Diversity and Inclusion in the Actuarial Profession in 2019

Where’s Wallie using AI

If AI can find Wally , they can find anyone!

Agile vs KANBAN - what’s the difference

What's is Agile?

Agile methodology is a practice which promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout SDLC life-cycle. Agile is alternative to a waterfall or traditional sequential development. It is ideal process for those who want to work with continuous feedback. 

It is a process in which requirement evolve and change. The primary object of each iteration is to comes with a working product. 

In an Agile approach, the leadership will encourage teamwork and direct communication. Here, stakeholders and developers should work simultaneously to align the product to match up their customer requirement and organization goals. 

What is Kanban?

Kanban process is nothing but a Board, which is called "Kanban Board." This board plays a vital role in displaying the task workflow. It helps to optimize the flow of task between different teams. It is a method for defining, managing and improving services for delivering knowledge work. 

In this method, work items are printed visually. It allows team members to see the state of every piece of work at every development stage. Moreover, a team member gets overview who's doing what and can identify and eliminate problem areas in the process. 

Kanban methodology allows reprioritizing work as per the need of stakeholders. As work moves from one state to another, some extra work also added until the flow is steady. The team collaborates with each other to improve the flow of work throughout the project. Kanban process is never restricted to set process and defined sprints. So, it offers flexibility for developers. 

Agile Principles

• The goal is set to satisfy the customer by offering continuous delivery of software.
• It always welcomes changes even during later stages. 
• Deliver working system from 15 days to one month, with a purpose to limit the timescale.
• Business stakeholders and development team will work daily until the project is over. 
• Working software is elementary in Agile Process
• Agile software development approach promotes sustainable development. 
• Give complete attention to technical expertise 

Kanban Principles

• Kanban process visualizes the workflow which is easy to understand. 
• Encourage acts of leadership at all levels
• It helps to measure and improve Collaboration 
• Respect the current process, roles & responsibilities 
• Helps team to make process easy and explicit

Here is a link to a table of differences by guru 99 https://www.guru99.com/agile-vs-kanban.html

Below are some videos explaining 

From sewage and compost to viable fuel

An Environmental Problem 

To halt climate change, the UN has said "unprecedented change" will be required in all aspects of society , both on a social and on a global level 

Fossil fuels on our environment is a big deal!

The European Commision has pledged that the EU will cut greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Our future and the future of our grandchildren are dependent on us to make this change 

A solution - faecal fuel 

Spanish company Ingelia has developed a biocarbon fuel called biochar - made using sewage, as a much cleaner energy source to traditional coal.

Biochar burns like coal but the actual production is carbon neutral - and it has a considerably lower production of harmful wastes such as nitrogen, sulfur, and chlorine.

By turning organic waste into a biocarbon that doesn't emit CO2 or other pollutants when produced, Ingelia may have just found a much more sustainable energy source than traditional coal.

How they do it 

Ingelia treats waste matter such as sewage with high pressure and heat to produce its biochar fuel.

"We use the organic collection of trash, the organic portion of municipal waste, sewage from treatment plants, and even waste from gardening. We take this waste and unfer specific pressure and temperature conditions, 20 bars and 200ºC, we dehydrate the organic matter and siphon off the humid matter in liquid form," explained the CEO Maria  Hernandez 

 "In other words, we concentrate 95% of the carbon in the waste."

During Ingelia's thermochemical conversion process (known as hydrothermal carbonisation), harmful wastes such as nitrogen, sulfur, and chlorine are, for the most part, siphoned off in the residual liquid.

The result, after an eight-hour process, is a solid, dry, cylindrical material that could replace fossil-derived carbon fuel.

The bad smells produced as a byproduct of the composting process are avoided by containing the treatment of the waste matter in a closed tank, allowing plants to be situated closer to population centres.

"It has the same calorific value and combustion structure," said Hernández. She added: "Compared with a standard composting or a biogas plant where the process takes around 30 days, the timescale for our method is as little as eight hours."

The founder - Maria Hernandez

From small beginnings in Valencia to international expansion. 

Hernández' determination earned the Ingelia co-founder and CEO a nomination in the Women's category for the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) awards, presented earlier this month at its annual conference in Budapest.

International Expansion 

Ingelia has already outsourced this process to their waste plants in Spain, the UK and Italy. In fact, Italy's largest sewage manager has also implemented the process in their Tuscany plant where they treat 80,000 tons of sewage per year and the Belgian town of Oostende too is set to have a plant that treats 20,000 tons of organic waste matter with four reactors.

Hernández said their cleaner fuel could replace 220,000 tons of coal per year by 2022.

Financials 

Last year the company had sales  of $2.29 million and is looking to raise $3.44 million.

Projections are  $28.4 million in turnover next year and up to $107 million for 2022.

Hernández added that her company is currently in negotiations with the majority of waste management companies in Spain.

Uses of Biochar 

It could be used to work batteries, or even to produce specific materials such as biopolymers, possibly for producing plastics or perhaps as substitutes for peat in soil

Environmental Impact

Maria enthusiastically shares with us her 2022 vision

"With our process, by 2022 we'd be able to replace 220,000 tons of coal per year and avoid the emission of half a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere," adding that the company was planning to capture 3% of the European waste management market.

Source Business Insider España. Copyright 2018.

“We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer."

By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

Jerusalem Post https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939

A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.

“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.

 It sounds fantastical, especially considering that an estimated 18.1 million new cancer cases are diagnosed worldwide each year, according to reports by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. 

Further, every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death (second only to cardiovascular disease).

Aridor, chairman of the board of AEBi and CEO Dr. Ilan Morad, say their treatment, which they call MuTaTo (multi-target toxin) is essentially on the scale of a cancer antibiotic – a disruption technology of the highest order.

The potentially game-changing anti-cancer drug is based on SoAP technology, which belongs to the phage display group of technologies. It involves the introduction of DNA coding for a protein, such as an antibody, into a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. That protein is then displayed on the surface of the phage. Researchers can use these protein-displaying phages to screen for interactions with other proteins, DNA sequences and small molecules.

In 2018, a team of scientists won the Nobel Prize for their work on phage display in the directed evolution of new proteins – in particular, for the production of antibody therapeutics.

AEBi is doing something similar but with peptides, compounds of two or more amino acids linked in a chain. According to Morad, peptides have several advantages over antibodies, including that they are smaller, cheaper, and easier to produce and regulate.

When the company first started, Morad said, “We were doing what everyone else was doing, trying to discover individual novel peptides for specific cancers.” But shortly thereafter, Morad and his colleague, Dr. Hanan Itzhaki, decided they wanted to do something bigger.

To get started, Morad said they had to identify why other cancer-killing drugs and treatments don’t work or eventually fail. Then, they found a way to counter that effect.

For starters, most anti-cancer drugs attack a specific target on or in the cancer cell, he explained. Inhibiting the target usually affects a physiological pathway that promotes cancer. Mutations in the targets – or downstream in their physiological pathways – could make the targets not relevant to the cancer nature of the cell, and hence the drug attacking it is rendered ineffective.

In contrast, MuTaTo is using a combination of several cancer-targeting peptides for each cancer cell at the same time, combined with a strong peptide toxin that would kill cancer cells specifically. By using at least three targeting peptides on the same structure with a strong toxin, Morad said, “we made sure that the treatment will not be affected by mutations; cancer cells can mutate in such a way that targeted receptors are dropped by the cancer.”

“The probability of having multiple mutations that would modify all targeted receptors simultaneously decreases dramatically with the number of targets used,” Morad continued. “Instead of attacking receptors one at a time, we attack receptors three at a time – not even cancer can mutate three receptors at the same time.”

Furthermore, many cancer cells activate detoxification mechanisms when in stress from drugs. The cells pump out the drugs or modify them to be non-functional. But Morad said detoxification takes time. When the toxin is strong, it has a high probability of killing the cancer cell before detoxification occurs, which is what he is banking on.

Many cytotoxic anticancer treatments aim at fast-growing cells. But cancer stem cells are not fast growing, and they can escape these treatments. Then, when the treatment is over, they can generate cancer again.

“If it does not completely annihilate the cancer, the remaining cells can start to get mutations again, and then the cancer comes back, but this time it is drug resistant,” Morad said.

He explained that because cancer cells are born out of mutations that occur in cancer stem cells, most of the overexpressed proteins which are targeted on the cancer cell exist in the cancer stem cells. MuTaTo’s multiple-target attack ensures that they will be destroyed as well.

Finally, some cancer tumors erect shields which create access problems to large molecules, such as antibodies. MuTaTo acts like an octopus or a piece of spaghetti and can sneak into places where other large molecules cannot reach. Morad said the peptide parts of MuTaTo are very small (12 amino acids long) and lack a rigid structure.

“This should make the whole molecule non-immunogenic in most cases and would enable repeated administration of the drug,” he said.

Morad said their discovery could also reduce the sickening side-effects of most cancer treatments, which stem from drug treatments interacting with the wrong or additional targets, or the correct targets but on non-cancerous cells. He said MuTaTo’s having a combination of several highly specific cancer-targeting peptides on one scaffold for each type of cancer cell would increase the specificity to the cancer cell due to the avidity effect. In addition, in most cases, the non-cancer cells that have a protein in common with the cancer cells do not overexpress it.

“This makes a great difference between the two kinds of cells and should decrease the side effects dramatically,” Morad said.

He equated the concept of MuTaTo to the triple drug cocktail that has helped change AIDS from being an automatic death sentence to a chronic – but often manageable – disease.

Today, AIDS patients take protease inhibitors in combination with two other drugs called reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The drug combination disrupts HIV at different stages in its replication, restrains an enzyme crucial to an early stage of HIV duplication and holds back another enzyme that functions near the end of the HIV replication process.

“We used to give AIDS patients several drugs, but we would administer them one at a time,” Morad explained. “During the course of treatment, the virus mutated, and the AIDS started attacking again. Only when patients started using a cocktail, were they able to stop the disease.”

Now, he said, people with AIDS are HIV carriers, but they are not sick anymore.

The MuTaTo cancer treatment will eventually be personalized. Each patient will provide a piece of his biopsy to the lab, which would then analyze it to know which receptors are overexpressed. The individual would then be administered exactly the molecule cocktail needed to cure his disease.

However, unlike in the case of AIDS, where patients must take the cocktail throughout their lives, in the case of MuTaTo, the cells would be killed, and the patient could likely stop treatment after only a few weeks.

The company is now writing patents on specific peptides, which will be a large bank of targeting toxin peptides wholly owned and hard to break, said Aridor.

Morad said that so far, the company has concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells, in addition to several in-vitro trials. AEBi is on the cusp of beginning a round of clinical trials which could be completed within a few years and would make the treatment available in specific cases.

Aridor added: “Our results are consistent and repeatable.”

Doctors Perform Remote-Controlled Cardiac Catheterization Procedure Kilometers Apart from Patient

It’s like a scene from a science fiction movie: The doctor was several kilometers away from the patient. Using a breakthrough technology developed in Israel, he was able to perform a heart catheterization procedure using a robot. Professor Rafael Beyar, Director of Rambam Health Care Campus, the inventor of this novel robotic system, said: “In the future, we’ll be able to teach the robot how to perform catheterizations by itself.”

What an incredible invention!

http://www.ausforam.org.au/6119.html

Quantum Computing - a game changer

The major news in Tech in 2019 - in my view is the development of the Quantum computer - the Q System 1 - which was launched at CES by IBM

What does quantum computing mean . 

In terms that I understand - it’s replacing bits and bytes (binary, 0 and 1) with atoms turning left and right. This enables computer power to scale to effectively infinity. 

What does this mean to you and me ?

A key factor is the commercialisation of Bitcoin and Blockchain 

It’s going to change the way we transact financially . 

Currently - Bitcoins constraint is the ability to transact immediately. Everytime  someone’s transacts - the computer system/cloud has to travel through the entire ledger system - which takes minutes - 

Using Quantum computers - this will be immediate! 

Re processing speeds, NBN , Internet , data transfer, storage - I think Quantam  computers will be a game changer.

Not sure whether I have got the concept right - but it sure does sound an exciting time to be in tech and on this planet! 

War chest of jargon

Qubits

Qiskit

Q-CtrL 

Quantum computing in a nutshell:

Quantum computing is all about qubits, or quantum bits. These are the basic units of information used by quantum computers. Unlike regular bits, which store data as either 1s or 0s, qubits take advantage of the quantum phenomenon known as superposition. This means they essentially exist as 1s and 0s simultaneously.

The advantage of this in computing is that it exponentially increases the amount of information you can process. A pair of qubits that can exist as either 1s or 0s can embody four possible states. Three qubits can embody eight. But three hundred qubits can embody more states than there are atoms in the Universe.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/8/18171732/ibm-quantum-computer-20-qubit-q-system-one-ces-2019