AK Blog on Fintech

The report itself can be found on this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170221105053/https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/tietoaeduskunnasta/julkaisut/Documents/tuvje_1+2004.pdf Indeed the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen has a quite solid approach to this work and he brought quite wide aspects of society into his review. However i cannot help but notice that his approach lacks one very important aspect - realities and implications of those challenges to real life are left almost unattended. Philosopher writes for politicians, what sense of reality are you waiting for? From which of those two? All right, we are not in 2020, so let's have a look at what has changed since 2004. Himanen list following main global trends that will affect us in the next 20 years. 1. Increasing international tax competition 2. The new global division of labour 3. Population ageing 4. Increasing pressures on the welfare society 5. The second phase of the information society 6. The...

The subject for this week’s homework is the effect that one of the new media components has on its field. There are tons of published articles and gigabytes of text written on each of the most known areas of new media: chat rooms, social networks, blogs, wiki- effects. But all of these different New Medias  have one common subject - us, humans. What is the effect of New Media on human behavior, our thinking and addictions? Therefore i decided to look at this aspect mostly in this blog post. How our thinking is affected by new media and are we benefiting from positive effects of new media or suffering from its negative influences? And is it possible to have a balance between these two? Obviously, this post is based on my own experiences, preferences and observations. And while i will try to be objective for the sake of brevity i will limit my post to only three most popular categories of new media alliance: Wikipedia, YouTube and Social Networks. Positives: Wikipedia and si...

The topic of this week, is the early stage of the internet and two items from that era: one that is still in use or at least familiar to users and the other one that is completely dead. Back in nearly 90’ties, the word “internet” was still associated with “TTU lab” and weird sounds coming from dial-up modems available to a few lucky ones at home. From these long forgotten times comes something that is still alive today: MUME.  MUME is one of the early MUDs, Based on Tolkien’s books, my favorite game and the sole reason I speak and write English today. made me read all Talkien's books and find even those that were not translated and read them also. For those who are completely unaware of what MUDs are, it is a type of game that happens completely inside your head. The only things that you see on your computer screen are lines of text jumping at you:   *a Dwarf* is here, riding a mountain mule. Message like this brings in your head, an image of a ve...

Any major development in human’s technological development, and IT field is certainly major, cannot be taken in isolation from changes in a society. For centuries, breakthroughs in technology used by humans were driven by military needs or with military as a tool for advancing trade routes. Need to produce more and better quality swords have driven material science and metallurgy advances, thus humans moved from Bronse age to Iron age. Desire to dominate on sea routes, led to discovery of America’s (a.k.a. “West Indies”) in 1493 and “magnetic declination” by Christopher Columbus in the same journey. Geography, Astronomy, maths advanced all in one journey. Development of Enigma code machine by German engineer Arthur Scherbius and subsequent efforts by Polish and British mathematicians and cryptographers have played significant role in military efforts on the Western Front of WW2. Even the birth of internet would be severely delayed if not for the discoveries made during t...