It might be a smart gamble—a new variant, the climate crisis, or a nuclear apocalypse might force us all indoors again—but it is, to put it dramatically, a bet against humankind

The question is whether we—the intended users—will go along with it.

Digital Geneva Footp

The prolonged pandemic has forced the government, including the Foreign Ministry, to readjust its targets and goals. But these difficulties are not an excuse to allow progress to be arrested. It is natural for the public to ask more of the government during trying times, and the RCEP is incomplete without Indonesia’s ratification.

Digital Geneva Footprint ofInternational Geneva

Year of the Tiger

China has yet to grant regulatory approval for the sale of cultivated meat (so far, Singapore is the only country in the world that has), but that could soon change as pressure mounts to achieve the five-year plan. Market approval would see increased private investment in local cultivated meat start-ups, like Joes Future Food, which has already raised nearly $11 million to start lab-grown pork production. Meanwhile, the sheer size of China’s potential market could spark additional investment in global brands that are already scaling up

By promoting cultivated meat alternatives, China could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from raising livestock (or importing meat), while ensuring that it maintains food security

A graph hypernetwork starts with any architecture that needs optimizing (let’s call it the candidate). It then does its best to predict the ideal parameters for the candidate. The team then sets the parameters of an actual neural network to the predicted values and tests it on a given task.

Given a new, untrained deep neural network designed for some task, the hypernetwork predicts the parameters for the new network in fractions of a second, and in theory could make training unnecessary. Because the hypernetwork learns the extremely complex patterns in the designs of deep neural networks

Boris Knyazev of the University of Guelph in Ontario and his colleagues have designed and trained a “hypernetwork” — a kind of overlord of other neural networks — that could speed up the training process.

MUDs, or multi-user domains.

New Zealand, Singapore, and Chile have signed the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement, which represents a new type of trade agreement to promote the digital economy.

Wellington’s participation in international and regional organizations, the diversification of its foreign relations, and its subtle adjustments to its policy toward China, particularly concerning some political and international issues such as the South China Sea.

the Greater Bay Area strategy

, digital diplomacy should primarily be understood as the use of digital information, communication and technologies to achieve diplomatic objectives. In this case, we mainly focus on the usage of digital diplomacy to help pursue foreign policy goals.

rejecting various metaverse-related trademark applications

Alibaba, which owns the , plans to launch new AR glasses for users to conduct virtual meetings over DingTalk, the company’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform, in its latest move to stake out a claim in the metaverse.

helping them gain first-mover advantage in the metaverse arena

VR immerses a user in an imagined world, like in a film or video game, with the aid of an opaque headset such as those from Oculus, a division of Facebook parent Meta Platforms. AR provides an overlay of digital imagery onto the real world with the use of a clear headset, like Microsoft’s HoloLens, or with newer smartphones and tablets.

Chinese Big Tech companies, led by internet giants Tencent Holdings and Baidu, comprised more than half of the world’s top 10 filers of patent applications for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies over the past two years, showing a strong effort to establish a foothold in the emerging metaverse market.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has accused the EU of ‘vaccine apartheid’, is expected to only attend online, while other countries may want to make a stand by boycotting the summit.

the EU’s handling of the Omicron variant will be raised by the African side as an example of how trust can be undermined if the EU does not consult before measures are taken.

America’s militarized approach is struggling to compete with extensive Chinese economic and infrastructure assistance.

trade engagements with Africa center around extractive industries such as oil and minerals; and selling high-priced technologies such as aircraft.

Africom epitomizes the militarization of US policy towards Africa.

personal connections that key people in the Biden foreign policy and national security establishment have with Tigrian leaders who ruled Ethiopia for almost three decades.

to use both global resources to solve local problems and turn local experiences and expertise into shareable global resources.

global advocacy and a myriad of activities that help to maintain the city’s global identity.

Sister-cities flourished following the Second World War as a way to improve people-to-people relationships across country borders in order to make war less likely.

as Kitakyushu’s Initiative for a Clean Environment, Sendai’s Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and Minamata’s Convention on Mercury.

peace tourism, research on nuclear abolition

the Mayors for Peace organisation

moral authority on nuclear abolition and non-proliferation.

Japan’s Nagasaki is an important example of a city engaged in global activism and activity.

promoting digital transformations

an evaluation of Secretary-General Guterres’s Our Common Agenda report,

cyberspace

Diplomacy Reset: Ten Global Summits to Watch in 2022

expanding commitments to climate mitigation, strengthening multilateralism, and increasing the resiliency of democracies.

in the form of plurilateral agreements in areas such as e-commerce, investment facilitation, and services regulation.

to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments—and on fisheries subsidies by the end of February 2022.

Ministerials generally occur every two years, but by March it will have been five years since the last conference, leaving Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s first ministerial with a long list of agenda items.

The sharing of data—and their use—may now be getting easier.

The use of PETs offers not only a means of bringing together data sets that cannot currently interact because of worries about privacy, but also a way for all sorts of organisations to collaborate securely across borders.

although American and Canadian records of the value of wood pulp traded between the two countries were basically the same, their data on the value of the clock trade differed by 80%.

The output is likewise statistically blurred, using differential privacy, before being sent back to the original inquirer.

For extra security, cryptographic hashes and digital signatures are applied, to prove that only authorised operations have taken place

a so-called “privacy budget”,

they cannot be reverse-engineered to reveal individual records

differential privacy.

That inquirer thus receives its answers, but never has access to the information on which those answers are based.

secure multiparty computation (SMPC)

The UN PETs Lab, which opened for business officially on January 25th, enables national statistics offices, academic researchers and companies to collaborate to carry out projects which will test various PETs, permitting technical and administrative hiccups to be identified and overcome.

privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)

Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable.

DATA ARE valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be.

“Pioneers” are the people on a mission to change the world; “artisans” are interested in mastering a specific skill; “operators” derive a sense of meaning from life outside work; “strivers” are more focused on pay and status; “givers” want to do work that directly improves the lives of others; and “explorers” seek out new experiences.

And teams are likelier to perform well if they blend types of employees: visionaries to inspire, specialists to deliver and all those people who want to do a job well but not think about it at weekends. Like mayonnaise, the secret is in the mixture.

they felt their roles had less meaning when they no longer had direct responsibility for the well-being of passengers.

Having a purpose does not necessarily mean a desire to found a startup, head up the career ladder or log into virtual Davos. Some people are fired up by the prospect of learning new skills or of deepening their expertise.

“Pioneers” are the people on a mission to change the world; “artisans” are interested in mastering a specific skill; “operators” derive a sense of meaning from life outside work; “strivers” are more focused on pay and status; “givers” want to do work that directly improves the lives of others; and “explorers” seek out new experiences.

Last year Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online giant’s cloud-computing arm, introduced Amazon SageMaker Canvas, a set of tools that lets people deploy machine-learning models without writing code.

low code/no code (LC/NC) tools

Power Apps platform

Just 25m people around the world are fluent in standard programming languages

They allow anyone to write software using drag-and-drop visual interfaces alone (no code) or with a bit of code creeping in (low code).

“the future of coding is no coding at all”

Now its neighbours’ instability looks like a risk to the solemnly invoked peace that underpins the whole European project.

By contrast, France’s President Emmanuel Macron relentlessly pushes the idea that Europe must develop its own “strategic autonomy”.

Bits of eastern Europe see NATO, and specifically America, as the bedrock of their security.

The way Europe deals with its neighbourhood is an extension of how it was built.

Europe sends money, and recently vaccines, as part of its “neighbourhood policy”, which extends to bits of the Middle East. But the task is low on its list of priorities.

In the western Balkans, pound-shop demagogues rant and loot. Across the Mediterranean, a mere people-smuggling dinghy ride from the EU, North Africa now mixes a drift away from democracy (Tunisia) with civil war (Libya).

But peace stops at the EU’s borders.

the crucial thing about the European project is that it has delivered peace.

China has long nurtured ambitions—invigorated by American sanctions but so far unsuccessful—to build a fully fledged chip industry.

It aspires to double Europe’s share of chipmaking, currently around 10%.

The shortages, and America’s tech-flavoured trade war with China, have reminded politicians how vital chips are to the modern economy—and how over-reliant their supply is on a few giant firms.

TSMC’s boss, C.C. Wei, said this month that a correction could be “less volatile” for his firm thanks to its position at the technological cutting-edge.

The chip business has swung between over- and undercapacity since it emerged in the 1950s, observes Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons, a firm of analysts (see chart). If history is a guide, then, a glut is in on the way. The only question is when.

on January 20th both Meta and Twitter integrated NFTs into their platforms.

the creator economy

web3 will not dislodge web2.

the future may belong to a mix of the two, with web3 occupying certain niches.

One is that the ownership of the computing power that keeps many blockchains up to date is often very concentrated, which gives these “miners”, as they are called, undue influence.

at recently launched web3 projects, between 30% and 40% is owned by the people who launched them.

Despite being a relatively recent phenomenon, web3 is exhibiting signs of centralisation. Because of the complexity of the technology, most people cannot interact directly with blockchains—or find it too tedious. Rather they rely on middlemen, such as OpenSea for consumers and Alchemy for developers.

“If something is truly decentralised, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time,” he writes. That creates opportunities: “A sure recipe for success has been to take a 1990’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralise it, and iterate quickly.”

Lock-in, reckons Mr Marlinspike, tends to emerge almost automatically.

That was the problem of early web3 offerings (then called “peer-to-peer” or “the decentralised web”).

Unlike Google and Meta they do not control their users’ data. OpenSea (in which a16z also has a stake) and Alchemy are just pipes to the blockchain. If their customers are unhappy, they can move to a competing service.

Syndicate helps investment clubs organise themselves into “decentralised autonomous organisations” governed by “smart contracts”, which are rules encoded in software and baked into a blockchain.

This is possible thanks to blockchains, which turn the centralised databases to which big tech owes its power into a common good that can be used by anybody without permission. Blockchains are a special type of ledger that is not maintained centrally by a single entity (as a bank controls all its customers accounts) but collectively by its users. Blockchains have outgrown cryptocurrencies, their earliest application, and spread into NFTs and other sorts of “decentralised finance” (DeFi). Now they are increasingly underpinning non-financial services.

Web3, in Mr Dixon’s telling, “combines the decentralised, community-governed ethos of web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of web2”.

More recently, open-source software, which users can download for nothing and adapt to their needs, took over from proprietary programs in parts of the industry—only to be reappropriated by the tech giants to run their mobile operating systems (as Google does with Android) or cloud-computing data centres (including those owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google).

since November some $1trn of the value of cryptocurrencies, the most mature province of web3, has gone up in flames.

“You don’t own ‘web3’. VCs and their [limited partners] do,”

Pitted against them are the sceptics.

On one side sit techno-Utopians, firms offering assorted web3 services and their VC backers.

His token showed that NFTs are not as non-fungible as advertised. And OpenSea’s reaction illustrated that the supposedly decentralised web3 has its own gatekeepers.

NFTs are the most visible instantiation of “web3”—an idea that its advocates and their venture-capital (VC) backers hail as a better, more decentralised version of the internet, built atop distributed ledgers known as blockchains.

NFTs are the most visible instantiation of “web3”—an idea that its advocates and their venture-capital (VC) backers hail as a better, more decentralised version of the internet,

The remedy for the failures of competition policy is not to abandon the consumer welfare standard but to bring it up to date.

The large and fluid tech ecosystems offered by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and others show the complexity of the task: they are in an innovative phase with new services being created that are highly popular and they increasingly compete with each other. It would be easy to erode the quality of their products with ill-judged rules.

Regulators and governments, especially in Europe, must be realistic about their ability to anticipate consumers’ needs and should not pursue firms purely because they have grown big by being useful

Before the consumer welfare standard emerged in legal judgments in the 1970s and 1980s, America’s trustbusting was capricious.

a bill that would ban tech giants from using their platforms to favour their own services.

Since the 1990s the EU has tended to put consumers’ interests first, but now its commissioner wants to apply a “broader notion” of harm.

One school, named after Louis Brandeis, a judge, holds that big companies must be tamed because they corrupt politics and damage customers, competitors and staff. The other says the goal of antitrust is to protect the welfare of consumers, which can be enhanced by big, efficient firms. For decades the consumer approach has been ascendant, but now the consensus has frayed and trustbusters are heading in a Brandeisian direction.

Interoperability often requires a level of commercial and technical finesse rarely seen in the management of government contracts.

In 2017 thousands of Google employees signed a letter outlining their unhappiness with the company’s role in the Maven project. Microsoft’s bid for the JEDI contract faced internal opposition on similar grounds. Many others will also have concerns about data fusion on such a scale, for military or any other purposes.

to build “a continuous pipeline of all-source intelligence analysis” into “continually learning analytic engines”.

“data fusion”—combining different pieces of information to reveal things that one source cannot capture, including things no human would think to look for.

In 2019 the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10bn contract for its Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI). Last year Amazon, which has been supplying the CIA with such services since 2013, got the contract annulled. A new tender issued in November will probably see the work shared among a number of firms. There will be more than enough to go around.

an increasing amount of processing be done “on the edge”—that is, on the platform carrying the sensor.

an narrow down a huge range of potential targets and pass information about them freely to where it is most needed.

But radar’s capabilities had to be built into systems that made use of them.

you need ways to combine their data into information that can be acted on at speed.

We labelled each of the roughly 1,700 songs with the lyrics language using an automated technique.

Many of the K-pop bands popular in South Korea manage to achieve global success by mixing in some English.

we plotted the most-streamed song for countries in each group weekly for the full five-year period, revealing precisely when and where these leaps happen.

the hegemony of English is in decline.

The Economist trawled through the top 100 tracks in 70 countries according to Spotify.

that price will be paid from the wallet rather than through physical suffering.

the amount of gas held in storage.

he thinks extra LNG could fill 15% of the shortfall that would result from a complete Russian cut-off.

to retire coal-fired power stations and its rash decision, taken in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, to shut down its nuclear plants, it remains more reliant on natural gas than it need be.

Germany is the most vulnerable.

This would be felt most acutely in Slovakia, Austria and parts of Italy (see chart), reckons David Victor of the University of California, San Diego

Without a war, JPMorgan Chase, a bank, forecasts that higher prices will lead to Gazprom making over $90bn in gross operating profit this year, up from $20bn in 2019.

may yet agree on how to contain China’s semiconductor ambitions. But it may prove impossible for one state to control such a complex industry.

despite Mr Trump’s campaign to snuff out China’s indigenous industries and Mr Biden’s more multilateral attempts to achieve the same end.

American semiconductor companies and those in friendly countries could sell their most advanced chipmaking services to the Chinese market, yet still be able to prevent Chinese firms from developing the most sophisticated manufacturing capacity themselves.

should focus on protecting trade secrets.

controlling exports of specific machines and components is unwise anyway, because no net of controls can be drawn tightly enough to stop a determined,

a compromise by cutting off Chinese access to chips and chipmaking tools above a certain level of sophistication.

America is caught between choosing a softer set of controls which may work better in the long run, or a harsher set that could hurt Chinese technology more in the short run but might harm American industry overall.

Without America’s friends on board America’s hard line on exports threatens to weaken its own companies.

The Europeans and the Japanese both want a more formal multilateral approach. But America reckons its ability to react fast to a Chinese threat would inevitably be curbed.

narrower coalition-of-the-willing approach to diplomacy.

the leading countries in the chip supply chain—America, Japan and the Netherlands

the Semiconductor Industry Association

of meetings to discuss sanctions that might be put on Russia

the Quad, a club of countries that embraces America, Australia, India and Japan.

global chip diplomacy is still weak.

to co-operate in “rebalancing” global chip supply chains. That was diplomatic language for keeping them away from China.

he EU-US Trade and Technology Council,

Officials pay lip service to the idea of updating Wassenaar so that it might help control the trade in semiconductors.

the Organisation of the Semiconductor Exporting Countries: OSEC.

he has never seen semiconductors so consistently top the diplomatic agenda.

must build a consensus with friendly countries.

lose its grip over the chip supply chain.

to develop their own versions of chip technologies they had previously imported along supply chains linked to firms in America.

beyond the reach of American law.

to evade America’s Export Administration Regulations, qualifying them as “ EAR-free”

Last year Huawei’s revenues shrank for the first time in a decade, by almost a third.

Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.

“Fundamentally, this resulted in a breakdown of trust between the business and the data sides of the house. That inspired us to leave Flexport and really try to understand its problem and solve it.”

with heritage in design of fault-tolerant systems.

with no dependence on external technology or licenses,

To some extent, RISC-V is at hardware (HW) level what Linux was in its origins at Operating System level, offering a competitive open source platform able to compete with Windows-based products.

requires improved computing performance, and methods to ensure safe and reliable software (SW) execution

open standard, it is designed to be adopted by any software, device, or online platform as well as by regulatory bodies and government agencies to establish standards for digital provenance

C2PA specification will provide platforms with a method to define what information is associated with each type of asset (e.g., images, videos, audio, or documents), how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified

establishing the provenance of media is critical to ensure transparency, understanding, and trust

empowers content creators and editors worldwide to create tamper-evident media, by enabling them to selectively disclose information about who created or changed digital content and how it was altered

released version 1.0 of its technical specification for digital provenance

the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)

concrete hope toward making these qubits compute

the MIT team’s new qubit appears to be extremely robust, able to maintain a superposition between two vibrational states, even in the midst of environmental noise, for up to 10 seconds.

many types of qubits, some of which are engineered and others that exist naturally

Where a classical bit in today’s computers carries out a series of logical operations starting from one of either two states, 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in a superposition of both states. While in this delicate in-between state, a qubit should be able to simultaneously communicate with many other qubits and process multiple streams of information at a time, to quickly solve problems that would take classical computers years to process.

such wobbly qubits could be a promising foundation for future quantum computers

when pairs of fermions are chilled and trapped in an optical lattice, the particles can exist simultaneously in two states — a weird quantum phenomenon known as superposition.

MIT physicists have discovered a new quantum bit, or “qubit,” in the form of vibrating pairs of atoms known as fermions.

PRINCIPLES FOR DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT

Design for scale:Widespread distribution of digital projects requires more than a pilot project, but also sustainable models and funding and partners who are also able to implement the initiatives in other regions.4) Build for sustainability: To achieve long-term impact, it is important to support users and stakeholders equally – with sustainable programmes, platforms and digital tools

Vožnja električnim automobilom skuplja nego "dizelašem"

Twist takes a big step towards making quantum programming easier by guaranteeing that the quantum bits in a pure piece of code cannot be altered by bits not in that cod

The scientists designed Twist to be expressive enough to write out programs for well-known quantum algorithms and identify bugs in their implementations.

understanding the meaning of a quantum program requires understanding the entanglement present in its data

Twist paves the way to languages that make the unique challenges of quantum computing more accessible to programmers

“Our language Twist allows a developer to write safer quantum programs by explicitly stating when a qubit must not be entangled with another,”

Twist can describe and verify which pieces of data are entangled in a quantum program, through a language a classical programmer can understand.

discarding one qubit without being mindful of its entanglement with another qubit can destroy the data stored in the other, jeopardizing the correctness of the program.

Twist is an MIT-developed programming language

By calling on NATO to pull military infrastructure out of Eastern Europe, and on the U.S. to offer written guarantees that it will never support Ukraine’s accession to NATO, Sarotte told me, “he wants a do-over of 1997.”

“Just as a glacier sweeps across a landscape slowly, yet alters broad swathes of terrain profoundly, so too did NATO’s expansion eastward force elements of the post-Cold War political landscape to shift and settle, leaving behind landmarks for the twenty-first century.”

At a summit in Helsinki, Clinton promised to give Yeltsin four billion dollars in investment in 1997, as much as the U.S. had provided in the five years prior, while also dangling W.T.O. membership and other economic inducements.

Washington “must be very careful not to be seen as running after the Russians, offering them concessions,” Clinton’s Secretary of State at the time, Warren Christopher, said.

Putin’s current demand—clearly provocative and unrealistic—is for NATO to remove its military infrastructure from states that joined after the 1997 agreement.