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Copyright: © Richard Jacobs
As the Blockchain space has grown, it's started to be noticed by national governments. There's more money at stake than ever before. More people involved. Is the Blockchain a state-level concern? More specifically, Should cryptocurrencies like BitCoin be regulated? For some yes; for others, no; and from this, the debates begin. For the Canadian government, the question is whether or not to introduce a general, 5% sales tax into the sale of BitCoin. And this is where the Blockchain Association of Canada (BAC) comes in. The BAC is a non-profit interfacing between government and heads of industry to showcase the potential of Blockchain technology, including—and especially—BitCoin. BAC Executive Director Kyle Kemper explains: "It's really important that companies can focus on building and know that they have some representation at the industry level." The BAC lobbies for the interests of Blockchain companies as a whole, pushing an industry-wide agenda with Canadian policymakers and officials. Hit play to hear more about Kyle Kemper and his work in the BAC. Subscribe, review, and if you can, donate some BitCoin to the cause. Every little bit helps us continue producing and sharing content with listeners like you.
A lot of the technologies that we use today were first imagined in Star Trek: cell phones, flash drives, tablets, sliding doors, voice-command for computers. It may seem odd now that these technologies are so ubiquitous, but in fact they once existed only in science fiction. What's next? Warp drives? Transporters? Ethan Siegel thinks yes. "I'll even challenge you to think of a technology that Star Trek envisioned that we don't have, and won't have," says Siegel. Siegel is a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Arizona. In his forthcoming book, Treknology, he explores the correlation between the technologies of sci and real life. Hit play to hear more about the imagined technology of the future. Subscribe, review, and if you can, donate a BitCoin or two. Every little bit helps.
The Human Genome Project took 13 years and cost 3 billion dollars. That was for just one human genome. Now the cost of DNA-sequencing has fallen dramatically. You can do human genetic testing for under a thousand dollars a genome today. And now next-gen DNA-sequencing technology has become economical enough to apply in different contexts. Take ClearLabs.com, a Silicon Valley tech company that's built a DNA-sequencing platform for food. It's expensive to mess up food, for a manufacturer. "The average food safety recall averages around ten million an incident, but can climb much higher," says ClearLabs co-founder Mahni Ghorashi. Besides the cost to business, which totals 55 million a year, there's also the cost to human life, with 3,000 deaths from food-bourne illnesses yearly. With the tech ClearLabs is developing, all this can be prevented. Listen to learn more about ClearLabs, and the application of DNA-sequencing to the food industry. Be sure to subscribe, review, and if you can, consider donating a few BitCoins to the cause.
300 events. 40,000 audience members. 500,000 social media followers. This is SciFest Dubai, co-founded by social entrepreneur and science journalist Raya Bidshahdri. "The goal is to really bring culture back to science; to make it fun and exciting through the arts," says Bidshahdri. The festival is a massive undertaking in itself, but it symptomizes a greater trend in education as an industry. Namely, it shows where education is failing. The rise of festivals like SciFest Dubai—along with alternative education companies and ed tech companies—demonstrates a reaction to the Industrial Age's factory model of public, standardized education. It's not working. Bidshadhri explains. "Currently, our education system is just not fit for purpose: student mental health is at an all-time low; student debt is at an all-time high; and traditional schools are dominated by uninspiring curricula, and an over-emphasis on short-term knowledge." Tune in to learn more about SciFest Dubai, and other disruptions in current education technology. Be sure to review and subscribe. And as always, if you can, consider donating a few BitCoins to the cause.
As a teenager, Robin Farmanfarmaian was mis-diagnosed with an auto-immune disease. All told, she ended up having forty-three hospitalizations, six surgeries, and three organs removed. For a mis-diagnosis. Seriously. Having gone through this, Farmanfarmaian decided to take her healthcare into her own hands. She fired her entire medical team, and took herself off the high-dose opiate she was on, leading to an experience equivalent to heroin withdrawal. "Because of that, I ended up getting diagnosed correctly… And literally after 13 years of massive surgeries, constant hospitalizations, I suddenly went into remission overnight." "Wow," I say. "I hacked my healthcare back together," says Farmanfarmaian. And now, Farmanfarmaian has learned how to hack the healthcare system even more extensively. "I've hacked my healthcare to the point where I now receive the vast majority of my healthcare within a two-block radius of my apartment, or inside of my home." Hacking the healthcare system is what Farmanfarmaian's new book is about: The Patient As CEO gets into the technologies that are empowering patients to be key decision-makers. To learn more, hit play. Subscribe, review, and if you can, donate a BitCoin or two. Every little bit helps.
How do you feed 7 billion people? How do you grow that much food? That's the question that confronts plant biologists. Over the past sixty years, our understanding of genetics has allowed us to increase yield of crops hugely. This, by taking an edible plant, and increasing the relative biomass of the part you can eat—a bigger grain of rice, for instance. Or a bigger bean from a soybean plant. But as the world population continues to grow, and change, researchers like Dr. Stephen Long are looking for more ways to grow more food, more quickly. Plants with high "photosynthetic efficiency" (PE) are plants that efficiently convert sun energy into plant biomass. Understanding and improving PE has been the object of Dr. Long's whole career. Most plants average a surprisingly low PE: 1%. Even high-PE plants only get up to 3%. Long sees an opportunity to up that number to 9% by editing the genes of plants Tune in to hear more about Dr. Long's research. Subscribe, review, and if you can, consider donating a few BitCoins to the cause.
Imagine this: you're out with friends, and you're contemplating another glass of wine despite the fact that you feel a bug coming on. Normally, you'd make a spontaneous decision based on how you think you feel both now and tomorrow. But what if you could be sure of it? In this Future Tech podcast, Genome Editing, we visit with Eleonore Pauwels, the Director of Biology Collectives with the Science and Technology Program at the Woodrow Wilson Scholar Institute in Washington, D.C. Pauwels delves deep into "the democratization of genomics and biology", the goal of which is for people to have 24/7 control of their health and even environment—imagine being able to determine that the restaurant food that you're about to eat is contaminated with salmonella. She also explains how such a decentralization will allow someone with a certain type of leukemia, for example, to monitor their cancer levels every 1-2 weeks from their home–convenient for someone living far from their doctor or with mobility issues. She goes on to disclose the various factors preventing this application from being widely available yet (even though the technology exists) before ending with several questions that will have you looking forward to the future. You'll also learn: How one company in China could be onto a breakthrough that will revolutionize how you read and interpret all aspects of not only your biological data but also that of thousands, perhaps millions, more How a digital avatar of yourself could monitor how you're evolving—in real time How the "dark side" of this power to control your health could also ruin it, as well as that of millions of people, unless you have a secret weapon—the "liquid biopsy"
Fundamentally, the role of the BlockChain's open ledger is to provide transparency. "Because of the nature of the BlockChain, you can look at all those transaction," says guest Donnie Gebert. For Gebert, though, there's more than one application of that transparency. Beyond cryptocurrency, what would the BlockChain look like if applied to policy-making? Imagine this… instead of voting on issues and representatives, you could essentially self-represent by crowd-funding government projects you supported, ideologically. "Instead of voting on an issue, you would decide where your money goes," says Gebert. "You financial contribution is your de facto vote, and you don't have to put your money into something you don't want to." Don't support the current war? Invest in federally owned parks instead. And that's just one scenario among many. For Gebert, the federal government is a racket. Who knows where all that money's going, and what it's being used for. There's a lack of transparency: no one knows how much federal services cost. "We've got a systemic problem," says Gebert. And for him, the BlockChain could be the way to fix it. Listen to learn more about Gebert's fascinating theory. And be sure to subscribe, review, and if you can, consider donating BitCoins to the cause.
People love plastic. Despite the advantages of digital currency, people still love their credit cards; secure and familiar in the old paradigm, the shift to digital currencies has been slow. And yet, it is inevitable that things will change. Manie Eagar sees this change happening soon. "There's a great convergence taking place," he says. "Very very exciting new paradigms are starting to emerge." "Tell me about this convergence," I say. For years, Manie Eagar has worked in the financial sector—specifically big banks, like Barclays. As he explains The Great Convergence, I can tell I'm talking to an expert, and a thought leader. "You may have heard of a project in Kenya called M-Pesa, where you can literally trade your airtime—or the minutes on your phone—for cash. And exchange it back again. So you literally have a little bank in your pocket." Tune in to hear the rest of Manie Eagar's take on the near future of digital currency. Subscribe, review, and if you can, consider donating a few BitCoins to the cause. Every little bit helps.
Statistics show that crime, especially violent crime, is hyper concentrated within certain times, places and people. Just look at these stats: 90-95 % of homicides take place in less than 2% of the street addresses in any area. Half of all crimes occur within the same 10 hours of every week. 5% or less of the population in any given area is responsible for 90% of crime that happens there. Is there a way to leverage this data to prevent crime? Robert Muggah thinks so. Listen in to hear him explain how technology is revolutionizing the world's policing systems. Here's a sampling of what you'll learn from the show: * How one technology reduced police response time in Brazil from 14 days after a crime had taken place to 20 minutes after it was reported * What hot spot policing is and why it's important * What the controversial "hotlist algorithm" is and the ethical questions it's raising *If you can't get enough of The Future Tech podcast, please subscribe, and throw some bitcoins our way.
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