Google Inches Closer to the Metavearth
by Mike Boland | AR Insider
Google’s annual Search On event was held yesterday, including several updates to search and Maps. Altogether, several moves advance Google’s ambitions to build an Internet of places. Also what we call the metavearth, this is all about adding digital dimension to the real world.
These ambitions stem from Google’s history of creating immense value indexing the web over the past 20+ years. Now it sees ample opportunity to do something similar by indexing the physical world. And part of that playbook is to build a corresponding knowledge graph, just like the web.
Initiatives under this tent so far include Google Lens and Live View which let users identify objects and navigate using AR overlays. Standing behind these front-end products are Google’s unique data that its spent years building, such as Street View and indexed image libraries.
Altogether, Google is becoming more visual, which aligns with the proclivities of the camera-forward Gen-Z. This is all about future-proofing, given that the generation continues to gain purchasing power as it cycles into the adult consumer population. Google has its eye on that prize.
How Caesars Entertainment Drastically Augmented its ESG Impact
by BEA BOCCALANDRO | SustainableBrands.com
‘Job purposing’ is making meaningful contributions to others or societal causes as part of regular work. Caesars showed that helping its sales and conventions departments job purpose was a promising pathway to dramatically augmenting its ESG work — and, thus, its positive societal impact.
What do the sales, procurement and ESG (environment, social, governance) functions have in common? Accelerating social justice is unlikely anybody’s answer, yet Caesars Entertainment has earned the right to give it. (Full disclosure: I’m an ESG advisor to the company’s leadership.)
The 2018 Caesars corporate social responsibility (CSR) team, led by Gwen Migita, saw the need for convening a cohort of corporate brands and key nonprofits to accelerate progress on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across corporate America. The CSR department, however, did not have the budget for such a pricey event. The team’s stroke of genius was realizing that the meetings and conventions department already held events that might be redesigned to meet the identified DEI need — specifically, the department hosted representatives from Caesars’ key business partners at a Caesars resort every year to showcase the company’s meetings and conventions prowess, relationship-building and sales. The question the CSR team put to their meetings and conventions colleagues was, “What if your sales events included the social-purpose objective of accelerating DEI in corporate America?”
What Proof of Stake Means for the Future of Blockchain Security
by Joseph Chukwube| Infosecurity Magazine
Proof of stake is a consensus algorithm originally invented by Sunny King and Scott Nadal in 2012. The idea for proof-of-stake (PoS) began as a way to create an alternative to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm, which requires miners to solve cryptographic puzzles to verify transactions on the blockchain. PoS was supposed to be an energy-efficient method of accomplishing the same thing.
In the same year, Peercoin became the first cryptocurrency to adopt proof-of-stake as its main consensus algorithm when it switched from Bitcoin’s SHA256 hash function used in POW algorithms (e.g., Bitcoin) and instead used a hybrid solution called Secure Hash Algorithm 256v1 with chained hashing (SHA-256c).
How Does Proof of Stake Work?
Proof of stake is a consensus algorithm that relies on coin age and weight to achieve consensus. Coin age is the total amount of time that the coins have been held by one or more owners, while coin weight is calculated by multiplying the number of coins by their value. For example, if you had 100 EOS tokens with a price of $1 each (100 x $1 = $100) and it was your only cryptocurrency asset, then your entire portfolio would have a coin weight of $100.
🌙 NASA - Best Photo from Last Week
Neptune Shows Off Its Rings in Near-Infrared Light
On Sept. 21, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope delivered the clearest view of Neptune’s rings in more than 30 years. Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured several bright, narrow rings as well as the planet’s fainter dust bands. Voyager 2 was the last to detect some of these rings during its flyby in 1989, but this is the first time we have an infrared image of them.
Since NIRCam images objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present. Those methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Last Updated: Sep 29, 2022
Editor: Monika Luabeya
Barbara Bickham
Barbara Bickham
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