Speed skating-German Pechstein becomes oldest female Winter Olympian at 49 Reuters
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT release technological research on a central bank digital currency
“The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today released the findings of their initial technological research into a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The published research describes a theoretical high-performance and resilient transaction processor for a CBDC by developing open-source research software, OpenCBDC. This collaborative effort, known as Project Hamilton, focuses on technological experimentation and does not aim to create a usable CBDC for the United States.
The research is separate from the Federal Reserve’s Board’s evaluation of the pros and cons of a CBDC. “It is critical to understand how emerging technologies could support a CBDC and what challenges remain,” said Boston Fed Executive Vice President and Interim Chief Operating Officer Jim Cunha. “This collaboration between MIT and our technologists has created a scalable CBDC research model that allows us to learn more about these technologies and the choices that should be considered when designing a CBDC.”
The whitepaper released today details findings from the first research phase. In this phase, researchers selected concepts from cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain technology to build and test platforms that would give policymakers substantial flexibility in the potential creation of a CBDC. The paper describes the following findings:
- The team met its goal of creating a core processing engine for a hypothetical general purpose CBDC and explored it in two architectures.
- The work produced one code base capable of handling 1.7 million transactions per second.
- The vast majority of transactions reached settlement finality in under two seconds within architectures that support secure, resilient performance and offer the significant technological flexibility required to adjust to future policy direction.
Researchers with MIT and the Boston Fed released the code for Project Hamilton, OpenCBDC, in github for contributions…”
- Medieval Theories of Obligationes by Mikko Yrjönsuuri.
Revised:
- Nicolas Malebranche by Tad Schmaltz.
- Kant’s Moral Philosophy by Robert Johnson and Adam Cureton.
- Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender by Mari Mikkola.
- Medieval Theories of Haecceity by Richard Cross.
- Civil Rights by Andrew Altman.
- Robert Alyngton by Alessandro Conti.
- Cicero: Political Philosophy by Malcolm Schofield, reviewed by Richard Kraut.
- The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body’ Problem by David Charles, reviewed by Brian C. Reece.
- Real Likenesses by Michael Morris, reviewed by Alberto Voltollini.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
- Confessions of Flesh: The History of Sexuality 4 by Michel Foucault, (ed. Frederic Gros; trans. Robert Hurley) is reviewed by Mark D. Jordan at Boston Review.
- Grief: A Philosophical Guide by Michael Cholbi is reviewed by Hamilton Cain at The Wall Street Journal.
- Reality +: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David Chalmers is reviewed by P.D. Smith at The Guardian.
Medical Humanities — Using Art To Build Better Doctors
A highly virulent variant of HIV-1 circulating in the Netherlands Science and New HIV strain found in the Netherlands: Highly infectious variant makes people ill twice as quick Daily Mail. GM, based on the Science paper:
You will see that it [the variant] increased in frequency in the 1990s — the plot is weirdly done, but it looks like it was the dominant strain for a while, then went down in the 2010s
Of course after the 1990s you had much more powerful ART combinations, so everything has been suppressed and thus a bit distorted in terms of relative frequencies
The paper is notable because it is an example of a highly lethal virus (doesn’t get worse than 100%) becoming even worse.
You will see that it [the variant] increased in frequency in the 1990s — the plot is weirdly done, but it looks like it was the dominant strain for a while, then went down in the 2010s
Of course after the 1990s you had much more powerful ART combinations, so everything has been suppressed and thus a bit distorted in terms of relative frequencies
The paper is notable because it is an example of a highly lethal virus (doesn’t get worse than 100%) becoming even worse.
