There’s new evidence giving cash to the poor is more transformative than we thought

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When it comes to poverty alleviation in the developing world, cash transfer schemes have been at the center of a difficult debate. For years, donor agencies and governments were urged to integrate the poor into their economies by providing them with a basic amount of cash. Yet those programs have been dogged by controversies, with critics arguing they encourage dependency, negatively impact labor, and pit community members against each other.

Using evidence collected in eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa over a decade, a new paper dispels some of these common misperceptions about unconditional cash transfers in Africa. The research was conducted through the Transfer Project, a multi-partner initiative that includes the UN agencies for children and food, national governments besides national and international researchers. Unconditional cash transfers, or UCT, are different from universal basic income in that they are time-bound and are given to poor households who make spending decisions consistent with their needs.

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The future of cities

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Cities may occupy just 2 per cent of the earth’s land surface, but they are home to more than half of the world’s population and generate 80 per cent of all economic output. And their dominance is growing: by 2045, an extra 2 billion people will live in urban areas.

At Pictet, we think it will put pressure on infrastructure, resources and the environment.

Encouragingly, those responsible for planning and building the urban centres of the future are up to the challenge. Worldwide, authorities are working ever more closely with the private sector in an effort to make our cities safer, more sustainable and better connected.

That’s good news for the planet.

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Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) are now valued at a combined $1 trillion USD.

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Alibaba and Tencent alone now account for almost one-third of the MSCI China Index, fueling its 47 percent gain in 2017.

As of this past March, China had skyrocketed to 164 unicorns, worth a combined $628.4 billion USD. Roughly 50 percent are controlled or backed by BAT.

But BAT isn’t keeping ambitions local. Worldwide, BAT invests in over 150 companies, spanning the gamut from AI to biotech.

And with access to more internet users than the U.S. and all of Europe combined, BAT is fueled by the greatest treasure trove of data on the planet.

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How artificial intelligence could kill capitalism

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If you believe the hype, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to change the world in dramatic ways soon. Nay-sayers claim it will lead to, at best, rising unemployment and civil unrest, and at worst, the eradication of humanity. Advocates, on the other hand, are telling us to look forward to a future of leisure and creativity as robots take care of the drudgery and routine.

A third camp – probably the largest – are happy to admit that the forces of change which are at work are too complicated to predict and, for the moment, everything is up in the air. Previous large-scale changes to the way we work (past industrial revolutions) may have been disruptive in the short-term. However, in the long term what happened was a transfer of labor from countryside to cities, and no lasting downfall of society.

However, as author Calum Chace points out in his latest book ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities’ this time there’s one big difference. Previous industrial revolutions involved replacing human mechanical skills with tools and machinery. This time it’s our mental functions which are being replaced – particularly our ability to make predictions and decisions. This is something which has never happened before in human history, and no one exactly knows what to expect.

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A new way to think about solving the world’s biggest problems

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How to build global cooperation. It’s SIMPOL!

A while back I received a book in the mail titled “The SIMPOL Solution: A New Way to Think About Solving the World’s Biggest Problems” by John Bunzl and Nick Duffell, who were unknown to me. I get sent a lot of books with grandiose titles and don’t get around to reading most of them. But something about this one intrigued me, along with an endorsement by Noam Chomsky, who wrote “It’s ambitious and provocative: Can it work? Certainly worth a serious try”.

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Why the Crypto market will be trillions

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Public embarrassment is a horrible feeling. We’ve all experienced in one form or another. Predicting the future of technology is daunting enough but mix that with the future of money and markets – forget about it. The effort was to convey a whole worldview in less than ten minutes. Needless to say, it required a fair amount of sweating to be more than an embarrassment, which it undoubtedly will be considered by some as. The risk seems worth it though so let’s do this!

The below video and continued text go into why many of our trusted systems no longer function properly. I don’t know who built the pyramids but they certainly had their measurement system right for it to be possible and sustainable. The damage done by tech advancements are not yet visible in society on a large scale. We hear of declining sales in music, the press, deteriorating health care budgets, automated factories, AI in commerce and about self-driving cars. The heads of many old systems have already been cut, are bleeding heavily and lashing out aimlessly as the body of the octopus still moves. To make some sense of this, the topics include crypto, capitalism, communism, genetics, competition, media, competence, fairness, cultural revolutions and our shared decentralized future.

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A record number of folks age 85 and older are working. Here’s what they’re doing

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Bob Blocksom, 87, is interested in becoming a truck driver to help pay for medical expenses for his wife.

Seventy may be the new 60, and 80 may be the new 70, but 85 is still pretty old to work. Yet in some ways, this is the era of the very old worker in America.

Overall, 255,000 Americans 85 years old and over were working over the last 12 months. That’s 4.4% of Americans that age — up from 2.6% in 2006, before the recession. It’s the highest number on record.

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Ryan Van Wagenen discusses how cryptocurrency will play into digital currency going forward

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Ryan Van Wagenen has been with Global Private Equity for nearly a decade and is no stranger to the cryptocurrency movement. Since being promoted to Director within GPE in 2011, Van Wagenen has been covering the firm’s technology coverage and has seen a lot of growth in the sector. The question one must ask about crypto is what role it will play in digital currency going forward.

The crypto market that trades diverse virtual coins can look scary, exciting, as well as mysterious most especially to the casual observer. Bitcoin is the pioneer in cryptocurrency. It drastically surged in price and steeply gone down recently. Initial Coin Offerings or ICO for short in the meantime is emerging at a remarkable rate.

On one end, there are positive bulls and on the other extreme bears like Harvard Economist Kenneth Rogoff who is calling for the fall of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. Despite the fact that a number of monetary advisers all over the world remain dubious and doubtful, it is hard to take for granted the remarkable amount of money invested in this kind of currency. Two premier futurists, study and forecast technology trends regarding where they see virtual currency headed and why you must be aware of it.

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This is America’s hottest job

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Uber, Airbnb managers say ‘I’m hiring’ on LinkedIn profiles.

Job postings up 75 percent in past three years on Indeed.com.

Murray Webb had been a lackluster student more interested in sports than schoolwork while attending a small Virginia college. Then he transferred to Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta to pursue a master’s degree in applied statistics and landed four job offers upon graduation. Webb, 33, now earns $160,000 a year targeting health-care customers for hospitals and says he is approached weekly by companies and recruiters seeking data scientists.

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The rise of the rural creative class

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Richard Florida:  One of the most persistent myths in America today is that urban areas are innovative and rural areas are not. While it is overwhelmingly clear that innovation and creativity tend to cluster in a small number of cities and metropolitan areas, it’s a big mistake to think that they somehow skip over rural America.

A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS). This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas.

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Bitcoin sees Wall Street warm to trading virtual currency

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SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are warming up to Bitcoin, a virtual currency that for nearly a decade has been consigned to the unregulated fringes of the financial world.

The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin, according to emails and documents viewed by The New York Times and four people briefed on the effort who asked to remain anonymous because the plans were still confidential.

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