All of today’s activities took place at the University of Nicosia. The first people to speak were people from a company called Fleet Management Limited. They are a shipmanagement company with a branch located in Cyprus. They manage over 600 ships around the globe. The mother company claims to be the second largest shipmanagement company in the world. They do not own any ships themselves, they merely organize and contract people who own vessels with those who need them. Fleet Management Limited has 20,000 employed seafarers, the majority of which are Asian or Middle Eastern. Unfortunately, only 0.5% of their employees are female, a statistic which I hope is raised in the near future. Fleet Management Limited typically offers contracts for 2 years at a time. Fun fact, one ship can travel ~360,000 miles in one year!
Next we were supposed to meet with Mediterranean Shipmanagement Company, but they didn’t show up so we just had lunch.
Next we had 2 lectures from professors at the university. The first one was on blockchain and cryptocurrency. I knew a little on the topic going in but this helped for sure. I especially liked his explanation of Bitcoin specifically as digital cash. I see the appeal of it being used for Machine to Machine transactions and it being and blockchain systems being unbiased when it comes to moderating online forums, but I think the professor’s thoughts on the matter were a little ambitious. I think the technology may be ready in ten years but not everyone will be using it. People say the same thing about VR, self driving cars, and crypto but as we have seen it takes people a long time to care. Also, we are notoriously slow at passing legislation to moderate these things so I don’t think this will revolutionize the way we do business by 2030, that’s just not realistic.
The last bit was about data forecasting, and I found certain aspects of it very interesting. Specifically the bit about complex algorithms performing far worse than simple ones. I think it’s funny that we create these algorithms to give us the most accurate representation and a line of best fit outperforms it by a wide margin.