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The administration of Simmons University has said that it is planning to close the school’s Department of Philosophy and end its major program.
Philosophy is one of several departments targeted.
“No decisions are final yet,” reports The Boston Globe, adding that “a final plan will be presented to the university’s board in October after university leaders meet with all departments.”
The university, which is women-only at the undergraduate level (but not for its graduate degrees), is facing financial constraints owed partly to what seems like a very bad deal it made with the online learning company 2U, according to which the company gets 50 to 62 percent of the tuition paid by each student in its online programs. According to the Globe, more than half of Simmons’ graduate students are in such online programs. The contract with 2U was made in 2013 and renewed (!) in 2018 for another 21 years.
Faculty were apparently instructed by the administration not to talk to the press. One professor, speaking anonymously to the Globe, says: “Cutting out the humanities and social sciences is like cutting out the heart and then seeing if the body will still walk.”
The current president of Simmons, Lynn Perry Wooten, has an academic specialization in “crisis leadership.”
The post Philosophy Threatened at Simmons University first appeared on Daily Nous.
Graduates now owe an average amount of £45,000, Student Loans Company figures have revealed
Outstanding student loans in England have surpassed £200bn for the first time – 20 years earlier than previous government forecasts, as the number of students at universities continues to outstrip expectations.
The Student Loans Company (SLC), which administers tuition and maintenance loans in England, said that the balance of government-backed loans reached £205bn in the current academic year, including £19bn worth of new loans to undergraduates. The figure has doubled in just six years. It reached more than £100bn in 2016-17 after the coalition government decided to increase undergraduate tuition fees from £3,600 a year to £9,000 in 2012.
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Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.
Becoming a financial advisor can be an excellent choice for anyone with a firm grasp of money, math, and business knowledge. It is a role that can offer incredible flexibility and an excellent income, but it is crucial to understand how to make this role a long-lasting career choice. Growth is vital for any business, as is being proactive and protective.
You’ll need to find ways to expand your reach, offering services that give the maximum benefits to your clients and ensuring that you are covered against possible mishaps. There are many facets to growing and securing a business, particularly a one-person operation. Keep reading to find out more.
Offer The Best In Customer Care
Any business, regardless of size or scope, must offer quality customer service if they want to make a name for themselves. This is particularly important for financial advisors, as you will work closely with individual clients. Your customer service skills will be truly put to the test, so you should ensure they are up to an excellent standard. It may help to take some training in customer service, to better understand the methods and techniques for ensuring customers have a great experience. You should also ensure that you avoid taking on too many clients at once, as you may not have enough time and energy to give them all the experience they deserve.
Find Your Niche
A niche can be an excellent way for any business to narrow its focus and find an untapped client base. If you try to offer too much to your customers, you run the risk of providing a lower quality service overall. It is best to look for a niche with good demand, without too many competitors to deal with in the area you’ll be serving. You should also choose a niche in an area that interests you and that you have the best background and understanding of.
Encourage Word Of Mouth Recommendation
Word of mouth recommendations can be the best way to help your business grow. Most clients will likely know someone in need of financial advice, and recommendations from people we know are often more valued and trusted. You could consider offering incentives like discounts or free trials to people who recommend clients by word of mouth. Likewise, you can further entice referrals by offering the same incentives to get them through the door.
Take Out Professional Liability Insurance
As a financial advisor, the advice you provide clients can have real and lasting implications for their lives and financial wellbeing. Naturally, you will be aiming not to make any mistakes in the first place, but it can still be beneficial to protect yourself, just in case. Professional liability insurance can protect your business in the case of error, giving you and your clients peace of mind. Look for comprehensive, customizable insurance that will best benefit your business, like the incredible options from The Hartford.
Partner With Other Finance And Business Experts
Your clients will be coming to you for expert advice, but it is still essential to know your limitations. Clients may need help you can’t provide, so partnering with other professional experts can be invaluable. This can be a mutually beneficial arrangement, with you and several experts across different fields partnering to recommend the others to their clients as needed.
Brand Yourself Effectively
Branding your business is crucial to help you gain recognition and trust. It can also be an excellent way to extend your reach to potential customers. Your branding should be consistent across all areas, from the color scheme of your office to your business website to your social media profiles. The first things you should consider are your logo and your name. Both will need to be eye-catching and memorable, ideally giving customers an idea of the service you provide.
Maximize Efficiency In All Areas
Efficiency is crucial for running a financial advising business profitably. Many small companies include processes that are cumbersome or unfit for purpose. It can be hard to know how to streamline and cut away the fat from your business processes, so regular evaluation may be necessary. You might also need to find ways to maximize efficiency and free up your time for higher-value tasks. Things like automation can be invaluable for small businesses, as it dramatically reduces the time taken to complete simple, repetitive tasks.
Final Thoughts
As a financial advisor, you will be trusted by your clients to offer the right advice at all times. Your clients could be from a range of backgrounds, so it is crucial to have the right knowledge and training to provide the best advice at all times. In addition, you’ll need to show that you can protect your clients’ interests in ways that no other advisor can. It is crucial to provide the best possible service if you want to grow your business. You’ll also need to maximize marketing and customer feedback to help build a solid and lasting foundation for your business.
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OpenAI was forced to take its wildly-popular ChatGPT bot offline for emergency maintenance on Tuesday after a user was able to exploit a bug in the system to recall the titles from other users' chat histories. On Friday the company announced its initial findings from the incident.
In Tuesday's incident, users posted screenshots on Reddit that their ChatGPT sidebars featured previous chat histories from other users. Only the title of the conversation, not the text itself, were visible. OpenAI, in response, took the bot offline for nearly 10 hours to investigate. The results of that investigation revealed a deeper security issue: the chat history bug may have also potentially revealed personal data from 1.2 percent of ChatGPT Plus subscribers (a $20/month enhanced access package).
"In the hours before we took ChatGPT offline on Monday, it was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Full credit card numbers were not exposed at any time," the OpenAI team wrote Friday. The issue has since been patched for the faulty library which OpenAI identified as the Redis client open-source library, redis-py.
The company has downplayed the likelihood of such a breach occurring, arguing that either of the following criteria would have to be met to place a user at risk:
- Open a subscription confirmation email sent on Monday, March 20, between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time. Due to the bug, some subscription confirmation emails generated during that window were sent to the wrong users. These emails contained the last four digits of another user’s credit card number, but full credit card numbers did not appear. It’s possible that a small number of subscription confirmation emails might have been incorrectly addressed prior to March 20, although we have not confirmed any instances of this.
- In ChatGPT, click on “My account,” then “Manage my subscription” between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, March 20. During this window, another active ChatGPT Plus user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date might have been visible. It’s possible that this also could have occurred prior to March 20, although we have not confirmed any instances of this.
The company has taken additional steps to prevent this from happening again in the future including adding redundant checks to library calls, "programatically examined our logs to make sure that all messages are only available to the correct user," and "improved logging to identify when this is happening and fully confirm it has stopped." The company says that it has also reached out to alert affected users of the issue.
This news follows a costly public faux pas committed by Google's rival Bard AI in February when it incorrectly assured Twitter that the JWST was the first telescope to image an exoplanet, as well as revelations that CNET had surreptitiously used generative AI to write financial explainer posts (a week before laying off a sizable chunk of its editorial department). Whether OpenAI will suffer the same market-based repercussions as its competitors remains to be seen.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/openai-says-a-bug-leaked-sensitive-chatgpt-user-data-165439848.html?src=rssMicrosoft Built GPT-4 Into Office
SUQIAN, CHINA - MARCH 17, 2023 - A citizen uses his mobile phone to check GPT-4 embedded Office software in Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China, March 17, 2023. Microsoft is reportedly building GPT-4 into Office. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Written by Hazem Zohny, University of Oxford
Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die?
These questions sound like they have nothing to do with a government budget. These annual events are, after all, conveyed as an endeavour in accounting. They are a chance to show anticipated tax revenues and propose public spending. We are told the name of the game is “fiscal responsibility” and the goal is stimulating “economic growth”. Never do we talk of budgets in terms of sacrificing some lives to save others.
In reality, though, government budgets are a lot like those trains, in philosophical terms. Whether explicitly intended or not, some of us take those trains to better or similar destinations, and some of us will be left strapped to the tracks. That is because the real business of budgets is in distributing death and life. They are exercises in allocating misery and happiness.
Take the austerity policies introduced by the UK government in 2010 and the following years. Studies put the mortality cost of spending cuts between 2010 and 2014 at approximately 150,000 excess deaths. A more recent study suggested that 335,000 excess deaths could be attributed to the austerity of the 2010s.
These are contestable figures – and they cannot draw a direct causal relationship between specific austerity policies and number of deaths. But even if it is impossible to assign an accurate death toll to austerity, it should come as no surprise that reducing welfare spending will reduce, well, welfare. The same is true in reverse. An England-focused study suggests that by increasing healthcare expenditure by 1%, around 300,000 deaths could have been avoided in the wake of 2010 cuts.
This has a sobering implication: knowingly or not, a decision is effectively made to let 300,000 die if healthcare expenditure isn’t increased by 1%.
Similarly, there is a clear link between fuel poverty and premature deaths. It is difficult to derive a precise figure, but it’s almost certain that a government decision not to further subsidise energy bills will trigger otherwise preventable deaths.
There is a truism in all this: resources are limited, and decisions inevitably come with trade-offs and opportunity costs.
For instance, austerity was a response to a severe economic downturn. Recessions reduce how much revenue a government has to spend on services, which leads to the loss of lives and livelihoods. Even for those who don’t suffer in the extreme, life is generally less liveable for many of us. For all we know, the global financial crisis would have (eventually) led to tens of thousands of additional deaths no matter how the government responded.
Budgets are of course hugely complicated, but this is all to show that while it is true that they involve accounting, the morally relevant currency of what is being accounted for is ultimately our wellbeing, including its loss through death.
For instance, assume it is indeed true that 300,000 deaths could be prevented by a 1% increase in healthcare spending. Assume also that using these funds in some other way (such as on education and home insulation) would in the long term prevent far more deaths, or, significantly improve the quality of several million lives.
Suddenly, talk of fiscal responsibility seems to miss the point. We are faced with a much more philosophically loaded debate. It becomes pertinent to say, hang on, just how much extra wellbeing for some do you think can make up for the deaths of 300,000 others? And how sure are you about this?
It starts to become obvious how value judgments infuse and implicitly guide these fiscal decisions that, unwittingly or not, involve weighing up certain lives against others, present lives against future ones, and proxies for wellbeing (such as job creation) against others (such as preventing premature deaths).
The risk of the language of “boosting the economy” is that it gives these monumental decisions in ethics a veneer of being value-free budgetary exercises in “following the evidence”, stopping us from seeing how the economic sausage is actually made.
Of course, evidence-based policy is better than unevidenced policy. What is missing is values-transparent policy, and that starts with the philosophical task of laying bare the precise value judgments that go into constructing what we’re told are “good economic outcomes”.
While the Office of Budget Responsibility independently assesses the economic credibility of the budget, no corresponding institution works to uncover its ethical assumptions and value trade-offs. Welfare economists and ethicists need to forge a new relationship that initiates and guides the uncomfortable public conversation of how government budgets inevitably trade-off lives and livelihoods, now and against the future.
Equally crucial, by instituting norms that encourage uncovering all the value-judgments smuggled beneath the guise of sanitised fiscal and economic talk, we might reduce the chances of opportunistic politicians gambling with millions of livelihoods by redirecting the train in the name of one ideology or another.
Hazem Zohny, Research Fellow in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
“The problem is that the whole process has been secret,” said John Ruff, left, a former English professor opposed to Valparaiso’s plan to sell paintings. Richard Brauer, right, a former art professor whom the school’s museum is named after, said, “It really does outrage me.”
US regulators have announced that they're taking action to "fully" protect all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), CNBC has reported. The institution is home to a large number of startups and established companies like Roku and Etsy, which will have full access to their funds as of today. At the same time, officials said there will be "no bailouts" and that shareholders and unsecured creditors won't be protected.
"Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system," the FDIC, Treasury Department and Federal Reserve said in a joint statement. "Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer."
In addition, HSBC UK agreed to purchase Silicon Valley Bank's UK division for a symbolic £1 to prevent the company's collapse in that region, the UK government announced. As in the US, both deposits and public funds are protected. "Today the government and the Bank of England have facilitated a private sale of Silicon Valley Bank UK," the press release states. "This ensures customer deposits are protected and can bank as normal, with no taxpayer support."
The FDIC took over SVB on Friday following the largest US bank collapse in nearly 15 years. There were concerns that numerous tech startups and companies wouldn't be able to make their payrolls, and Etsy said yesterday that payments to merchants may be delayed. On Friday, Roku announced that it could lose as much as 26 percent of its cash reserves, or more than $487 million, due to the collapse.
On top of SVB, Signature Banks was closed by regulators on the weekend. It's one of the largest banks used by cryptocurrency companies, as the Coinbase exchange, for one, had $240 million in deposits at the bank. In the same joint statement, federal regulators said that "all depositors of this institution will [also] be made whole."
Silvergate, another institution popular with crypto exchanges (and known for purchasing Diem, the ambitious crypto project funded by Facebook), collapsed on March 8th. That marks a run of three key banks with ties to technology firms closing in the space of a week.
To reassure depositors no doubt nervous over these events, the government said that it will make additional funding available to other eligible institutions. The new program will allow banks to put up treasuries and other safe government securities as collateral in return for central bank loans of up to one year. It's designed to fix a key issue that led to SVB’s failure: unrealized losses on government securities caused by rapidly rising interest rates.
"The U.S. banking system remains resilient and on a solid foundation, in large part due to reforms that were made after the financial crisis that ensured better safeguards for the banking industry," the joint statement reads. "Those reforms combined with today's actions demonstrate our commitment to take the necessary steps to ensure that depositors' savings remain safe."
Update March 13, 2023 at 4:18 AM ET: The post has been updated to include news that HSBC UK has purchased Silicon Valley Bank UK and that UK deposits and taxpayers will be fully protected.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/us-regulators-will-protect-all-deposits-at-silicon-valley-bank-045837677.html?src=rssGLOBAL-MARKETS/BANKS
A man puts a sign on the door of the Silicon Valley Bank as an onlooker watches at the bank’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, U.S. March 10, 2023. REUTERS/Nathan Frandino
Cerebral, a telehealth startup that gained popularity during the early days of the pandemic, disclosed this week that it shared the personal data of more than 3.1 million US patients with social media companies and advertisers, including Google, Meta and TikTok. As first reported by TechCrunch (via The Verge), a recently uploaded notice on Cerebral’s website reveals the company had been using “pixels,” tracking scripts companies like Meta offer to third-party developers for advertising purposes, to collect user data since it began operating in October 2019.
Following a recent review of its software, Cerebral “determined that it had disclosed certain information that may be regulated as protected health information under [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act].” Among the data Cerebral shared are names, phone numbers, birth dates and insurance information. In some instances, the company may have also exposed information it collected through the mental health self-assessment patients completed to schedule counseling appointments and access other services. According to Cerebral, it did not disclose social security numbers, bank information or credit card numbers.
After learning of the oversight, Cerebral says it “disabled, reconfigured, and/or removed” the tracking pixels that caused the data exposure. “In addition, we have enhanced our information security practices and technology vetting processes to further mitigate the risk of sharing such information in the future.” The US Department of Health and Human Services is investigating Cerebral. News of the data exposure comes after the Federal Trade Commission fined discount drug app GoodRx $1.5 million for sharing patient information with Meta and Google. Earlier this month, the agency announced a $7.8 million settlement with online counseling company BetterHelp and said it was seeking to ban the company from sharing health data for ad targeting.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mental-health-startup-cerebral-shared-private-patient-data-with-google-meta-and-tiktok-223806251.html?src=rssCerebral
Screenshot from Cerebral's website.
Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Etsy is warning sellers it may take longer than usual for the company to process some payments. “We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with your deposit that was scheduled for today,” Etsy told affected merchants on Friday in an email the company shared with NBC News. “Please know that our teams are working hard to resolve this issue and send you your funds as quickly as possible.”
An Etsy spokesperson attributed the delay to “the unexpected collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” noting the company used the bank to facilitate payments to some merchants. They added Etsy is working with other payment partners to facilitate deposits. The company expects to pay affected sellers “within the next several business days.” More than 7.5 million merchants use Etsy to sell their wares online.
Federal regulators took over SVB on Friday amid the largest bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. With its close ties to Silicon Valley, SVB’s failure has created knock-on effects throughout the tech industry. On Friday, Roku said it could lose as much as 26 percent of its cash reserves, or more than $487 million, due to the collapse. One day later, the value of USD Coin, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, fell to a low of $0.87 after Circle, the firm that manages the currency, disclosed it had $3.3 billion stuck at the bank. While USD Coin’s value has mostly recovered, the news nonetheless sparked fears of a possible financial contagion within the cryptocurrency industry.
More importantly, there are many people whose next paycheck won’t come on time. That includes employees at early-stage startups and small business owners who depend on Etsy for their livelihood. One seller, Owen McKinney, told NBC News the deposit delay could have a “catastrophic" effect on his business.
What comes next is hard to say. On Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Janey Yellen told CBS’s Face the Nation the federal government would not bail out SVB and would instead focus on assisting depositors. “Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out… and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again,” Yellen said. “But we are concerned about depositors and are focused on trying to meet their needs.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/etsy-warns-of-merchant-payment-processing-delay-due-to-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-165056872.html?src=rssETSY-IPO/
A sign advertising the online seller Etsy Inc. is seen outside the Nasdaq market site in Times Square following Etsy's initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq in New York April 16, 2015. Etsy's IPO has been priced at $16 per share, a market source told Reuters, valuing the online seller of handmade goods and craft supplies at about $1.78 billion. REUTERS/Mike Segar
Science is the reason you aren't reading this by firelight nestled cozily under a rock somewhere however, its practice significantly predates its formalization by Galileo in the 16th century. Among its earliest adherents — even before pioneering efforts of Aristotle — was Animaxander, the Greek philosopher credited with first arguing that the Earth exists within a void, not atop a giant turtle shell. His other revolutionary notions include, "hey, maybe animals evolved from other, earlier animals?" and "the gods aren't angry, that's just thunder."
While Animaxander isn't often mentioned alongside the later greats of Greek philosophy, his influence on the scientific method cannot be denied, argues NYT bestselling author, Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, Animaxander and the Birth of Science, out now from Riverhead Books. In in, Rovelli celebrates Animaxander, not necessarily for his scientific acumen but for his radical scientific thinking — specifically his talent for shrugging off conventional notion to glimpse at the physical underpinnings of the natural world. In the excerpt below, Rovelli, whom astute readers will remember from last year's There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness, illustrates how even the works of intellectual titans like Einstein and Heisenberg can and inevitably are found lacking in their explanation of natural phenomena — in just the same way that those works themselves decimated the collective understanding of cosmological law under 19th century Newtonian physics.
Excerpted from Animaxander and the Birth of Science. Copyright © 2023 by Carlo Rovelli. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Did science begin with Anaximander? The question is poorly put. It depends on what we mean by “science,” a generic term. Depending on whether we give it a broad or a narrow meaning, we can say that science began with Newton, Galileo, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, or Anaximander — or with an astronomer in Babylonia whose name we don’t know, or with the first primate who managed to teach her offspring what she herself had learned, or with Eve, as in the quotation that opens this chapter. Historically or symbolically, each of these moments marks humanity’s acquisition of a new, crucial tool for the growth of knowledge.
If by “science” we mean research based on systematic experimental activities, then it began more or less with Galileo. If we mean a collection of quantitative observations and theoretical/mathematical models that can order these observations and give accurate predictions, then the astronomy of Hipparchus and Ptolemy is science. Emphasizing one particular starting point, as I have done with Anaximander, means focusing on a specific aspect of the way we acquire knowledge. It means highlighting specific characteristics of science and thus, implicitly, reflecting on what science is, what the search for knowledge is, and how it works.
What is scientific thinking? What are its limits? What is the reason for its strength? What does it really teach us? What are its characteristics, and how does it compare with other forms of knowledge?
These questions shaped my reflections on Anaximander in preceding chapters. In discussing how Anaximander paved the way for scientific knowledge, I highlighted a certain number of aspects of science itself. Now I shall make these observations more explicit.
A lively debate on the nature of scientific knowledge has taken place during the last century. The work of philosophers of science such as Carnap and Bachelard, Popper and Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Quine, van Fraassen, and many others has transformed our understanding of what constitutes scientific activity. To some extent, this reflection was a reaction to a shock: the unexpected collapse of Newtonian physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, a common joke was that Isaac New‐ ton had been not only one of the most intelligent men in human history, but also the luckiest, because there is only one collection of fundamental natural laws, and Newton had had the good fortune to be the one to discover them. Today we can’t help but smile at this notion, because it reveals a serious epistemological error on the part of nineteenth-century thinkers: the idea that good scientific theories are definitive and remain valid until the end of time.
The twentieth century swept away this facile illusion. Highly accurate experiments showed that Newton’s theory is mistaken in a very precise sense. The planet Mercury, for example, does not move following Newtonian laws. Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues discovered a new collection of fundamental laws — general relativity and quantum mechanics — that replace Newton’s laws and work well in the domains where Newton’s theory breaks down, such as accounting for Mercury’s orbit, or the behavior of electrons in atoms.
Once burned, twice shy: few people today believe that we now possess definitive scientific laws. It is generally expected that one day Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s laws will show their limits as well, and will be replaced by better ones. In fact, the limits of Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are already emerging. There are subtle incompatibilities between Einstein’s theory and Heisenberg’s, which make it unreasonable to suppose that we have identified the final, definitive laws of the universe. As a result, research goes on. My own work in theoretical physics is precisely the search for laws that might combine these two theories.
Now, the essential point here is that Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are not minor corrections to Newton’s. The differences go far beyond an adjusted equation, a tidying up, the addition or replacement of a formula. Rather, these new theories constitute a radical rethinking of the world. Newton saw the world as a vast empty space where “particles” move about like pebbles. Einstein understands that such supposedly empty space is in fact a kind of storm-tossed sea. It can fold in on itself, curve, and even (in the case of black holes) shatter. No one had seriously contemplated this possibility before. For his part, Heisenberg understands that Newton’s “particles” are not particles at all but bizarre hybrids of particles and waves that run over Faraday lines’ webs. In short, over the course of the twentieth century, the world was found to be profoundly different from the way Newton imagined it.
On the one hand, these discoveries confirmed the cognitive strength of science. Like Newton’s and Maxwell’s theories in their day, these discoveries led quickly to an astonishing development of new technologies that once again radically changed human society. The insights of Faraday and Maxwell brought about radio and communications technology. Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s led to computers, information technology, atomic energy, and countless other technological advances that have changed our lives.
But on the other hand, the realization that Newton’s picture of the world was false is disconcerting. After Newton, we thought we had understood once and for all the basic structure and functioning of the physical world. We were wrong. The theories of Einstein and Heisenberg themselves will one day likely be proved false. Does this mean that the understanding of the world offered by science cannot be trusted, not even for our best science? What, then, do we really know about the world? What does science teach us about the world?
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-anaximander-carlo-rovelli-riverhead-books-143052774.html?src=rssNewton's cradle, illustration
Illustration of a Newton's cradle.
The abrupt collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has affected the value of the world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency, increasing fears of a possible ripple effect among Web3 companies. On Saturday morning, USD Coin fell to a record low of $0.87 after Circle, the company that manages the stablecoin, disclosed that $3.3 billion of the approximately $10 billion cash reserves backing USDC was held by SVB.
As The Guardian notes, the drop is unprecedented. As a stablecoin, the value of USDC is supposed to remain stable thanks to its peg to the US dollar. According to data from CoinGecko, USDC’s previous all-time low was about $0.97 in 2018. More recently, the currency fell to $0.99 following the collapse of Three Arrows Capital. As of the writing of this article, USDC is valued at approximately $0.95 cents.
previously people were arguing that USDC had only lost its peg on the less deep exchanges (kraken, gemini)
— Molly White @ SXSW (@molly0xFFF) March 11, 2023
down just about everywhere now. going to be a rough weekend, i think. pic.twitter.com/4BCW6Lael9
Web3 is Going Just Great creator Molly White suggests the effect from a sustained USDC drop would be “enormous.” A handful of other stablecoins, including FRAX and DAI, use USDC as collateral. On Friday, Circle said it would “continue to operate normally” while it waits for more information on what will happen to SVB’s clients. "As of Thursday, we had initiated transfers of these funds to other banking partners. Though these transfers had not yet been settled as of close of business Friday, we remain confident in the FDIC’s management of the SVB situation and stand ready to receive these funds," Circle said on Saturday, adding $5.4 billion of its cash assets are held by BNY Mellon, "one of the largest and most stable financial institutions in the world."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/usdc-stablecoin-breaks-dollar-peg-following-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-232052571.html?src=rssGLOBAL-MARKETS/BANKS
A view of the Park Avenue location of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), in New York City, U.S., March 10, 2023. REUTERS/David 'Dee' Delgado
The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has put more than a quarter of Roku’s cash at risk. The streaming company had $487 million, representing 26 percent of its cash, in Silicon Valley Bank, the company disclosed in an SEC filing Friday.
The future of those funds is now uncertain as federal regulators have taken over the financial institution amid the second-largest bank collapse in United States history. “The Company’s deposits with SVB are largely uninsured,” Roku wrote in its filing. “At this time, the Company does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB.”
In a statement on Friday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said that it will pay “uninsured depositors an advance dividend within the next week” and that “uninsured depositors will receive a receivership certificate for the remaining amount of their uninsured funds.” But there’s still a lot of uncertainty about how long that process will take to play out, and how much of their uninsured funds companies will ultimately be able to recover.
However, Roku’s situation is, at least for now, a lot less dire than many of the smaller startups that relied on Silicon Valley Bank, some of which are now unable to pay their bills or their employees.
In its SEC filing, the company noted that it has more than a billion dollars in cash at multiple other banks. “As stated in our 8-K, we expect that Roku’s ability to operate and meet its contractual obligations will not be impacted and we continue to have access to $1.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents which are distributed across multiple, large financial institutions,” a Roku spokesperson said in a statement to Engadget.
While Silicon Valley Bank was previously a little-known institution, it was known for its close relationships with startup founders, who made up much of its clientele. But, as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine explains, the bank’s reliance on fixed-rate assets, also made it uniquely exposed to the conditions that ultimately led to a run on the bank Thursday after prominent venture capitalists urged founders to move their money out of the institution.
Roku is not the only major public tech company now facing losses as a result of the bank’s collapse. Roblox had about 5 percent of its $3 billion in cash, at Silicon Valley Bank, the company told the SEC. “Regardless of the ultimate outcome and the timing, this situation will have no impact on the day to day operations of the Company,” it wrote in a filing. Video service Vimeo also disclosed that it had “less than $250,000” with the bank.
Updated to clarify that Roblox had 5 percent of its $3 billion in cash balances at SVB.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/roku-says-it-could-lose-25-percent-of-its-cash-after-silicon-valley-bank-fails-000615481.html?src=rssSilicon Valley Bank Shut Down By Regulators
SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 10: Employees stand outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters on March 10, 2023 in Santa Clara, California. Silicon Valley Bank was shut down on Friday morning by California regulators and was put in control of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Prior to being shut down by regulators, shares of SVB were halted Friday morning after falling more than 60% in premarket trading following a 60% declined on Thursday when the bank sold off a portfolio of US Treasuries and $1.75 billion in shares to cover declining customer deposits. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Enlarge / Signage outside Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California, US, on Thursday, March 9, 2023. SVB Financial Group bonds are plunging alongside its shares after the company moved to shore up capital after losses on its securities portfolio and a slowdown in funding. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Silicon Valley Bank was shuttered by US regulators on Friday after a rush of deposit outflows and a failed effort to raise new capital called into question the future of the tech-focused lender.
With about $209 billion in assets, SVB has become the second-largest bank failure in US history after the 2008 collapse of Washington Mutual, and marks a swift fall from grace for a lender that was valued at more than $44 billion less than 18 months ago.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the US regulator that guarantees bank deposits of up to $250,000, said it was closing SVB and that insured depositors would have access to their funds by Monday.
Here, as promised, is a podcast we made at the Center for Ethics and Education based on interviews we did with Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, authors of the excellent book Can College Level The Playing Field, which is an indispensable read if you want to understand the relationship between inequality and higher education, and inequality within higher education, in the US. (For CT discussion of a very poor quality review of the book, see here). Also I unabashedly recommend the whole podcast series!
Researchers understand the structure of brains and have mapped them out in some detail, but they still don't know exactly how they process data — for that, a detailed "circuit map" of the brain is needed.
Now, scientists have created just such a map for the most advanced creature yet: a fruit fly larva. Called a connectome, it diagrams the insect's 3016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, Neuroscience News has reported. The map will help researchers study better understand how the brains of both insects and animals control behavior, learning, body functions and more. The work may even inspired improved AI networks.
"Up until this point, we’ve not seen the structure of any brain except of the roundworm C. elegans, the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons," said professor Marta Zlatic from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. "This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we’re guessing on the way computations are implemented. But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works."
To build the map, the team scanned thousands of slices from the larva's brain with an electron microscope, then integrated those into a detailed map, annotating all the neural connections. From there, they used computational tools to identify likely information flow pathways and types of "circuit motifs" in the insect's brain. They even noticed that some structural features closely resembled state-of-the-art deep learning architecture.
Scientists have made detailed maps of the brain of a fruit fly, which is far more complex than a fruit fly larva. However, these maps don't include all the detailed connections required to have a true circuit map of their brains.
As a next step, the team will investigate the structures used for behavioural functions like learning and decision making, and examine connectome activity while the insect does specific activities. And while a fruit fly larva is a simple insect, the researchers expect to see similar patterns in other animals. "In the same way that genes are conserved across the animal kingdom, I think that the basic circuit motifs that implement these fundamental behaviours will also be conserved," said Zlatic.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scientists-create-the-most-complex-map-yet-of-an-insect-brains-wiring-085600210.html?src=rssNeuron system
System of neurons with glowing connections on black background
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