We had a company visit this morning with Fleet Management Limited at the University of Nicosia followed with two lectures in the afternoon. One of them was about cryptocurrency and the other one was about blockchain and forecasting. Starting with FML, they have been operating for 28 years and are the 2nd largest third party manager of the dry and wet assets worldwide. They have a total of 625 ships. They have the most cargo carrying ships. Their bulk carrier operators include some businesses like Mitsubishi and Oldendorff. They have about 20,000 employees however only about 100 of them are women. I asked a question wanting to know about how much it costs to maintain all of their ships. They said it costs about 9,000 dollars per day but make a revenue of about 50,000 dollars. I also now know that a 40ft shipping container can fit 8,000 boxes of shoes.

We had a nice lunch provided by the University of Nicosia and it definitely put the Pitt dining hall to shame. I was actually able to eat food and did not have to throw up after. Woohoo!

After lunch we had our lectures. The first one was with the CEO of the university. He spoke to us about the technology surrounding cryptocurrency. I learned a lot from the lecture however had an existential crisis because of it. I do not like the idea of an even more digitalized world. He said that having a camera on you at all times is basically inevitable. I will be moving to the mountains in the near future to avoid this problem.

Our second lecture was by former olympian Spyros Makridakis. He is also one of the best forecasters in the world. He has had 5 competitions to test people’s ability to forecast data. The 6th one is currently going on. It was also fairly interesting to me however I do not think I should become a data scientist.