Spread of ESGs could herald new global movement

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The Future Now Show:
Demography of Europe with Michael Akerib

Hanlon Lab

News about the Future:
New report: Establishing Best Practice for Forensic DNA Databases / Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions

Hashgraph - The Future of Blockchain

Recommended Book:
Home Made Bio Electronic Arts

BLOOM – Smart surface for spatial acoustics

ULTRANOW X Briefings: UBERBABE SOS WOW NOW

Futurist Portrait: Olakunle Soriyan


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By Frank-Jürgen Richter
Global Times, September 24, 2017

An ESG is a financial product that complies with environmental, social and governance rules, and until recently it was just part of financiers' jargon - their chat is full of short-form acronyms that many of us do not understand. But recently ESG has come into common parlance. This is good, as it represents a new global inclination to save the planet and to save ourselves from investments we do not understand.

Of course, working together in this way is a splendid idea; it creates efficiencies and develops innovative solutions supporting emerging world-wide goals, with many set within the UN Sustainable Development Goals to be met by 2030. ESGs are fast becoming a vital set of criteria for investment development and they demand new measurements of company performance. But there are much broader and more subtle aspects to this movement.

Cheating has been commonplace ever since lending and borrowing became institutionalized. William Shakespeare in 1596 aptly commented upon "… this pound of flesh" as something that is owed and ruthlessly claimed in repayment. In more modern times there was the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 expanding out of Thailand, as banks were seen to be over-indebted and could not pay back their customers. China learned much from that and developed its sovereign reserves, thus helping it to weather the 2008 global financial crash emanating from the US. These crashes forced central banks to increase regulation and oversight as well as developing fresh rules such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act reforming Wall Street investment and curbing speculation.

The EU in 2004 developed the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, which will be updated by January 2018 as MiFID II (yet another acronym). Although these rulings are primarily US or EU-based, they include all the global operations of firms registered in either the US or EU, in an effort to restrict global corruption.

But it is well known that corruption is still widespread, as is the fact that it is the poorest who suffer the most, often losing their jobs if a firm ceases trading while the corrupt boss with good legal aid may well escape punishment. There are many economies that suffer from corruption, especially among the developing nations.

The developed world is not exempt, as regulators and the judiciary often bring wrong-doers to trial. One instance is the Libor scandal that was perpetuated by major global banks. The banks falsely set the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), which is the average interest rate underpinning well over $350 trillion in derivatives. The skewed rate benefited the banks in question. The perpetrators have been removed from office and new regulations devised. However, few people connected with this crime have been convicted as the evidence against them was not strong enough, though banks have been heavily fined for allowing the fixing to take place.

Other heavy fines for banks have concerned their non-disclosure of hidden savings. Swiss banks have long been known as secretive, closely guarding their clients' assets - as are certain offshore tax havens. Now global regulations demand that banks open their lists to the relevant tax authorities and failure to do so has resulted in massive fines. This means that rich people have fewer places to hide their undeclared gains.

Also, India recently scrapped the use of large-denomination currency notes to crimp their black economy. That shock caused some havoc and temporarily reduced its quarterly growth figures and reduced the wealth of the super-rich by 1 percent. In the future India may halt the use of credit cards, moving instead to biometrics - validating transactions by an eye or thumb scan.

I began this piece by suggesting that ESGs are blossoming worldwide. It may be a case of there being a time when influential individuals all have the same idea at approximately the same time. This is noticeable in science when breakthroughs happen in different parts of the world by groups apparently unconnected to each other. Of course they are not "unconnected" as they will have studied the same things and been to the same conferences, but the groundswell ensures the development bursts forth.

Perhaps it is time for the world to become more transparent, more inclined to observe better environmental practices, to support better social policies and to adhere to strongly principled rules of governance applied to political as well as commercial practice. We are all facing huge global pressures - it is time to be concerned about our future and it is time for strong global leadership. The 19th National People's Congress in October may be a defining moment for China to define new developments for the world's second-largest economy.

Dr. Frank-Jürgen Richter is founder and chairman of Horasis, a global visions community dedicated to inspiring our future. Horasis is using its unrivalled history of partnership with corporations from emerging markets to create a powerful platform for cooperation between emerging and developed markets.

Ecosia is a social business run by a small group of dedicated people. We work together to create tools that empower everyone to easily do good by planting trees. We believe our trees have the power to make this world a better place for everyone in it.


Ecosia is a social business run by a small group of dedicated people. We work together to create tools that empower everyone to easily do good by planting trees. We believe our trees have the power to make this world a better place for everyone in it.



Ecosia team 2016

Every month we roam through current events, discoveries, and challenges - sparking discussion about the connection between today and the futures we're making - and what we need, from strategy to vision - to make the best ones.

Shape the future now, where near-future impact counts and visions and strategies for preferred futures start.

Do we rise above global challenges? Or do we succumb to them? The Future Now Show explores how we can shape our future now - where near-future impact counts. We showcase strategies and solutions that create futures that work.

Every month we roam through current events, discoveries, and challenges - sparking discussion about the connection between today and the futures we're making - and what we need, from strategy to vision - to make the best ones.

The Future Now Show

November 2017

Demography of Europe
with
Michael Akerib

Musings on the future are often quite narrow in scope (e.g. specific technologies) and time. The near future is obviously of great interest as it’s our next page, but it’s one page in a very long book and sometimes you need to read the whole book to get the best sense of what the next page might hold. That approach is taken here when considering the demographics of Europe – the story starts 9000 years ago and spans the planet. Sit back, soak it in, and only then wonder about the future. -- Paul Holister



Table of Content
History 1:16
Now 25:52
Migration 28:27
Opportunities 48:58

www.clubofamsterdam.com/press.asp?contentid=982

The Future Now Show
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Credits

Michael Akerib, Rector, Swiss UMEF University. www.umef-university.ch
Paul Holister, Editor, Summary Text

The Future Now Show
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Hanlon Lab is largely devoted to camouflage and the highly interdisciplinary approaches necessary to study its mechanisms and functions. We conduct a good deal of field work to understand the sensory world and natural behaviors of marine animals that can change their appearance within one or a few seconds. Our main focus is on cephalopods although recently we have studied flatfish, filefish and groupers that can also produce Rapid Adaptive Camouflage on a time scale somewhat similar to squid, octopus and cuttlefish. We also study terrestrial organisms when appropriate. Our greatest source of inspiration – and our guidance of laboratory studies - has come from field research.

We conduct a wide range of experimentation in the laboratory to tease out the details of camouflage that we observe and quantify from field studies. These include mechanisms of visual perception and sensory integration as well as the functional morphology of the complex skin that produces the changeable body patterns.

We are highly collaborative and work at multiple levels of integration: from molecules to behavior to ecology. Our central focus is the whole organism, and we use a comparative approach in nearly all of our studies. We often combine art and science in our research, and in some cases our work extends to materials science and engineering. We are consistently involved in public outreach, particularly through natural history television and science-based stories on the world wide web. We welcome inquiries regarding our research.

Octopus vulgaris Camouflage Change

New report: Establishing Best Practice for Forensic DNA Databases

This report was developed by the Forensic Genetics Policy Initiative using an innovative consultative approach. The final report reflects input from civil society groups around the world from a human rights perspective.

The project began as a result of civil society concerns about the lack of public input and debate regarding the development and expansion of forensic DNA databases around the world. The seven-year project has included extensive monitoring of press articles and legislation from 132 countries, visits to a number of countries with forensic DNA databases or developing new legislation (including UK, USA, China, India, Brazil, South Korea), and extensive discussion with civil society groups, policy makers, lawyers, forensic scientists and academics from many other countries.

The project has taken the innovative and unique approach of developing best practice international standards by engaging civil society in extensive discussion and debate. As a result, this report is the most wide-ranging and definitive analysis of human rights safeguards for forensic DNA databases that is available worldwide.

The report Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions examines the re-emergence of the urban commons as both a bottom-up emergence by citizens/commoners and a radical municipal administrative configuration. Starting with an exploration of the relationship between cities and the commons, with a particular focus on the recent revival and growth of urban commons, we attempt to answer the question of why urban commons are so crucial for a social-ecological transition. Then we review grassroots initiatives for urban commons transitions both in the global north and south, but with specific attention towards the municipal coalitions of Barcelona, Bologna, Naples, Frome and Ghent. As a conclusion we propose an institutional framework for urban commons transitions. We look to answer the following questions: i) what can cities do to respond to the new demands of citizens as commoners; ii) what their role may be in facilitating a social-ecological transition; and iii) what institutional adaptations would favour such a role.

Hashgraph - The future of decentralized technology.





Core concepts

For the full document THE SWIRLDS HASHGRAPH CONSENSUS ALGORITHM: FAIR, FAST, BYZANTINE FAULT TOLERANCE click here

The hashgraph consensus algorithm is based on the following core concepts.
• Transactions - any member can create a signed transaction at any time. All members get a copy of it, and the community reaches Byzantine agreement on the order of those transactions.
• Fairness - it should be difficult for a small group of attackers to unfairly
influence the order of transactions that is chosen as the consensus.
• Gossip - information spreads by each member repeatedly choosing another member at random, and telling them all they know
• Hashgraph - a data structure that records who gossiped to whom, and in what order.
• Gossip about gossip - the hashgraph is spread through the gossip protocol. The information being gossiped is the history of the gossip itself, so it is “gossip about gossip”. This uses very little bandwidth overhead beyond simply gossiping the transactions alone.
• Virtual voting - every member has a copy of the hashgraph, so Alice can calculate what vote Bob would have sent her, if they had been running a traditional Byzantine agreement protocol that involved sending votes. So Bob doesn’t need to actually her the vote. Every member can reach Byzantine agreement on any number of decisions, without a single vote ever being sent. The hashgraph alone is sufficient. So zero bandwidth is used, beyond simply gossiping the hashgraph.
• Famous witnesses - The community could put a list of n transactions into order by running separate Byzantine agreement protocols on O(n log n) different yes/no questions of the form “did event x come before event y?” A much faster approach is to pick just a few events (vertices in the hashgraph),to be called witnesses, and define a witness to be famous if the hashgraph shows that most members received it fairly soon after it was created. Then it’s sufficient to run the Byzantine agreement protocol only for witnesses, deciding for each witness the single question “is this witness famous?” Once Byzantine agreement is reached on the exact set of famous witnesses, it is easy to derive from the hashgraph a fair total order for all events.
• Strongly seeing - given any two vertices x and y in the hashgraph, it can be immediately calculated whether x can strongly see y, which is defined to be true if they are connected by multiple directed paths passing through enough members. This concept allows the key lemma to be proved: that if Alice and Bob are both able to calculate Carol’s virtual vote on a given question, then Alice and Bob get the same answer. That lemma forms the foundation for the rest of the mathematical proof of Byzantine agreement with probability one.




Mance Harmon, CEO of Swirlds, describes Hashgraph compared to the rest of the market, both in terms of performance and security.

Learn more about Proof of Work, Leader-Based, Economy-Based, Voting-Based, and Virtual Voting Systems.

September 19th, 2017, TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco

Home Made Bio Electronic Arts
by D. Landwehr, V. Kuni

"Science for everyone" is the motto of a new movement involving biology and electronics. Here the do-it-yourself approach that is already well-established on the electronics and computer scene is applied to the field of natural sciences, blurring the borderlines between art and science. The artists and scientists who work in the interdisciplinary way refer to themselves as bio-hackers or bio-punks and deliberately take up the creative impetus provided by those two movements. Their research aims to communicate scientific knowledge that is otherwise reserved for insiders only.

BLOOM : A smart, shape-shifting textile surface for acoustic modulation from Yeadon Space Agency on Vimeo.

BLOOM regulates acoustic issues in large spaces by opening and closing a knitted surface to provide the right amount of sound attenuation when it is needed. During the development of this project, our team was captivated by the idea of an acoustic cloud that can be folded as simply as origami paper, by using technical knits, smart materials, coded movement, and small modular components. We envision the invention to be suspended from ceilings, where it is sensitive to sound and therefore interacts and behaves intuitively, opening or closing to create a responsive environment.

The structure of BLOOM’s surface opens to absorb sound waves and prevent direct reflection of noise. When reverberant sound is desirable, the surface closes up to permit increased reflection around the space that BLOOM inhabits. The geometry of the knitted origami surface is based on pedesis, wherein slightly dissimilar triangular shapes repeat in an aperiodic manner, thus absorbing a broad range of sound frequencies.

Additionally, the fibers that are used in the technical knit have a fluffy, hollow structure, with desirable properties for absorbing sound. The fluffy surface interrupts sound reflection so that the sound waves propagate within the surface itself. An increase in the volume of noise that one experiences in a room causes the surface to unfold, exposing more and more fibrous surface area to absorb the unwanted din. Hence, BLOOM can manage the quality of sound that is needed for a specific situation and crowd.

Each flower cluster that makes up the surface of BLOOM is designed and tailored from fiber to shape. By being able to custom design the fiber yarns, we control the acoustic qualities of BLOOM, and its lightweight construction. Every single stitch is digitally programmed, which creates the shape and folds instantly for direct application.

PRODUCTION

Creating a modular system provides us the freedom to easily customize BLOOM for clients. The system could be installed in intimate restaurants and conference rooms, or large airports, schools, auditoriums, and libraries. Each basic module contains a standardized actuator component with a six arms that are digitally controlled by a microprocessor, combined with weighted battens that are integrated into the textile. The entire system is designed to be infinitely variable. Thus, BLOOM has the capability to be adjusted in scale, material and color, due to the use of digital knitting technology and the repetition of modular, manufactured components. The production of BLOOM for a specific installation would ideally be done near the location of the project, by providing digital files to regional fabricators, but the entire system can also be easily shipped for installation. The lightweight, folding pieces makes transport relatively efficient and inexpensive.

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UAI is an accelerator. We train individuals to lead themselves, their lives, their organizations, and their countries with joyous, prosperous integrity. We forecast developments across every sector of civilization. We develop product solutions for every sector of civilization. We develop and direct missions. And we invest in, advise, and mentor individuals and organizations.

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Insight courtesy of UAI CEO Lise Voldeng. Title credits music courtesy of UAI CEO Lise Voldeng and Elad Marish. Supported by the Club of Amsterdam.

In the covered wagon days of the Internet, I used to tell my Hollywood peers something like, "If you can tell a beautiful story around a campfire, you can tell a beautiful story in any medium." Today I say, it started it starts with love, singing true. Here is an excerpt from my triple trilogy of my true campfire stories, "uberbabe: sos (stars over shootland), wow (worlds over war), now (nucleus of wonder)."

 

Lisa (Lise) Voldeng: CEO, creator, futurist, and investor. Runs accelerator Ultra-Agent Industries Inc. Loves icecream and integrity.

Voldeng consistently forecasts global developments (across every sector of civilization) and successfully implements solutions to help us prosper. She builds brands, markets, organizations, platforms, products, and experiences. She invests in, advises and mentors individuals and organizations who want to prosper integrously.

Olakunle Soriyan - a MasterMind .. Futurist .. Thought Revolutionist .. NATION-BUILDER .. NORMALCY is NOT my thing .. & CONFORMITY is an ADVERSARY. Olakunle Soriyan is based in Nigeria.

THE OLAKUNLE SORIYAN COMPANY is a research-driven training, consulting and coaching nation-building social enterprise mapping out solutions to African challenges, developing insight on the most pressing issues, shaping culture and impacting the course of history by mobilizing, inspiring and empowering society's thinkers, decision makers and influencers; as well as supporting and defending the most vulnerable.

"Why I Exist? I am a research-driven nation-building entity mapping out solutions to African challenges, developing insight on the most pressing issues, shaping culture and impacting the course of history by mobilizing, inspiring and empowering society's thinkers, decision makers and influencers; as well as supporting and defending the most vulnerable amongst us. I primarily exist to improve the state of Africa by ensuring that the people, institutions and organizations of Africa are on the list of the world's most purposeful, inventive and impactful entities by the year 2035 and beyond. This is why I exist. It is timeless and will never change."

 

Why Nigeria has bad leaders

 

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