Techeconomy Business Series [Webinar #3] – Meet the Speakers

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the financial technology (fintech) sector, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance resilience and customer focus. This era demands a strategic approach to ensure that fintech solutions address evolving customer expectations while remaining secure and adaptable to unforeseen disruptions. So, how can fintech companies leverage AI for predictive…

By 2028, Airbnb could be totally banned in this European travel hotspot

Millions visit Barcelona every year (Picture: Getty Images)
Last year, 15.6 million tourists headed to Barcelona, one of the world’s most vibrant beach cities. 
From the awe-inspiring Sagrada Familia and strolls along La Rambla, to beach parties and clubbing until dawn, there’s something for everyone in the Spanish hotspot. 
But the city’s plans to ban short-term rental apartments by 2028 have left the future uncertain for holidaymakers, making headlines around the world and sparking threats of billion-euro lawsuits.
Airbnb has now urged Barcelona to ‘rethink’ its crackdown on short-term rentals in the city, claiming that its restrictions only benefit the hotel sector. 
In a letter sent over the weekend to Mayor Jaume Collboni, Airbnb’s head of policy for Spain and Portugal, Sara Rodriguez, said: ‘The only winter from Barcelona’s war on short-term rentals is the hotel industry.’
In June, Collboni announced the plans to get rid of all short-term private rentals in the city, which includes cancelling the licenses of 10,101 apartments currently approved.  

It’s a hugely popular destination for holidaymakers (Picture: Getty Images)
The city initially began the clampdown on short-term rentals in 2014, introducing a moratorium on tourist accommodation licenses, which severely restricted the ability of everyday citizens to share their homes. 
Airbnb argued that none of these earlier measures had proven effective. ‘A decade later, official data shows that while short-term rentals numbers have fallen, challenges related to housing and over-tourism are worse than ever,’ it said. 
It claimed that while the number of Airbnb listings has fallen over the past decade, rents have risen by 70%, while the average price of a home has increased by 60%. 
Airbnb also highlighted that in the last decade, Spain has built fewer homes than at any point since 1970, despite an increase in demand, and that the city’s vacant homes outnumber short-term rentals by eight to one. 
‘Policies that address this issue are more likely to boost affordable housing supply than clamping down on Airbnb,’ it said, explaining that the site has removed over 7,000 listings from the platform since 2018.

Murals in Spain have protested against the effects of tourism (Picture: Getty)
Which other European countries are cracking down on short-term rentals?
Across Europe, many countries are either restricting or banning short-term lets.
UK
Prior to news of the General Election, the UK government unveiled plans that would mean planning permission is required to rent out a property for more than 90 days per year.
Michael Gove said this would be to ‘strike a balance between giving local people access to more affordable housing while ensuring the visitor economy continues to flourish.’
There would also be a mandatory national register for local authorities to keep track of exactly how many short-term lets are in the area.
In response, Airbnb said: ‘We recognise there are historic housing challenges facing some communities in the UK.
‘While short-term lets are not the root cause of housing challenges, we want to be a responsible partner and help make communities stronger and work hand in hand to address the challenges they face.’

Planning permission may be required to rent out properties in the UK (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Paris, France
If you’ve got a short-term let in Paris, be careful: the city has a dedicated policing unit with the sole focus of catching and fining illegal renters.
Here, owners are only allowed to rent their primary residence (that’s the place you live for at least eight months per year) for a maximum of 120 days per year. However, you can rent a single room without any time limit.
Vienna, Austria
If you rent out an apartment in the Austrian capital, you can only offer it out for a maximum of 90 days per year.
Parts of Vienna had already imposed these restrictions back in 2018, but it now applies to the whole city.
Portugal
Last year, Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa announced that no new licenses for holiday lets would be issued. Again, Portuguese locals were struggling to afford rental costs amid a housing crisis.
Existing licenses will also be reviewed every five years, and Airbnb owners will be given a tax break if they convert their properties into standard homes.
The only exception to the rules are in rural areas which the Prime Minister said do not have the same ‘urban pressure’.

Portuguese locals are struggling to afford housing costs (Picture: Getty Images/Westend61)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The Dutch capital has particularly strict rules. Here, Airbnb owners can only rent out their homes for a maximum of just 30 days per year.
If you go above this time frame, you need a special permit.
Italy
Short term rentals are heavily regulated in Italy.
Florence has probably had the most extreme crackdown in recent years. Here, new short-term licenses have been completely banned in the city centre.
In Rome, rules are tight too: you can only rent out your short-term let for a maximum of 60 days per year.
And, in 2023, Italy’s Tourism Ministry drafted laws which would see short-term lets curbed across the entire country.

Italian authorities have proposed nationwide rules (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Under the proposals, there would be a two-night minimum stay requirement and a new type of identification for property listings.
‘Today in Rome there are over 25,000 accommodation facilities,’ said Alessandro Massimo Nucara, general director of the national association for hotel businesses.
‘That’s the equivalent of 10,000 hotels. In order to open a hotel one has to request an infinite number of permits. But when it comes to opening what would be the equivalent of 10,000 hotels, it’s a different story as all these permits are not required.’
Can I have a party in my Airbnb accomodation?
Last year it was revealed Airbnb owners and guests across the entire site could soon be facing sanctions if they use rental properties to throw parties as part of a government drive to stamp out anti-social behaviour.
Referencing noise problems, drunken behaviour and disorderly conduct, the plan promises the creation of a new registration scheme that would provide councils with the data to identify short-term lets in the local area.
If any short-term rental property proved ‘problematic’, local officials could take action against those deemed responsible.

Hotels have much stricter rules to adhere to than private short term lets (Picture: Getty Images)
What else is Barcelona doing to curb tourism?
Earlier this year, Barcelona became the latest European holiday hotspot to introduce a heftier tourist tax.

Since April 1 2024, the city’s tourist tax – which was first introduced in 2012 – rose from €2.75 (£2.36) per night to €3.25 (£2.79) per night.
The Spanish government approved plans to increase the tax to up to €4, so there may be another increase next year.
The surcharge hike will have a knock on effect on accommodation prices.

Now that guests will have to part ways with €3.25 for the tax, a stay in a five-star hotel will now cost €6.75 (£5.79) per night when factoring in the new surcharge and the accommodation-specific tax, which adds up to €47.25 (£40.51) per person to stay for the week.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
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“Shop Small” and “Win Big” on Small Business Saturday in Morganton

MORGANTON, N.C. – Citizens can “shop small” and “win big” next weekend for the annual Small Business Saturday in Morganton.
Small Business Saturday takes place in Downtown Morganton on November 30th from 10am-5pm. It will be in collaboration with the popular “Who’s Got the Winning Ticket?” event.
Inside the 22 participating stores will be a scratch off Willy Wonk-esque gold ticket. Those with the right ticket will receive $100-$250 in “Downtown Bucks” to spend at your favorite local business. Approximately $4,000 in total will be given out.
Below is a list of the participating businesses:

Sidetracked Brewery
Thistle & Twig
Paradise Glass
Morganton General Store
Hamilton Williams
West Union Art Studio
The Olive
Merrill Mischief
Moondog Pizza
O’Suzannah’s Yarn on Union
Foothills Gear Garage
Tiffany West Interiors
Craft’d
Aqua B Boutique
Marquee Cinema
BelleVi Medspa
Viva La Vintage
Bigfoot Climbing Gym
Benjamin’s & Libba’s
Alexander Brooke Boutique
Patterson’s Amish Furniture
Reflections Boutique

Each participating business will have a large lollipop outside.
The winning tickets can be exchanged outside of the Main Street Office at 112 B West Union Street.
*Downtown Bucks are only valid on Small Business Saturday but can be used all day. No purchase is required to receive a ticket. You must be 18 or older to win.

Google’s search business is all about distribution. The DOJ wants to take this away, and it’s freaking investors out.

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Google’s search business is all about distribution. The DOJ wants to take this away, and it’s freaking investors out.

Analysis by

Alistair Barr

2024-11-21T21:53:39Z

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‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky

Bluesky has been growing rapidly since 2023.Credit: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto/ShutterstockResearchers are flocking to the social-media platform Bluesky, hoping to recreate the good old days of Twitter.“All the academics have suddenly migrated to Bluesky,” says Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University, UK. The platform has “absolutely exploded”.In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from close to 14 million users to nearly 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal in large part because it looks and feels a lot like X (formerly known as Twitter), which became hugely popular with scientists, who used it to share research findings, collaborate and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles in 2022.That was the year that billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other changes, prompting some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and abusive content have increased on X, and community protections have decreased, say researchers.Bluesky, by contrast, offers users control over the content they see and the people they engage with, through moderation and protections such as blocking and muting features, say researchers. It is also built on an open network, which gives researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges a hefty fee for this kind of access.Several similar social-media platforms have also sprung up, including Mastodon and Threads, but they haven’t gained the same traction among academics as Bluesky.Mass migrationDaryll Carlson, a bioacoustics researcher at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, says she noticed the largest influx of users on Bluesky after the US election. Musk has become closely aligned to president-elect Donald Trump. For Carlson, Bluesky offers a space to engage with other scientists, as well as artists, photographers and the general public. “I’d really like it to continue to be a place of joy for me,” she says.On the platform, users scroll through feeds — curated timelines of posts on specific subjects. Users can like feeds, pin them to their homepage or request to share content on them.One of the most popular is the Science feed, where scientists and science communicators share content. It’s been liked by more than 14,000 users and gets 400,000 views a day. So far, it has 3,500 contributors, from ecologists and zoologists to quantum physicists, but those numbers are increasing rapidly.To become a contributor, users need to share evidence of their research credentials with a moderator. Mae Saslaw, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, vets requests to post on the feed from people in geoscience and has seen an increase from one a week to half a dozen per day. As an early-career researcher, Saslaw has found Bluesky useful for learning about new software, finding interesting papers and applying for jobs.Safe spaceFor many researchers, the move to Bluesky has been about gaining back control over what appears in their timelines. Feeds are one example, but the platform also offers options to filter out content such as nudity and spam, or specific phrases, from appearing in their timelines.Bluesky also offers a feature that users have nicknamed the ‘nuclear block’, which prevents all interaction with blocked accounts — an option no longer available on X. And users can create and subscribe to regularly updated collaborative block lists, such as lists of offensive accounts. If a user subscribes to one of these, no content from those accounts will appear on their timelines.Clíona Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says the protections offered by BlueSky are appealing. Murray was very entrenched in X. She co-founded an organization to diversify neuroscience, called Black in Neuro, which started in part there. But she began to feel that X was not a safe place.Bluesky offers ‘starter packs’ — user-created custom lists of accounts for new joiners to follow. Murray created one called Blackademics U.K.; she also notes the work of Rudy Fraser, an open-source developer who created a collection of feeds called Blacksky. This pack includes a moderation tool with which users can report content that is racist and anti-Black or contains misogynoir — expressing hatred particularly against Black women — and filter them out.But as Bluesky grows, the problems that plague X could come to haunt it, too, say researchers. “There’s definitely a risk that bad-faith actors will move in; bots will move in,” says Davies.“With any huge wave of growth, there’s going to be a wave of spam and scam as well,” says Emily Liu, who manages growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky in San Francisco, California. “We’ve scaled up our trust and safety team; hired more moderators to help combat all of this.”Leave or staySome researchers, such as Axel Bruns, a digital-media researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, are keeping their Twitter accounts to avoid losing them to impersonators. Others have shut their accounts down.Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says he has lost some 1,000 followers in the exodus (he still has 98,000). But he is reluctant to leave. “If good experts quit X, who will offer evidence-based input on X?”

‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky

Bluesky has been growing rapidly since 2023.Credit: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto/ShutterstockResearchers are flocking to the social-media platform Bluesky, hoping to recreate the good old days of Twitter.“All the academics have suddenly migrated to Bluesky,” says Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University, UK. The platform has “absolutely exploded”.In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from close to 14 million users to nearly 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal in large part because it looks and feels a lot like X (formerly known as Twitter), which became hugely popular with scientists, who used it to share research findings, collaborate and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles in 2022.That was the year that billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other changes, prompting some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and abusive content have increased on X, and community protections have decreased, say researchers.Bluesky, by contrast, offers users control over the content they see and the people they engage with, through moderation and protections such as blocking and muting features, say researchers. It is also built on an open network, which gives researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges a hefty fee for this kind of access.Several similar social-media platforms have also sprung up, including Mastodon and Threads, but they haven’t gained the same traction among academics as Bluesky.Mass migrationDaryll Carlson, a bioacoustics researcher at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, says she noticed the largest influx of users on Bluesky after the US election. Musk has become closely aligned to president-elect Donald Trump. For Carlson, Bluesky offers a space to engage with other scientists, as well as artists, photographers and the general public. “I’d really like it to continue to be a place of joy for me,” she says.On the platform, users scroll through feeds — curated timelines of posts on specific subjects. Users can like feeds, pin them to their homepage or request to share content on them.One of the most popular is the Science feed, where scientists and science communicators share content. It’s been liked by more than 14,000 users and gets 400,000 views a day. So far, it has 3,500 contributors, from ecologists and zoologists to quantum physicists, but those numbers are increasing rapidly.To become a contributor, users need to share evidence of their research credentials with a moderator. Mae Saslaw, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, vets requests to post on the feed from people in geoscience and has seen an increase from one a week to half a dozen per day. As an early-career researcher, Saslaw has found Bluesky useful for learning about new software, finding interesting papers and applying for jobs.Safe spaceFor many researchers, the move to Bluesky has been about gaining back control over what appears in their timelines. Feeds are one example, but the platform also offers options to filter out content such as nudity and spam, or specific phrases, from appearing in their timelines.Bluesky also offers a feature that users have nicknamed the ‘nuclear block’, which prevents all interaction with blocked accounts — an option no longer available on X. And users can create and subscribe to regularly updated collaborative block lists, such as lists of offensive accounts. If a user subscribes to one of these, no content from those accounts will appear on their timelines.Clíona Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says the protections offered by BlueSky are appealing. Murray was very entrenched in X. She co-founded an organization to diversify neuroscience, called Black in Neuro, which started in part there. But she began to feel that X was not a safe place.Bluesky offers ‘starter packs’ — user-created custom lists of accounts for new joiners to follow. Murray created one called Blackademics U.K.; she also notes the work of Rudy Fraser, an open-source developer who created a collection of feeds called Blacksky. This pack includes a moderation tool with which users can report content that is racist and anti-Black or contains misogynoir — expressing hatred particularly against Black women — and filter them out.But as Bluesky grows, the problems that plague X could come to haunt it, too, say researchers. “There’s definitely a risk that bad-faith actors will move in; bots will move in,” says Davies.“With any huge wave of growth, there’s going to be a wave of spam and scam as well,” says Emily Liu, who manages growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky in San Francisco, California. “We’ve scaled up our trust and safety team; hired more moderators to help combat all of this.”Leave or staySome researchers, such as Axel Bruns, a digital-media researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, are keeping their Twitter accounts to avoid losing them to impersonators. Others have shut their accounts down.Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says he has lost some 1,000 followers in the exodus (he still has 98,000). But he is reluctant to leave. “If good experts quit X, who will offer evidence-based input on X?”

MDE presents award for Science of Reading Excellence to MUW

11 minutes ago

MISSISSIPPI UNIVERSITY FOR WOMEN (WCBI) – The School of Education at The W was recognized by the Mississippi Department of Education today with its Mississippi Science of Reading Excellence Award.
The W has also been recognized as a Mississippi Emerging Science of Reading Educator Preparation Program for its commitment to literacy education.
The Science of Reading goes beyond teaching students how to read. It involves research into child brain development, psychology, and language development, and the relationship of reading skills to education success.

“The research backs it. That is what the Science of Reading is. There are studies that show the connection of students that start kindergarten, if they’re ready for kindergarten, they tend to stay on track. But those that start behind, typically stay behind. Those who struggle in kindergarten struggle in 3rd Grade. They struggle in graduating high school, and so, what we are doing is ensuring our teacher candidates have the knowledge and skills to set the trends that don’t just impact success in the classroom, but impacts their success in their family, in their jobs, and in the community,” said Rose Ford, MWU Assistant Professor of Education.
The W was also featuring its Center for Education Support, which provides help for teachers in their classrooms.
More than 80% of recent Elementary Education graduates from The W are working in Mississippi Public Schools.
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