Money Style Tech

China 6% GDP growth , US bankcards exit Indonesia, Big tech credit, New Digital World Order, Metaverse Fashion, How water came to Earth, free satellite data for environmental monitoring

UPDATE:?The?Long Mekong Weekend?heads into the new digital world order and booming consumer market of China.

Goldman Sachs has upped its forecast for China’s gross domestic product (GDP) forecast to 6% from 5.5%.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo called on Wednesday for his country to abandon the use of foreign payment networks like MasterCard and Visa and encouraged the public to adopt credit cards made by domestic banks.?

Big tech credit has been growing rapidly in recent years. Big tech lenders can lend to borrowers that have been unserved or underserved by traditional financial institutions. As a source of disruption, big techs represent a "brave new world" for monetary policymakers.

The global virtual reality industry will grow at a compounded average annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54% between 2020 and 2024 (IDC 2021). With the continued development of new technologies, the specific industry related to the metaverse could develop tremendously over the next 5-10 years.

Designers and entrepreneurs in the digital fashion world agree that the metaverse, with all of its potentialities, is an industry is in its infancy with relatively few cost or technological barriers to becoming a digital fashion designer,?

“The water trail “ starts in the interstellar medium with hydrogen and oxygen gas and ends with oceans and ice caps on planets, with icy moons orbiting gas giants and icy comets and asteroids that orbit stars. The beginnings and ends of this trail are easy to see, but the middle has remained a mystery.

If you want to track changes in the Amazon rainforest, see the full expanse of a hurricane or figure out where people need help after a disaster, it’s much easier to do with the view from a satellite orbiting a?few hundred miles above Earth.

Goldman Sachs Lifts China GDP Growth Forecast to 6%

Goldman Sachs has upped its forecast for China’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth this year off the back of signs its economy’s recovery is picking up pace. Strong recovery in sectors sensitive to the Covid-19 pandemic and broadly improved activity data in the first two months of this year drove the upgraded outlook,?Goldman Sachs?said in the research note, as it raised its GDP forecast to 6% from 5.5%.

China’s economy showed a gradual, though uneven, recovery in January and February, but statistics bureau spokesman Fu Linghui told a briefing on Wednesday that it would take time to repair corporate and personal balance sheets damaged during the pandemic.

China has set a modest annual growth target of around 5% this year after significantly missing its target for 2022. Last year, the world’s second-largest economy expanded just 3%, its slowest pace in decades excluding 2020, weighed down by restrictive Covid policies, a deep property slump and weak external demand.

Goldman Sachs also cited improved activity in the real estate sector, which has made new progress in its climb out of a months-long slump, as another reason for its revised forecast. The investment bank last raised its forecast for China’s 2023 GDP growth in January to 5.5% from a previous estimate of 5.2%.

Read more?here.

Indonesia to abandon Visa, MasterCard to be 'independent'

As part of the new payment system launched last year, Indonesian President Joko Widodo called on Wednesday for his country to abandon the use of foreign payment networks like MasterCard and Visa and encouraged the public to adopt credit cards made by domestic banks. At a local business gathering,?Widodo?emphasized that "everyone [in Indonesia] should be able to use" Indonesian-manufactured credit cards so that "we can be independent," as he explained that the aim is to avoid risking transactions in case of a geopolitical disruption that?could economically affect?the country.

According to the president, the initiative "shows that Indonesia is following the pace of digital technology transformation in the economic sector."

"Be very careful. We must remember the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem," he warned.?

This is in light of the implementation of a Domestic Government Credit Card payment system in March last year by?the world’s seventh-largest economy in terms of GDP. It also follows after?US-based Visa and MasterCard payment systems suspended operations in Russia as a response to the war in Ukraine.?

The Bank of Indonesia has previously called for Indonesians to stop making payments in US Dollars

Statistics Indonesia data that was released last month indicated that the country’s economy expanded by 5.31% in 2022, showing its best annual growth rate since 2013.

Read more?here?and?here.

Big tech credit better than banks: evidence from China

Big tech credit has been growing rapidly in recent years. As they are less reliant on traditional collateral, big tech lenders can lend to borrowers that have been unserved or underserved by traditional financial institutions. As a source of disruption, big techs represent a "brave new world" for monetary policymakers, requiring them to re-evaluate the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission through these new lenders.?

Big tech lenders grant credit to more new borrowers than conventional banks do. When monetary policy eases, big tech lenders are more likely to establish new lending relationships with firms, as compared with traditional banks. The advantages of big tech lenders in information, monitoring and risk management are the potential mechanisms. That is, big tech credit tends to amplify the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission mainly via the extensive margin relative to traditional bank loans. In addition, monetary policy has a stronger impact on the real economy through big tech lending than via traditional bank loans.

Download the full article?here.

New Digital World Order

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the global virtual reality industry will grow at a compounded average annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54% between 2020 and 2024 (IDC 2021). With the continued development of new technologies, the specific industry related to the metaverse could develop tremendously over the next 5-10 years.

The term, a combination of the prefix "meta" (implying transcend) with the word "universe", describes (referring to the specific environment of our work) a synthetic environment generated by computers but linked to the physical world. The concept was first coined in 1992 in a novel ("Snow Crash"), written by Neal Stephenson, describing it as a huge virtual environment parallel to the physical world in which users interact through digital avatars.

Virtuality, which blends physical and digital, is facilitated by the convergence of Internet technologies and Extended Reality (XR). According to the Reality-Virtuality Continuum (Milgram et al. 1995), XR integrates the digital and physical in varying degrees, augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR).

In AR, the user is positioned in a real environment that is enriched by virtual data, but reality plays a predominant role over the additional virtual data. In MR, the user moves through an environment where real and virtual data coexist. In VR, real data is completely replaced by virtual data. If AR aims to enrich reality with useful information for performing complex tasks, VR aims to replace the real world with a simulated one.

In the metaverse, users experience through their avatars an alternative life in virtuality that is a metaphor for the real world in analogy to the physical self in real life. To achieve Reality-Virtuality duality, the development of the virtual world goes through three sequential stages: (I) digital twins, (II) coexistence of physical-virtual reality (so-called surreality), and (III) digital natives.

Digital twins refer to (large-scale, high-fidelity) physical models and entities duplicated in virtual environments. Digital twins reflect the properties of their physical counterparts (Mohammadi 2017), in terms of, for example, object movement, temperature, or function. The connection between virtual and physical twins is provided by their data.

After establishing a virtual copy of physical reality, the second phase focuses on creating digital native content. Content creators, identified with avatars (representing human users in the virtual world) generate digital realizations within digital worlds. These digital representations may be linked to their physical counterparts, or exist only in the virtual world. These digital creations may be supported by connected ecosystems governed by norms and values (in terms of culture, economics, laws, or social behavior) similar to those that exist in the real world but directed solely at the production of intangible content (Bush 2021).

In the third and final phase, the metaverse becomes a self-sustaining and persistent virtual world that coexists and interacts with the physical world independently. Avatars can experience heterogeneous activities in real-time, characterized by the presence of an unlimited number of competing users even across multiple virtual worlds (Grieves and Vickers 2017). Indeed, the virtual world enables interoperability between digital platforms, allowing users to create content and distribute it.

Read the full article?here.

Fashion designers embrace metaverse

Chinese regulators are "increasing focus on minors' addiction, personal information protection, data security, and openness of ecosystem", though mainstream adoption of the metaverse will "take a long time, given major technological and regulatory hurdles." Designers and entrepreneurs in the digital fashion world agree that the metaverse, with all of its potentialities, is an industry is in its infancy. However, there are relatively few cost or technological barriers to becoming a digital fashion designer, but more regulation is necessary to guarantee high quality and good services.?

Xing Ziqi, co-founder of London-based brand Xtended Identity aims to extend human identity beyond traditional limitations in an innovative, boundary-free way. Xtended Identity is “digital haute couture” and sold a dress on virtual goods marketplace “The Dematerialised” for US $6,100.?

Digital fashion is a hot concept in China, welcomed by customers and designers". Fashion is the most widely adopted digital commodity not only in China, but across the world. A Worldwide's survey of 3,000 consumers found that virtual goods are no longer considered niche purchases. A total of 94 percent of respondents see digital fashion becoming mainstream.

Designers have grand, science fiction-esque visions for the future of digital fashion. Xing Ziqi and her co-founder Xing Yunjia predict that digital and physical fashion will eventually intermingle. They call this "phygital".

"It refers to a garment that consists of digital parts and physical parts that form a complete look,which will be the key innovation in our next collection design. The beauty of combining the digital and the physical is that it pushes people's fashion experience beyond reality,"says Xing Ziqi.

Read full article?here.

Goldilocks star reveals how water arrived on?Earth

Without water, life on Earth could not exist as it does today. Understanding the history of water in the universe is critical to understanding how planets like Earth come to be. Astronomers typically refer to the journey water takes from its formation as individual molecules in space to its resting place on the surfaces of planets as “the water trail.” The trail starts in the interstellar medium with hydrogen and oxygen gas and ends with oceans and ice caps on planets, with icy moons orbiting gas giants and icy comets and asteroids that orbit stars. The beginnings and ends of this trail are easy to see, but the middle has remained a mystery.

The formation of stars and planets is intertwined. The so-called “emptiness of space” – or the interstellar medium – in fact contains?large amounts of gaseous hydrogen, smaller amounts of other gasses and?grains of dust. Due to gravity, some pockets of the interstellar medium will become?more dense as particles attract each other?and form clouds. As the density of these clouds increases, atoms begin to collide more frequently and?form larger molecules, including water that forms?on dust grains and coats the dust in ice.

Stars begin to form when parts of the collapsing cloud reach a certain density and heat up enough to start fusing hydrogen atoms together. Since only a small fraction of the gas initially collapses into the newborn protostar, the rest of the gas and dust?forms a flattened disk of material?circling around the spinning, newborn star. Astronomers call this a proto-planetary disk.

As icy dust particles collide with each other inside a proto-planetary disk,?they begin to clump together. The process continues and eventually forms the familiar objects of space like asteroids, comets, rocky planets like Earth and gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn.

There are two potential pathways that water in our solar system could have taken. The first, called?chemical inheritance, is when the water molecules originally formed in the interstellar medium are delivered to proto-planetary disks and all the bodies they create without going through any changes.

The second theory is called?chemical reset. In this process, the heat from the formation of the proto-planetary disk and newborn star breaks apart water molecules, which then reform once the proto-planetary disk cools.

Read full article?here.

How to use free satellite data to monitor natural disasters and environmental changes

If you want to track changes in the Amazon rainforest, see the full expanse of a hurricane or figure out where people need help after a disaster, it’s much easier to do with the view from a satellite orbiting a?few hundred miles above Earth.

Traditionally, access to satellite data has been limited to researchers and professionals with expertise in remote sensing and image processing. However, the increasing availability of open-access data from government satellites such as?Landsat?and?Sentinel, and free cloud-computing resources such as?Amazon Web Services,?Google Earth Engine?and?Microsoft Planetary Computer, have made it possible for just about anyone to gain insight into environmental changes underway.

I?work with geospatial big data?as a professor. Here’s a quick tour of where you can find satellite images, plus some free, fairly simple tools that anyone can use to create time-lapse animations from satellite images.

For example, state and urban planners – or people considering a new home – can watch over time?how rivers have moved, construction crept into wildland areas or?a coastline eroded.

Get full instructions?here.