales, irrespective of where they register their assets.

Now they see untapped potential in new sectors which barely existed 20 years ago, including social media, e-commerce, mobile internet and mobile money.

Levies on mobile and internet services have sparked street protests in Uganda, cabinet squabbles in Nigeria and a parliamentary brawl in Ghana.

And China imports $400bn-worth of chips a year, more than any other country. Though private companies and allied countries might be happy to go along with the Americans now, the amount of money being left on the table by not selling to Chinese customers may start to rankle.

The list includes chips used for artificial intelligence (ai), software to design advanced chips and the machine tools to manufacture them. Selling such things to China is now barred without explicit permission from America’s government. Rulebreakers risk being cut off from American tech themselves.

China’s growing isolation—both self-imposed and enforced by restrictions like America’s new rules on tech exports—is far more severe.

American politicians do not seem to understand the advantage conferred by their country’s openness, however.

Less than half as many Chinese received visas to study abroad in the first half of 2022 as in the first half of 2019. This pulling apart is bad for the world, but China may suffer more. It does not have as diverse a pool of researchers as the West. According to data from MacroPolo, a think-tank, although 60% of the world’s best AI researchers work in America, over two-thirds of them are foreign (and over a quarter of them Chinese). In contrast, China draws overwhelmingly on domestic talent: almost all its best ai researchers are Chinese, and 70% of them have studied only in China.

he West is ahead on biotech, cloud computing and AI

China is dominant in some industries, such as 5G telecoms. It makes some 80% of the world’s lithium batteries.

what is called juguo tizhi or the “whole-of-the-nation system”.

China’s investments are also more co-ordinated.

This calculation confirms that America maintains a slight edge (see chart 1), spending about $800bn or 3.8% of GDP in 2020. That compares to about $660bn in China after adjusting for differences in the cost of living, or 2.7% of gDP.

Peter Thiel, a fabled investor, has argued that there has been too much investment in “bits” (software and analytics) and not enough in “atoms” (hardware and manufacturing).

Private investment, meanwhile, doubled from 1% of GDP in 1979 to 2% in 2017. Giant tech firms such as Google, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Apple sprouted in America. China spawned similar titans, such as Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com and Tencent.

Its spending peaked at 1.86% of GDP in 1964. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall federal spending on R&D fell well below 1% of gDP.

“Technological innovation has become the main battlefield of the international strategic game,” said China’s president, Xi Jinping, in a speech last year to Chinese scientists. “We’re in a multi-generation era-defining competition against the ccp [Chinese Communist Party],” rhymes Mr Young, one of the sponsors of the Chips Act.

The month before it passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides $52bn over five years for the semiconductor industry, some of which will incentivise private R&D.

“It’s a total clamp down, trying to cut off every head of the hydra of China’s chip industry.”

The anxiety is easy to understand. In 2008 China spent a third as much as America did on research and development (R&D) and about half as much as Europe, after adjusting for differences in the cost of living. By 2014 it had surpassed Europe. By 2020 its spending was 85% of America’s.

China fears rule-making as a plot to stop it catching up.

“When you are the weaker party, you cannot get a fair deal.”

A truly desperate Russia might stop selling advanced arms to India and Vietnam, both rivals of China’s, and forget its previous disquiet about China playing a larger role in the Arctic.

The Americans were too late: the prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, signed the Chinese pact before they arrived. In August the islands announced a $66m Chinese loan to pay for Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, to build mobile-phone towers. In September Mr Sogavare defied public appeals from Australia, previously its closest partner, and delayed elections for a year, saying they clashed with a sports tournament.

China has begun working with the IMF, the G20 and the Paris Club of creditors to help some low-income countries restructure crippling debts, among them Zambia. It has also recently struck a restructuring deal with Ecuador.

China prefers to extend the terms of loans rather than write them off, often securing promises to give Chinese lenders a priority claim to revenues (as well as clauses to keep loan terms secret)

In June a first cohort of 120 young cadres from six ruling parties in southern Africa attended a “leadership school” in Tanzania, opened with $40m in Chinese funding.

A European diplomat asserts that Mr Xi is guided by a tianxia guan: an ancient world view with China at the centre, and the influence of Chinese civilisation radiating out to all compass points

Confirmation bias was only part of the problem.

Without team-specific coaching and development, the work is indeed harder than it needs to be, and collaboration is less effective—so workloads become even heavier, making people feel even more overwhelmed and less able to pursue development and growth.

I believe that Yoda’s type of wisdom exists on every team, but only when everyone’s input is openly shared.

A replay may also be requested if it appears that a violation of the social contract—such as a back-channel conversation or an aggressive encounter—has occurred.

Circulate the results in a shared document and then orally after reconvening the full team. Candor breaks can serve as a coaching mechanism: In time team members will begin spontaneously sharing their feedback.

“Most important, they must be able to put their egos aside and assess themselves candidly.”

No matter how sensitive the issue or how serious the criticism, members must feel free to voice their thoughts openly—though always constructively—and respond to critical input with curiosity, recognizing that it is a crucial step toward a better solution.

Conflict avoidance can be corrosive, even deadly, causing teams to miss opportunities and needlessly exposing them to risk

This ensures that the person responsible for the project has clear, well-documented input encompassing a variety of perspectives along with concrete offers of support and that by the time the project comes to fruition, it has been subject to rigorous examination and benefits from the full wisdom of the team.

we have discovered that this courage and candor are sustained when the larger group reconvenes.

People have more courage in small groups; they are less inhibited about critiquing ideas and weeding out weak ones.

who will make the final decision.

The aim is robust dialogue, not consensus

Is this the highest performance we’re capable of?

deeply committed to one anothe

seekers, aware of and open about the areas in which we need to grow

meet their goals and commitments

not encumbered by hierarchy or control.

does not have silos

does not avoid conflict

an unspoken agreement to avoid conflict

have traditionally emphasized leadership competencies, not team competencies.

the rising star of social media could find itself similarly thwacked.

Spotify forks over a 15% commission on subscriptions purchased on iPhones—a tax so annoying that it has filed a complaint against Apple over it.

reliance on distribution platforms that are not their own.

low barriers to entry

try to capitalise on network effects, as data on the listening and viewing habits of similar users promised to deliver an unbeatable product.

Many developing countries see nothing magic about the year 1945, and have limited nostalgia for a time when the West dominated rulemaking

about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.

even stronger memories of suffering at the hands of colonial powers

explained why Europe’s dark past, notably the Holocaust, obliged its leaders to call out rights abuses, from China to Ukraine

This was “power politics”, Mr Wang retorted: a bid to “replace commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries”.

a straw-man argument

China hates to be isolated, deploying diplomats to lobby and twist arms to build support.

A “shared future” is another way of saying “development first”, ie, rejecting any order guided by shared, universal values.

a “Global Security Initiative” or “A Community of Shared Future for Mankind”

Chinese leaders want to preserve elements of the current order that helped their country rise, such as world trade rules that fostered their export champions and encouraged inflows of foreign capital and technology

Its officials liken Western powers to missionaries, bossily imposing their own values, a trait they call particularly alien to Asia, a continent that respects diversity.

When its efforts meet resistance, it pushes for vaguer rules whose enforcement becomes a question of political bargaining. All too often, it seeks to revive old, discredited ways of running the world that put states first, at the expense of individual freedoms.

Recipient governments are pushed into higher environmental standards or to protect the rights of vulnerable minorities.