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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power and punitiveness went together.

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

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

promotes individual blame instead of collective learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to facilitate cross-border transactions for Indians overseas

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

the “India Stack”,

would make “special presentations” about its digital infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

people tend to think of them as influential by default

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

inds it impossible to translate talk into action

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

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

leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

turns on arguments between key individuals

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

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

people have been gathering to discuss decisions since Adam and Eve

a mini-industry in management books

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

moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”