Lifeboat Foundation

The bottom line: The world as we know it — of complex global supply chains and countries playing to their best Ricardian advantage — is rapidly transforming into an atavistic place of trade barriers and bellicose rhetoric. If countries increasingly retreat into their nationalistic shells, no amount of fiscal or monetary stimulus will be able to head off the inevitable economic and financial consequences.

Global financial system.

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With over 350,000 new malware samples emerging every day, it’s difficult for any one strain of malware to make a name for itself. Any single malware sample whose name you know — be it Mirai, WannaCry, or NotPetya — speaks to a trail of devastation.

In 2019, people are also hearing another name: Emotet.

But Emotet has been around in one form or another since 2014, and its first major resurgence was in 2017. In the beginning, Emotet was just one trojan among many — a particularly run-of-the-mill banking trojan that did some damage before being researched, understood, and dismissed in a flurry of signature updates.

I’m excited to share my new 1 hour interview at Singularity University radio with Steven Parton. Also, check out Singularity Hub and the write-up they did of the interview. We talk all things transhumanism, longevity, Cyborgs, and the future:

Singularity University, Singularity Hub, Singularity Summit, SU Labs, Singularity Labs, Exponential Medicine, Exponential Finance and all associated logos and design elements are trademarks and/or service marks of Singularity Education Group.

© 2019 Singularity Education Group. All Rights Reserved.

Continue reading “Where Death Ends and Cyborgs Begin, With Futurist Zoltan Istvan” »

Goldman Sachs is taking aim at the world’s biggest quant hedge funds.

The investment bank recently approved a three-year plan to spend more than $100 million to overhaul its stock trading platform, according to Mike Blum, a Goldman partner and chief technology officer of electronic trading.

The project, named Atlas after the Greek God, is meant to accelerate the shift Goldman has been making since realizing in 2014 it was falling behind in Wall Street’s equities technological arms race. Huge quant funds like Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma are among the most demanding of clients from a technology perspective, and competitors including Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan have been jockeying to serve these money managers.

Lux Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, has raised more than $1 billion across two new funds to back companies on “the cutting edge of science.” The firm raised $500 million for its sixth flagship early-stage fund and another $550 million for an opportunity fund focused on growth-stage investments. Limited partners include global foundations, university endowments, and tech billionaires.

Lux also announced a new hire: Deena Shakir, formerly of GV (Google Ventures), has joined as an investment partner.

To the regular person, Lux’s investments are considered moonshot. The firm has backed entrepreneurs that are working on everything from neurostimulation to nuclear energy to synthetic biology. During my last interview with co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe, I actually called one of his portfolio companies “freaking crazy.”

Cell freezing (cryopreservation)—which is essential in cell transfusions as well as basic biomedical research—can be dramatically improved using a new polymeric cryoprotectant, discovered at the University of Warwick, which reduces the amount of ‘anti-freeze’ needed to protect cells.

The ability to freeze and store cells for cell-based therapies and research has taken a step forward in the paper “A synthetically scalable poly(ampholyte) which dramatically Enhances Cellular Cryopreservation.” published by the University of Warwick’s Department of Chemistry and Medical School in the journal Biomacromolecules. The new polymer material protects the cells during freezing, leading to more cells being recovered and less solvent-based antifreeze being required.

Cryopreservation of cells is an essential process, enabling banking and distribution of cells, which would otherwise degrade. The current methods rely on adding traditional ‘antifreezes’ to the cells to protect them from the cold stress, but not all the cells are recovered and it is desirable to lower the amount of solvent added.

The financial-technology boom that turned China into the world’s biggest market for electronic payments is now changing how banks interact with companies that drive most of the nation’s economic growth. As MYbank and its peers crunch reams of new data from payment systems, social media and other sources, they’re growing more comfortable with smaller borrowers that they previously shunned in favor of state-owned giants.

Jack Ma’s online bank is leading a quiet revolution in the way China lends to small businesses, taking aim at a credit bottleneck that has held back Asia’s largest economy for decades.

Using real-time payments data and a risk-management system that analyzes more than 3,000 variables, Ma’s four-year-old MYbank has lent 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) to nearly 16 million small companies. Borrowers apply with a few taps on a smartphone and receive cash almost instantly if they’re approved. The whole process takes three minutes and involves zero human bankers. The default rate so far: about 1%.

Continue reading “Jack Ma’s $290 Billion Loan Machine Is Changing Chinese Banking” »

César Pelli, the architect whose firm designed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia and other of the world’s most recognizable buildings, died on Friday at his home in New Haven. He was 92.

The Argentine state news agency Telam confirmed the death, as did Anibal Bellomio, a senior associate architect at Pelli’s firm in Connecticut, with news organizations. Mr. Pelli had been dean of the Yale School of Architecture there, from 1977 to 1984.

Mr. Pelli’s many distinctive works include the World Financial Center in New York (now Brookfield Place), famous for its glass-roofed Winter Garden; the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, known for its bright blue-glass facade; and a terminal at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. He won hundreds of awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ 1995 gold medal.