world Archive

china Missiles and planes make China’s South China Sea Island bases an effective update of the Maginot Line

No Comments

April 21, 2018 | brian wang |

China has built seven new military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea. China will continue to improve and expand its dregger fleet and triple dredging capacity again over the next 15 years. China will spend $2 to …

history Ancient industrial civilizations would be very hard to detect

No Comments

April 20, 2018 | brian wang |

Centauri Dreams and The Atlantic have articles that consider if would we know if an early mammal built a civilization in the last 60 million years? Let’s assume a civilization lasting no more than 100,000 years, which turns out to …

population India should be most populous country in 2024

No Comments

April 20, 2018 | brian wang |

China’s population is 1.42 billion and India’s population is 1.35 billion. India is projected to surpass China’s population in 2024. In 2024, India and China are expected to have roughly a population of 1.44 billion each. After that, India’s population …

artificial intelligence The US used to advance so fast that countries could only copy what the US did 20 years before

No Comments

April 17, 2018 | brian wang |

Michael Wessel, chairman of the congressional U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, testified that 350,000 chinese students in the USA are “systematically stealing US technology”. Wessel said 20 percent of those working on advanced artificial intelligence at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence …

blockchain Digital Financial Services for the world’s poor can be accelerated with Blockchain

No Comments

April 13, 2018 | brian wang |

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have the Level One project to use Digital financial services (including blockchain for identification) for financial services for the world’s poor. Digital financial services (DFS) are among the quickest and most effective ways of …

energy Iranian currency crisis, possible sanctions, and political stability

No Comments

April 12, 2018 | brian wang |

Iran’s currency, the rial, lost some 20% against the US dollar in two weeks as Iranians rushed to hedge against depreciation of their assets. Some fear an imminent collapse of the nuclear deal and return of economic sanctions. On Monday …

artificial intelligence Foresight discussion on Artificial General Intelligence and Corporations

No Comments

April 8, 2018 | brian wang |

The Foresight Institute is currently having its mini-conference on Artificial General Intelligence and Corporations. Peter Scheyer has a paper written with a grant given by Paul Christiano on the legal aspects of AGI as corporations. This is the central aspect …

africa Population projections of 11.2 billion in 2100 imagines dropping birth rate in Africa but 16 billion more likely

No Comments

April 6, 2018 | brian wang |

Africa’s population growth rate has not declined since 1955. The annual population growth rate increased from 2.22% in 1955 to 2.85% in 1985. Then it went down to 2.47% in 2000 but then went back up to 2.60% in 2010-2015 …

cities High end smartphones later in 2018 should use Broadcom chip enables centimeter accurate GPS

No Comments

April 5, 2018 | brian wang |

GPS World tested a development kit systems with the Broadcom® BCM47755 chip. The chip can use the regular L1 GPS frequency as well as the more accurate L5 GPS frequency. The recently released Samsung Galaxy S9 did not have the …

energy Bahrain has its largest oil and gas find at 80 billion barrels of shale oil

No Comments

April 4, 2018 | brian wang |

Bahrain announced the discovery of 80 billion barrels of shale oil which is its largest oil and gas find ever. The tight oil was discovered in the offshore Khalij Al-Bahrain Basin, which spans some 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) …