Make Sense of the world
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Bill Gates had his first extended moment in history at the end of the 20th century. He regularly appeared as the richest, but also the nerdiest, man on earth. His rarely eclipsed top ranking lasted for at least two decades. Perhaps bored by the idea of holding wealth, he eventually decided to...
A new machine learning approach to COVID-19 testing has produced encouraging results in Greece. The technology, named Eva, dynamically used recent testing results collected at the Greek border to detect and limit the importation of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases among arriving international...
Many will remember 2020 as the year of COVID-19, an invisible pestilence that is still haunting the world a full year after its outbreak in the form of a global pandemic. Though it is still rather early, 2021 may one day be remembered as the year of an unexpected financial epidemic, the craze for...
Wired this week features a story by Will Knight with the title, “Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech.” It highlights the curious relationship between the natural behavior of human beings and the sophisticated but fundamentally unnatural logic of artificial intelligence...
A look back at history shows that desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures. After all, it was not until Saudi officials watched in horror as oil prices plummeted by 70% that, in 2016, Vision 2030 was born. While other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members presented their own...
Globally, the short-term changes in pollution levels associated with COVID-19 lockdown measures highlighted the importance of investment in renewable energy sources more than ever. India's National Solar Mission was set as one of the policy initiatives under the National Action Plan on Climate...
The battle of media titans over their profits — and our data — triggered by Australia’s attempt to make Google and Facebook pay for the news they use has little to do with the public interest. If we are worried about the quality of news and information, there’s not much to choose between...
Everyone knows that Amazon is a successful, profitable, world-conquering and, therefore, obscenely rich company. It has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. He keeps getting richer by the day. With his fortune, Bezos doesn’t need to be as careful with his cash, in contrast with normal...
As Shoshana Zuboff has warned in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” the great tech giants have built a system people have become dependent on for their social relationships. But this “social” system has been built to...
On January 7, the news media announced that Elon Musk had surpassed Jeff Bezos as “the richest person on Earth.” I have a personal interest in the story. Two of my neighbors just bought a Tesla, and this morning, on the highway between Geneva and Lausanne, an angry Tesla driver flashed me...
Unless you live completely off the grid, you have most likely heard something about the GameStop boom last week. For those unaware, a hedge fund, Melvin Capital, held very large short positions against GameStop, a brick-and-mortar gaming store whose stock has been falling steadily over the...
