Lifeboat Foundation

Chinese scientists have established the world’s first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4600 kilometers for users across the country. The team, led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported in Nature their latest advances towards the global, practical application of such a network for future communications.

Unlike conventional encryption, quantum communication is considered unhackable and therefore the future of secure information transfer for banks, power grids and other sectors. The core of quantum communication is quantum key distribution (QKD), which uses the quantum states of particles—e.g. photons—to form a string of zeros and ones, while any eavesdropping between the sender and the receiver will change this string or key and be noticed immediately. So far, the most common QKD technology uses optical fibers for transmissions over several hundred kilometers, with high stability but considerable channel loss. Another major QKD technology uses the free space between satellites and ground stations for thousand-kilometer-level transmissions. In 2016, China launched the world’s first quantum communication satellite (QUESS, or Mozi/Micius) and achieved QKD with two ground stations which are 2600 km apart.

Venezuela’s government is planning to move to a fully digital economy as hyperinflation has made worthless bolivar notes practically disappear, and dollarization expands through the local financial system.

The U.S. dollar has operated as an escape valve for Venezuela amid U.S. sanctions and collapsing oil revenues, President Nicolas Maduro said in a televised interview with Telesur on Friday. He said 18.6% of all commercial transactions are in dollars, while 77.3% are carried out in bolivars with debit cards. Only 3.4% are paid with bolivar notes.

“They have a war against our physical currency. We are moving this year to a more profound digital economy, in expansion. I’ve set the goal of an economy that’s 100% digital,” Maduro said, adding that physical money will eventually disappear.

Movie ratings can determine a movie’s appeal to consumers and the size of its potential audience. Thus, they have an impact on a film’s bottom line. Typically, humans do the tedious task of manually rating a movie based on viewing the movie and making decisions on the presence of violence, drug abuse and sexual content.

Now, researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, armed with artificial intelligence tools, can rate a movie’s content in a matter of seconds, based on the movie script and before a single scene is shot. Such an approach could allow movie executives the ability to design a movie rating in advance and as desired, by making the appropriate edits on a script and before the shooting of a single scene. Beyond the potential financial impact, such instantaneous feedback would allow storytellers and decision-makers to reflect on the content they are creating for the public and the impact such content might have on viewers.

Using artificial intelligence applied to scripts, Shrikanth Narayanan, University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, and a team of researchers from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) at USC Viterbi, have demonstrated that linguistic cues can effectively signal behaviors on violent acts, drug abuse and sexual content (actions that are often the basis for a film’s ratings) about to be taken by a film’s characters.

The shroud over P2P firms has fallen, with China’s banking regulator announcing last month that it had shut down all such platforms. However, the financial time bomb is far from being defused for millions of families who invested billions of yuan, and a very real concern exists that mishandling the situation could lead to social unrest.

The shroud over peer-to-peer lending firms has fallen, and China’s banking regulator says all such platforms across the country have ceased operations – but countless billions are already feared lost.

A french automaker; Citroen is banking that tiny electronic vehicles are the way of the future!

The mini mobility unit starts at around $7059 including VAT, but can be rented with a subscription model or with minute-by-minute payments.

Just in time for the Christmas holiday, Emotet is sending the gift of Trickbot.

After a lull of nearly two months, the Emotet botnet has returned with updated payloads and a campaign that is hitting 100, 000 targets per day.

Emotet started life as a banking trojan in 2014 and has continually evolved to become a full-service threat-delivery mechanism. It can install a collection of malware on victim machines, including information stealers, email harvesters, self-propagation mechanisms and ransomware. It was last seen in volume in October, targeting volunteers for the Democratic National Committee (DNC); and before that, it became active in July after a five-month hiatus, dropping the Trickbot trojan. Before that, in February, it was seen in a campaign that sent SMS messages purporting to be from victims’ banks.

People who are sick can ask for EUA drugs, but you have to ask often. INDIANAPOLIS, Nov. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Eli Lilly and Company’s (NYSE: LLY) investigational neutralizing antibody bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) 700 mg. Bamlanivimab is authorized for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients 12 years and older with a positive COVID-19 test, who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization. Bamlanivimab should be administered as soon as possible after a positive COVID-19 test and within 10 days of symptom onset. The authorization allows for the distribution and emergency use of bamlanivimab, which is administered via a single intravenous infusion.

The Investor Relations website contains information about Eli Lilly and Company’s business for stockholders, potential investors, and financial analysts.

THE FINANCE industry has had a long and profitable relationship with computing. It was an early adopter of everything from mainframe computers to artificial intelligence (see timeline). For most of the past decade more trades have been done at high frequency by complex algorithms than by humans. Now big banks have their eyes on quantum computing, another cutting-edge technology.

A fundamentally new kind of computing will shake up finance—the question is when.

Finance & economics Dec 19th 2020 edition.

Continue reading “Wall Street’s latest shiny new thing: quantum computing” »

University of Copenhagen researchers have advanced their quantum technology to such a degree that classical computing technology can no longer keep up. They have developed a chip that, with financial backing, could be scaled up and used to build the quantum simulator of the future. Their results are now published in Science Advances.

First came Google. Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute in collaboration with University of Bochum have joined Google in the race to build the world’s first quantum computer with what they are calling a “major breakthrough.”

“We now possess the tool that makes it possible to build a quantum simulator that can outperform a classical computer. This is a major breakthrough and the first step into uncharted territory in the world of quantum physics,” asserts Professor Peter Lodahl, Director of the Center for Hybrid Quantum Networks (Hy-Q).