DayVectors

* 21 entries including: US Constitution (series), economic dislocation of globalization (series), understanding AI (series), 3D printing & smart construction, EU GDPR, ribosomes more diverse than thought, warehouse / fulfillment center boom, synesthesia, global economics of iPhone, smart speakers for medical care, and shift in basis of US power grid.

[MON 30 APR 18] NEWS COMMENTARY FOR APRIL 2018

* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR APRIL 2018: Following up the comments here last month on Chinese President Xi Jinping's accumulation of power, an essay by Banyan, THE ECONOMIST's Asia blogger ("Can Xi Jinping Make Use Of The Power He Has Accumulated?", 31 March 2018) posed questions about the actual utility of Xi's grand hold on China.

Xi was skillful in his rise to the top. The anti-graft campaign he launched in 2013 is what Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister, called a "masterclass in political warfare": while successfully trimming back on widely-resented corruption, Xi used it as an opportunity to sideline his political rivals, who Xi replaced with his own loyalists. Now a new super-agency, the National Supervisory Commission, will take the campaign outside the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reform educational institutions, hospitals, village governments, and any other part of Chinese society seen in need of "reform".

Xi now wears so many hats as a head of top-level committees and commissions that he has been dubbed "the Chairman of Everything". His "Xi Jinping Thought" has been incorporated into the Chinese Constitution. That leaves the outstanding question of: what, exactly, does Xi intend to do with such far-reaching power?

Fortunately, Xi is no Vladimir Putin: he holds the CCP, not himself, as both pinnacle and embodiment of authority in China, and wants a better China for the Chinese people. Xi rose to the top to save the CCP, and China, from corruption and chaos in the Party. Only a stronger CCP will be able to deliver the goods.

At the CCP's every-five-year congress in October, Xi declared that the "principal contradiction" facing Chinese society was no longer getting enough to eat -- it was instead to have a better quality of life in the face of roaring economic development. The CCP, by implication, can only succeed by giving Chinese citizens what they want and need: good schools, clean air, universal health care. These things, according to Xi, are more important than personal liberties.

That's a bigger challenge than the race for growth of the recent past. How can China keep on growing economically and protect the environment? Should the government rebalance the booming east of the country against the laggard west? Not the least of the problems is that China's bureaucrats have become accustomed to pursuing growth at all costs, and resist change. This last factor was one the main reasons Xi consolidated power around himself.

Xi is exploiting his powers, a push being underway to streamline and centralize the bureaucracy, to ensure that those who implement policy are obedient to those who dictate it. The rewards system for provincial officials is being restructured to reflect a report card defined by the central government. Xi has selected a new team of ministers and advisers with an emphasis on technocratic competence -- one-man rule still demands good lieutenants.

The problem is that Xi is undoing administrative changes made two decades ago by the reformist prime minister of the time, Zhu Rongji. Zhu wanted to separate the CCP and the state, professionalize government, and promote a market-based economy. Xi taking a step backward, and most of the officials on which the CCP is based have no liking for being pushed around by the central government. There's self-interest in that resentment, of course, but history also suggests that attempting to run countries under rigid central control is not a winning strategy.

There are signs that it isn't going to work well now, either. In 2013, China launched an ambitious plan to move from low-wage manufacturing and preferential financing for state enterprises to a model based on domestic consumption, services, and an energized private sector. Little progress has been made; Xi's leadership model is not one that encourages initiative. There's also the issue that Xi rules the Chinese people with an iron fist carefully wrapped in a velvet glove -- and though public restlessness hasn't proven any threat to the government yet, there's no guarantee the Chinese people will stay passive forever.

Xi is faced with external challenges as well, including North Korean tantrums, an aggressive American stance on trade, and parallel American moves to strengthen relations with Taiwan. Being the Chairman of Everything has a huge drawback: Xi will be held responsible for everything that goes wrong.

* As discussed in an essay by Charlemagne, THE ECONOMIST's European blogger ("How The Dutch Will Take Britain's Place In Europe", 31 March 2018), the Dutch were not at all happy with Britain's Brexit. 80,000 Dutch firms trade with Britain; 162,000 trucks pass between the two countries each year. Rabobank, a Dutch financial firm, estimates that even a soft Brexit could cut 3% from Dutch GDP by 2030. Except for Ireland, none of Britain's trading partners will suffer more. Hans de Boer, president of VNO-NCW, the Dutch business lobby, drily comments: "Brexit was not our preferred option."

The Dutch spent the 1950s and 1960s trying to get Britain into the European club. When the UK voted to Leave in 2016, it seemed as if the world had been put into reverse, and the Dutch might decide to Leave as well. Dutch citizens had long been doubtful of the EU, and Mark Rutte -- prime minister since 2010 -- was disinclined to defend the union. Dutch Euroskepticism manifested itself in Geert Wilders, a stereotypical nationalist-populist who advocated "Nexit". When elections came around in 2017, there were worries he would have his way.

Rutte won the election, though Wilders got enough votes to force Rutte into a four-party coalition to obtain a slender majority. However, instead of becoming timid Rutte, with encouragement from his advisers, surprised everyone to become an EU advocate. In March 2018, he visited Berlin to give an extended address, accepting the value of the EU and the challenges that came with it, to conclude:

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Following the speech, the Dutch and seven like-minded small northern and eastern European countries -- informally called the "bad-weather coalition (BWC)", none of the eight being noted for a sunny climate -- generated a paper to define a common EU vision.

The Dutch vision is limited EU authority, but more intra-EU trade. They sternly warn EU governments to get their own houses in order before talking about common solutions. Hans de Boer shrugs, saying such rhetoric is more about reassuring Dutch voters than chastising the EU. There's no doubt there's been a change of heart in the prime minister; he used to come back from EU summits complaining about how dull they were, but now he's upbeat. A colleague says: "I've never seen him so pro-European."

Rutte explains that Brexit forces the Dutch to recalibrate their four-century diplomatic balancing-act between France, Germany, and Britain. This has two implications:

• A determination to stand fast with the EU. The Dutch goal is to ensure that the EU hammers out a strong trade relationship with Britain, and not undermine the EU bargaining position. Nexit would be the Dutch matching the folly of the British with their own -- and the chaos that Brexit has inflicted on the UK demonstrates that the Netherlands can't afford such folly.
  
  
• A focus on ad-hoc coalitions on specific issues. Rutte suggests a basic list: with the Germans on migration, trade, and the euro; with some central European countries on the EU internal market; with the French on climate change. In a country so brutally vulnerable to sea level rise, few Dutch deny climate change.

The search for informal coalitions is partly the traditional Dutch fear of the bigger players, meaning France and Germany in the present case, ganging up to push the Netherlands around. However, the Dutch are cautiously optimistic that the Germans won't sell them out. In fact, the Germans see the BWC as acting well more in German interests than not. Peter Altmaier, Germany's economy minister and a member of Angela Merkel's inner circle, has lent the "Gang of Eight" his tacit support.

Rutte is also investing in Emmanuel Macron: Rutte has visited the French president twice in Paris, and hosted Macron in The Hague in return. The relation has its tensions, Macron being focused on a strong EU with a hefty common budget, which isn't music to Dutch ears. Still, Rutte doesn't see any show-stoppers in the relationship, and suggests that a Franco-Dutch deal on the EU might be a model other EU members would follow. Besides, as noted above, fears expressed over Dutch politicians of a strong EU are partly for public consumption; and given threats from pushy Chinese, subversive Russians, US President Donald Trump's fondness for trade warfare, and Islamic terrorism, a stronger EU may not sound like such a bad thing to the Dutch public today.

Brexit threw the Dutch into uncertainty, with the result of driving them into the arms of Europe. They're still finding their way in the new order, but feel they can play a significant role in the union, holding the line against EU excesses. Rutte bristles at suggestions that his country is a bit player in the game; as THE ECONOMIST puts it, the reality of the Netherlands now is: "Not a mouse, and roaring."

* As for Macron, he went all-out in his defense of the European project in a speech before the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 17 April. He warned that "there seems to be a European civil war" between liberal democracy and rising authoritarianism. The EU, Macron said, needs to be more assertive in defense of democracy: "I don't want to belong to a generation of sleepwalkers that has forgotten its own past."

He condemned what he called "a fascination with the illiberal" in Europe. "I want to belong to a generation that will defend European sovereignty because we fought to obtain it. And I will not give in to any kind of fixation on authoritarianism."

In a debate with MEPs after his speech, Macron said he wanted to keep the UK close to the EU even with Brexit, but there could be "no cherry-picking in the single market", that Britain must give "full respect" for the freedoms of the EU single market: free movement of goods, services, capital, and people.

Beyond that, Macron identified areas of common European concern, such as tackling climate change and environmental problems, health, minority rights and privacy. He wants France and Germany to be leaders in eurozone reform, including turning the bailout fund -- the "European Stability Mechanism" -- into a "European Monetary Fund (EMF)", like the IMF. The concept is that the EMF would get a country's debt problems and other financial crises before they affected the rest of Europe. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats are wary of schemes in which, in effect or at least perception, bail out weaker EU members.

The 17 April speech was only a warmup for Macron's delivery of a speech to the US Congress on 25 April. Earlier in the day, Macron had performed a charm offensive on Donald Trump -- even embracing him and kissing him on the cheeks. Trump attempted to match the hands-on familiarity, but Macron seemed to hold the initiative in the contest. Macron then addressed Congress in fluent, if heavily accented, English, beginning by emphasizing the shared values of France and the US:

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After detailing the bonds between the two countries, Macron denounced the spirit of nationalist-populism, and its accompanying authoritarianism:

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Macron listed issues to be addressed, most significantly climate change:

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Macron spoke of resisting "fake news" -- apologizing if he stepped on someone else's copyright of the term, with a little laughter in response -- and terrorist propaganda, and spoke of joint efforts to deal with North Korea and the problems of the Middle East. As far as the Iran nuclear deal went, Macron implicitly warned Trump:

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Macron concluded on a ringing note:

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* As discussed by an editorial from BLOOMBERG.com ("Globalization Isn't Down for the Count" by Michael Schuman, 16 March 2018), only a few years ago, it seemed like globalization was dead. Nationalism was the watchword, with demagogues calling for raising walls on borders, populist leaders snubbing international pacts, Britain attempting to give up on Europe's grand experiment in peaceful integration. Globalization, in attempting to lower barriers and level the global playing field, was regarded as a fraud and a ripoff.

Donald Trump, provoked by self-serving Chinese economic policies, recently began to talk of raising tariff; simultaneously, Italian voters boosted parties that denounced immigrants and the euro. And yet, after the dust settled, it amounted to little.

After Trump's announcement on 1 March of broad tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, economists and business leaders warned him of job losses, damaged industrial competitiveness, and higher costs for businesses and consumers. The European Union promised to retaliate, while US stock markets fell. Trump's chief economic adviser resigned, and his Republican colleagues, inclined to humor him, pushed back, stood up to him, with more than a hundred members of Congress signing a letter protesting the exercise.

Trump characteristically doubled down, with Peter Navarro, his trade czar, saying there would be no exemptions. However, when the actual tariff plan was unveiled on 8 March, Trump left out Canada and Mexico, two of the largest steel exporters to the USA, and offered to leave out other close allies.

Things didn't turn out so different in Italy. In the 4 March national election, the anti-Europe parties -- the populist Five Star Movement, and a coalition including the immigrant-hating League -- won a plurality of the votes. There were fears that Italy would then attempt to pull out of the EU.

The fears were greatly exaggerated. Matteo Salvini, the usually hot-headed boss of the League, said that even though the euro "was, is, and remains a mistake," he had no intention of taking Italy off the currency -- adding that holding a Brexit-like referendum over Italy's membership in the EU was, he said, "unthinkable."

Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio also muted his party's calls for a referendum, stating that "we want to remain part of the EU and the euro zone." The reality is that most Italians want to stay in the EU, and are not so upset about the euro. In a late 2017 poll, 59% of Italians supported the single currency. There is a general realization that giving up on the EU and the euro would be financial disaster, with investors dumping Italian stocks, bonds, and other assets in haste.

China, heavily dependent on exports, is wary of a rollback in globalization as well. True, the Chinese government makes no secret of efforts to boost the country's manufacturing base, even while officials in Washington DC fume over heavy hand of Chinese government subsidies. However, the Chinese are aware of the anger -- Beijing having recently sent Liu He, one of its most influential economic mandarins, to Washington DC to get trade talks with the USA on a positive track. The relationship between the two countries is unhealthy, but it hasn't yet broken down into outright combat.

America's economic nationalists complain that free traders care too much about alleged economic efficiency, and not nearly enough about a declining middle class or threats to national security. America's vital industries and the workers employed by them are at risk, they say, in a global economy where others don't play fair. True, globalization does have its problems: foreign competition has driven down some American industries, and undercut a faction of American workers. It is also true that US trading partners don't always play fair. Nonetheless, the reality is that protectionism doesn't solve the problems, helping a few at best while hurting the rest.

Trump's metals tariffs might be good for a handful of steelmakers and their employees, but the cost would be passed on to everyone else -- in higher prices, lower sales, and fewer jobs. Most Americans understand this: a Pew poll released in November 2017 reported that 56% of Americans believe the North American Free Trade Agreement is good for the USA, against only 33% who say it's bad. Navarro and his kind might be willing to pay more for their cars or washing machines and to protect steelworkers at the expense of others, but most of their fellow Americans are not.

Pointing to a closed steel mill or attacking poor immigrants makes for good TV; but closing doors to the world hurts those watching at home. Most people are smart enough to realize they get too many benefits from being connected to the global economy -- lower prices, more job opportunities, and bigger profits -- to risk of losing them. Trump, never one to give up easily, is not likely to abandon his protectionist instincts; but all that means is that he will continue to shuffle on, clumsily and often ineffectually, pretending he has a fix to problems he doesn't understand.

* For the moment, the global economy is booming, with the stock market riding high. The Trump Administration has attempted to keep it riding high by loosening financial regulations. As discussed in an editorial by Free Exchange, THE ECONOMIST's rotating economics essayist, ("Financial Regulators Too Often Think: This Time Is Different", 27 January 2018), there's nothing new in this pattern, and it always ends badly.

The essay starts with: "For a phenomenon with such predictably bad outcomes, a financial boom is strangely seductive." Ten years ago, the world was in the grips of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; now soaring markets inspire a go-go enthusiasm, little tempered by caution.

Finance is inevitably prone to boom-&-bust cycles. When the economy is charging forward, profits and asset values grow; credit is easier to get as well, helping to fuel the surge. Complacency sets in, with talk of a "new normal", in which profits will grow forever, and there's no worries about credit risk.

However, the simple fact is that what goes up, will come down -- and when markets begin to fall, the complacent mindset quickly evaporates. Banks become stingier with loans; companies pile up debt and fire workers; unemployed workers can't pay their bills. Investors, frightened of losing everything on their holdings, unload them, with asset prices then falling faster and faster. Panic sets in. This is not rocket science.

In their book THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff look back over eight centuries of financial pratfalls, to find that investors always, always fall prey to financial excess. That's not at all surprising; the more unsettling reality is that governments, as a rule, not only do not anticipate a fall, they can make it worse.

There are certainly things governments can do to control the damage, such as ensure that banks have adequate reserves so they don't get caught short, or tighten up lending when investment begins to overheat. In reality, in the decade leading up to the 2008 crash, the USA rolled back bank regulations established in the wake of the Great Depression, encouraged loose trading rules, permitted large-scale bank consolidation, and allowed mortgage-lending standards to weaken.

Inevitably, after the 2008 debacle, controls were restored -- but now the Trump Administration, backed by a GOP-controlled Congress, is dismantling them again. To be sure, some of the deregulation is justifiable, and controls do remain in place; but we've seen this pattern before, and it suggests a day of reckoning down the road. Why governments fail to learn from mistakes is obvious. As Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber describe in their book FRAGILE BY DESIGN, governments are not impartial referees of the financial system, they are also dependent on it for their own financing needs, among other things. That means ongoing bargaining between bankers and politicians, in which the public interest may be short-changed.

In a recent IMF working paper, Jihad Dagher reviews ten financial crises, beginning with the 1720 collapse of the South Sea Bubble, and finds they had much in common, generally being preceded by periods in which governments rolled back regulations. The failures of the past fade in memory; politicians try to drive the boom, not merely to please voters, but in some cases to protect their own financial well-being.

Then comes the fall, with a political backlash, and a resurgence of regulation. Warren Buffett's famous financial maxim -- that only when the tide recedes can you see who has been swimming naked -- also applies to politics. The corollary is that, as long as the tide is high, voters can't see who's naked, and so politicians have an incentive to be reckless.

Markets are now showing signs of instability -- the lunatic thrashing over Bitcoin brings back memories of the circus atmosphere leading up to the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000 -- while interest rates are slowly creeping higher, giving markets a growing case of nerves. There's little doubt among the prudent that this time is not different and there will be a fall, the current boom having endured for longer than the historical average.

It's only a question of when the "Trump bump" turns into the "Trump slump". Trump didn't really create the bump, markets were climbing before he won the 2016 election; the most he's done is give encouragement to the excess of enthusiasm. It is impossible to show that the markets wouldn't have continued their climb, no matter who was elected, and it is ridiculous to think it can go on indefinitely. When will the party end? This year? The next? Who knows? Will we ever get out of this boom-&-bust cycle? That may be a task for a future civilization. [ED: The party ended abruptly in 2020.]

[FRI 27 APR 18] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (11)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (11): The first two clauses of Article I, Section 8, as appropriate to their significance, were for taxes and borrowing, to obtain monies needed by the Federal government to carry out its duties. This was a full about-face from the Articles of Confederation, which had given Congress no means of obtaining funds except to beg them from the states, which proved reluctant to provide them.

There was no explicit restriction in the 1st clause, the Taxing & Spending Clause, on how the taxes could be obtained, other than two stated in Section 9 -- getting ahead of the story a bit, Congress could not levy "direct" taxes, and also could not tax exports -- and, through the subordinate Uniformity Clause, a stipulation that Congress could not play favorites among states though selective tax policies.

As far as the 2nd clause -- the right to "borrow Money on the credit of the United States" -- went, that gave the Federal government the ability to obtain funds in the face of war or some other national emergency, with the money possibly obtained from foreign powers. Particularly in the case of foreign powers, who might attack the United States if debts were not repaid, the Federal government needed the ability to make good on its debts.

The 3rd clause, the Commerce Clause -- to regulate "Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" -- is regarded in modern times as focused on economic interactions -- but in the 18th century, the term "commerce" could fit with other interactions between entities, and would be better rendered as "affairs". In fact, during the convention there was a proposal for a distinctive clause for the Congressional regulation of "affairs" with the Indian tribes, but it seemed more appropriate to lump that consideration in with interstate or international affairs / commerce.

The next five clauses granted authority to Congress to make laws for:

• Naturalization of citizens as per the Naturalization Clause; and for bankruptcies.
  
  
• Coining money, regulating the national monetary system and dealing with counterfeiters, and establishing standards of weights and measures. These rights went to the Federal government because the Framers were tired of the chaos of states defining their own currencies and standards. Uniform standards were not a nitpicky detail, either, since it complicated commerce across state borders if weights and measures weren't standardized.
  
  
• Establishing post offices and post roads.
  
  
• Protection of what is now called "intellectual property", meaning patents and copyrights, as per the Copyright Clause.

The 9th clause is a bit puzzling, and is put off for the moment. The 10th through 16th clauses defined authority for military matters, including:

• Declaration of war, as per the War Clause.
  
  
• Establishment of an Army and Navy, with the rules of operation of such organizations the responsibility of Congress.
  
  
• Action against pirates, or others in violation of the "law of nations".
  
  
• To regulate privateering, and call up state militias "to suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions."

Appropriations for the army could not be for longer than two years -- a constraint not placed on the Navy -- reflecting the Framers' distrust of standing armies. The Framers tended to place great faith in militias, seeing them as the backbone of American land power. They also saw the militia as a defense against authoritarian government; not in the sense of taking up arms against the government in case of a difference of opinion, but if the government itself unambiguously overthrew the Constitution.

Consider, as an example, a president assuming dictatorial powers, arbitrarily overriding Congress and the judiciary, blatantly violating the laws. Militia, in that sense, were seen as part of checks and balances wired into the system. However, nobody envisioned armed citizens as taking the Constitution into their own hands; indeed, the fear generated by Shay's Rebellion had given strong impetus to the creation of Constitution, to come up with a system where citizens wouldn't be inclined to take up arms. The militias were instead seen as instruments of legitimate state authority against an illegitimate Federal government.

Generals like George Washington were not so sure about the combat utility of militias -- which is why the 16th Clause granted Congress the power of "organizing, arming, and disciplining" the militia. The relationship between the Federal government and the militia would nonetheless remain muddled, at least as long as militias, as they were understood at the outset, persisted.

The 17th clause also had its troublesome implications. Congress, in short, had legislative authority over the District of Columbia, the seat of the national government -- with the quirk that the District of Columbia had no representatives in Congress, and wouldn't have them for a long time -- as well as over military installations and other Federal holdings in the states. That would, of course, result in a long-running tug-of-war between the Federal government and the states, who would sometimes object to not having effective control over tracts of land within their borders. The presence of the Federal holdings in the states also further complicated the notion of a state seceding from the Union, as if it weren't problematic enough to begin with. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 26 APR 18] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: The Russians and the Chinese have been developing air-to-air missiles (AAM) that can substantially outrange the US AIM-120 AMRAAM missile. As discussed by an article from FLIGHTGLOBAL.com ("New Long-Range Missile Project Emerges In US Budget" by Stephen Trimble, 2 November 2017), the Pentagon has begun a study effort for a "long-range engagement weapon (LREW)" apparently intended to match Russian and Chinese efforts.

The LREW program is classified -- and given that the investigation is only getting started, there's likely not that much to talk about even if it wasn't. The US Air Force is also is developing two short-range weapons:

• The "Small Advanced Capabilities Missile (SACM)" -- a small, relatively cheap AAM, it appears to replace the AIM-9 Sidewinder,
  
  
• The "Miniature Self-Defense Munition (MSDM)" -- which is an anti-AAM small missile for self-defense.

Lockheed Martin has promoted a concept missile designated CUDA -- meaning of acronym unclear -- which is something like an AMRAAM cut down to half length, nicknamed the "HalfRAAM", and appears to be along the lines of SACM. Watch this space.

* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("AFRL Awards Final Component Contract For SHiELD Development" by Robin Hughes, 21 November 2107), the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to "design, develop, and industrialize" "Laser Advancement for Next-generation Compact Environments (LANCE)" element of the AFRL "Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD)" program.

The goal of SHiELD is to integrate a lightweight high-power laser system on a tactical aircraft -- fighter, attack aircraft, ETC -- to provide self-defense against surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles. AFRL wants to test the laser on a fighter by 2021. LANCE will be a high-powered fiber-optic laser array.

Earlier contracts in SHiELD were awarded to Northrop Grumman -- for a tracking and beam-focusing system, the exercise being labeled the "SHiELD Turret Research in Aero Effects (STRAFE)" -- and to Boeing -- for developing and integration of the pod for the SHiELD system, the effort being labeled the "Laser Pod Research & Development (LPRD)". The pod will perform thermal management, but power is likely to be generated by the aircraft carrying the pod.

* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("China's UAVs Proliferate in Middle East", 11 November 2017), Chinese-made drones are becoming popular with military forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, in part because the US has been reluctant to sell in those markets, lest the drones help promote further disorder. Chinese drones are now in service with the air forces of Iraq, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with reports that they have been obtained by Egypt and Jordan as well.

Some of these countries have also used these drones in combat. Saudi Arabia has employed the systems during the air campaign over Yemen, while Iraq has flown them in its ongoing campaign against the Islamic State group. The UAE has deployed several to Libya to support the Libyan National Army against Islamic fighters there.

These nations had requested to purchase armed versions of the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper, but were denied by the Obama administration due to concerns that selling into the region would break the international Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) rules, which attempt to prevent proliferation of technologies that enable the creation of delivery systems for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The UAE was granted permission to purchase unarmed Predators, known as the Predator XP.

The Trump Administration is, to no surprise, now trying to get around the MTCR restrictions -- but even if that happens, Chinese competition will be tough to beat. Beijing's success in the Middle East is based on two similar air systems, both clones of the MQ-1 Predator: the China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation (CASC) CH-4 AKA "Rainbow", and the Chengdu / Avic Wing Loong I, designated GJ-1 in the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force service. Estimates suggest the price of a CH-4 system is about a fifth that of an MQ-1. CASC is ramping up production of the CH-4, it appears to support purchases by Saudi Arabia.

Sales in the Middle East have encouraged the Chinese to expand their vision in drone sales. In April 2017, China's Avic company demonstrated a model of its "Wing Loong II" -- comparable to the US MQ-9 Reaper -- at an exhibition in Mexico. In June 2017, the Wing Loong II appeared at the Paris Air Show, as part of a display of Chinese-produced weaponry. In early 2018, the Chinese displayed a model of the "Star Shadow" drone, a stealthy diamond / flying wing aircraft, capable of surveillance or strike missions, with a payload of up to 400 kilograms (880 pounds). It does not appear to have flown yet, but the Chinese wouldn't have promoted it unless they were looking for export sales.

[WED 25 APR 18] SMART CONSTRUCTION

* SMART CONSTRUCTION: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("3D Printing And Clever Computers Could Revolutionize Construction", 3 June 2017), the chapel at King's College in Cambridge, UK, completed in 1515, is a marvel of Gothic style. The ceiling is particularly impressive, an elegant web of stone as seen from below -- and far stronger than it looks.

Building such structures was meticulous, highly-skilled work; too complicated and expensive for modern structures. They may be poised for a comeback, however, with computer-aided design and 3D printing permitting the design and construction of elaborate structures that combine style with utility and low cost.

As an example, consider a facility south of Doncaster in the UK run by Laing O'Rourke, a construction firm. The facility turns out precast concrete elements; it includes a system named "FreeFAB", one of the biggest 3D printers in the world, with a nozzle moving about a gantry 30 meters long, 3.5 meters wide, and 1.5 meters tall (98 x 11.5 x 4.9 feet). FreeFAB doesn't print concrete; instead, it prints forms made of a special wax for precast panels. The panels are for Crossrail, Europe's biggest construction project, which is digging a new east-west railway line across London.

FreeFAB is the first 3D printing tech used in a large construction. There have been efforts to print concrete directly, but laying concrete down in layers tends to weaken it, possibly leading to delamination. The precast elements produced by the wax molds don't have that problem. FreeFAB, designed by Australian architect James Gardiner, allows automated construction of highly elaborate molds. The molds that FreeFAB turns out might take more than a week to build using traditional methods; FreeFAB turns them out in three hours. FreeFAB also generates less waste, since unlike traditional molds, the wax can be recycled and re-used. It took Gardiner three years to find a wax that can be printed, milled, and recycled.

The FreeFAB system is still being debugged, with the facility turning out precast elements using molds produced by FreeFAB or by traditional methods as necessary. If it can be made to work well enough, Laing O'Rourke plans to spin the facility off as a separate company.

Philippe Block, an architectural engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, would be a natural customer for the firm. Block makes floors that have the flowing, veined look of biological membranes. Only a few centimeters thick, their elaboration bring to mind the chapel ceiling at King's College. They are lightweight, with only about a third of the mass of a typical floor slab, but very strong, being in the form of shallow vaults, in which compression paths distribute the load.

Block is now collaborating with Gardiner on a demonstration building in the Zurich suburbs, with FreeFAB being used to print molds for pouring floor segments. Gardiner has further ambitions, thinking of using ductal concrete -- reinforced with steel fibers that make it lighter than concrete reinforced with steel rods but just as strong -- to build lightweight bridges that could cross rivers in a single span. That's a project for the future, but the pieces are coming into place.

[THU 24 APR 18] EU GDPR FOR DATA RIGHTS

* EU GDPR FOR DATA RIGHTS: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.COM/BUSINESSWEEK ("It'll Cost Billions for Companies to Comply With Europe's New Data Law" by Jeremy Kahn, Stephanie Bodoni, and Stefan Nicola, 21 March 2018) on 25 May 2018, the European Union's "General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)" will go into effect, to protect the data security and privacy of EU citizens.

The GDPR took a decade to put together and applies to any business, anywhere on Earth, that handles the personal data of European residents. The rules cover almost everything that can be linked to an individual: addresses, charge card numbers, travel records, web search history, computer ID codes, biometric data, and so on.

The world's 500 biggest corporations are expected to spend a total of $7.8 billion USD to comply with GDPR. Businesses must appoint an EU resident as liaison with regulators, and many larger companies are required to designate a "data protection officer" responsible for compliance. Microsoft has 300 engineers working to ensure that its software is GDPR-compliant. At Krones AG, a 15,000-employee German maker of bottling equipment, almost 60 people are involved in GDPR preparations.

Julian Saunders -- chief executive officer of Port, a UK startup selling software to assist companies in privacy control -- says GDPR compliance is painful: "The bigger an organization is, the bigger a nightmare it is." Many companies outside Europe didn't see it coming until it was almost upon them, and tech industry observers don't believe even half the companies will be GDPR-compliant by the end of 2018.

The difficulties in compliance are greatly aggravated by the fact that many of the law's provisions remain ill-defined. What, precisely, is the difference between "consent" and the "explicit consent" GDPR demands for sensitive data, like criminal records? Similarly, although companies can claim a "legitimate interest" in data that outweighs privacy concerns, how is that legitimate interest defined? Certainly, if Amazon.com sells product to customers, the company has a perfect right, indeed a necessity, to keep a detailed record of the sale -- and of course knows better than to tell the world about it. However, what about a company that supports itself via targeted advertising? Without the ads, the company is out of business.

The GDPR imposes a list of other requirements:

• Companies can no longer bury data collection policies in an eye-glazing list of "terms and conditions".
  
  
• They must certify that their processes minimize impact on individual privacy rights.
  
  
• They may collect only the data needed for immediate purposes. They can't simply hoover up information, on the expectation of exploiting it later.
  
  
• Larger businesses must keep records of the data they hold, why they have it, how long they'll keep it, and how they protect it.
  
  
• GDPR gives consumers the right to see the personal data an organization holds about them, and they have a "right to erasure," meaning they can ask that the data be deleted, and don't have to give a reason.
  
  
• If any customer data is lost, destroyed, or stolen -- from a hack, losing a notebook computer with customer data on the hard drive, or backup media lost in a fire -- businesses have 72 hours to inform regulators.

Courts have been debating EU privacy rules for two decades; GDPR only promises to intensify the debate. Wim Nauwelaerts -- a lawyer with Sidley Austin in Brussels, says each country has enough discretion under GDPR to lead to a lot of differences -- forcing companies with operations across Europe to comply with a chaos of different regulations. Nauwelaerts asks: "What was the purpose, then, of having a GDPR in the first place?"

* In very closely related news, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by Congress on 10 and 11 April. Facebook is under severe pressure, mostly due to the fact that political advertising company Cambridge Analytica mined millions of Facebook accounts without users' consent, and used the data to boost the Trump campaign.

In reality, the grilling was more like a light toasting, Zuckerberg sailing through the inquisition effectively unharmed. The first problem with the event for Congress was that the hearing had a high public profile, and so there were many members of Congress in attendance -- meaning no one of them had the time to interrogate Zuckerberg in much detail. More significantly, many of them didn't know enough about the issues to ask sensible questions. Senator Orrin Hatch (R:UT) asked: "How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?"

Zuckerberg replied, keeping a straight face: "Senator, we run ads." Some of the clueless comments of the old geezers of the Senate went viral online.

There was some focused questioning, Senator Kamala Harris (D:CA) pressing Zuckerberg on his failure to explain how extensively Facebook tracked user activity beyond Facebook-owned platforms, and why the company did not inform users in 2015 that their data had been shared with Cambridge Analytica.

However, Zuckerberg knew what line to follow, and followed it repetitively. Did he take ownership? Of course he did. Was Facebook responsible for protecting user content? It was. If a lawmaker said Facebook had done something wrong, Zuckerberg replied that the company was working to make it right. If he couldn't give an answer, he promised a reply later. It was just too easy for him; when Zuckerberg was offered break time from questioning, he replied, again with a straight face: "We can do a few more."

The media judgement on Zuckerberg was that his performance wasn't much more than smoke and mirrors. However, the reply would be: "What else might be expected?" Congress has no clear idea of how to tackle the online privacy issue. How could Zuckerberg be expected to make everything right, when lawmakers did not have any guidelines to show him the way? Under the circumstances, it seemed that he was doing as well as anyone might expect -- and nobody could expect anything all that satisfactory.

ED: Zuckerberg is a short fellow, about 170 centimeters (67 inches) tall, and he sat on a thick pad during his interrogation. Comedian Seth Meyers said: "That's his wallet." Comedians then suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- who is about 163 centimeters (64 inches) tall -- should have complained about not getting a pad of his own. That was unkind; although Sessions has troglodyte political views, he is generally respected in Congress as conscientious, honest, and civil.

[MON 23 APR 18] LEFT BEHIND (2)

* LEFT BEHIND (2): While inequality grew in the rich world, poor countries began to catch up economically. In hindsight, it was all but inevitable -- they had nowhere to go but up, and could get on board a charged-up global economic system. On the wider view of things, it was all for the good, but political leadership and economists were slow to catch on to what was happening. When countries with lots of low-wage workers begin trading with richer economies, pay for similarly-skilled workers converges to a median; those in poor countries get richer, those in rich countries get poorer.

Of course, it wasn't a case of everyone in the rich world falling behind, while everyone in the poor world benefited; there were benefits to both rich and poor countries in globalization, they just weren't evenly distributed on a geographic basis. Prosperity flowed to regions in a position to gain from globalization.

Companies, particularly manufacturers, tend to cluster together, to have access to suppliers, subcontractors, partners, pools of specialist labor. The cluster builds on itself, drawing workers to the area, attracted by employment opportunities and an environment congenial to their interests. Think of California's Silicon Valley, with its startups and venture capitalists, with the same sort of thing playing out in other industries. Financial firms cluster in New York because they are close to the banks that finance them, and clients that hire them, and there have access to a great pool of specialized talent.

Globalization makes those clusters all the more powerful, since firms then can make money from customers across the world. Business clout tends to flow to the global clusters that are the most effective. Financial firms in London outcompete those in Frankfurt; California's internet firms overwhelm the competition in Paris. Laggards either have to up their game, specialize, relocate, or go under -- ruthless, yes, but capitalism's like that. On the clearly positive side, global markets mean economies of mass production, while consumers get a wider choice of competitive goods.

In any case, the best performing firms and places have thrived in the new world order. Across a wide range of industries, the share of output generated by America's clusters has risen, sometimes dramatically. In the financial industry, their share of output rose from 18% to 29%; and in retail, wholesale, and logistics from 15% to 21% between 2002 and 2014. Since 2013, surveys show the share of high-salary tech jobs found in America's eight largest technology hubs has risen. Similarly, from 1997 to 2015 London's share of Britain's gross value added rose from 19% to 23%.

Ah, but what about the rest? One of the drivers of the UK's Brexit was a resentment of London as a global hub of commerce that was outpacing the rest of Britain. The resentment was overblown, it wasn't like London was bleeding the rest of the UK dry; but it did seem problematic, with the firms and places that weren't so well-placed falling behind in relative terms. Studies have shown that technology transfers between the world's globally-competitive firms take place rapidly. Unfortunately, within borders, it's a different story, laggard firms being slow to leverage technology from the aggressive firms.

Faced with decline, the sensible thing to do is relocate. In the most successful developing countries, people eagerly move to new centers of progress, as they did in America and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The population of Shanghai doubled from 1980 to 2010, just as Manchester's did from 1811 to 1841. Life in China's booming cities is not always easy, but many Chinese still prefer it to the stagnation and impoverishment of the countryside.

In the rich world, however, such mobility has declined. Relocation used to be ordinary in America; now it's more an exception, though it's still more common than it is in Europe. Each year, a bit over 2% of Americans move across state lines, whereas only 1.5% of Europeans move between regions within their home country -- and in spite of the EU's freedoms of movement, only 0.37% move from one country to another. Nonetheless, mobility in fading across the board.

Restrictive urban-planning rules in rich cities make housing unaffordable, even with higher pay in the rich cities. On the other side of the coin, government benefits and pension payments mean people are no longer forced to move out of poor areas -- and indeed, given the costs of living in poor areas are lower, there's a clear economic incentive to stay. State and local benefits reduce mobility as well: as per one estimate, the pension of a teacher who spends 30 years in one school system is about twice that of a teacher who splits her career between two.

Moving is troublesome, and people usually need to have a good reason to pull up stakes. Unless a person making the move is fleeing an intolerable environment, it generally means giving up social connections, abandoning networks of friends. Youngsters tend to migrate from their childhood homes to find a life elsewhere; once they get settled, it's harder to move, and it continues to get harder the older they get. Aging has other effects: adult children may need to care for elderly parents, while healthy grandparents can help raise the grandchildren. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 20 APR 18] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (10)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (10): The 3/5ths Clause of Article I remains, in hindsight, an unsettling element of the Constitution. Less disturbingly, members of Congress were granted, in Section 6, a limited immunity from arrest -- only for a class of civil cases, the idea being to protect members of Congress from legal harassment during a legislative session -- while they were in Congress, or in transit to or from congressional sessions. Members of Congress could also say anything they liked during a legislative session, with no fear of legal repercussions. However, as described in Section 5, Congress did have the right to judge the qualifications of its members, and discipline them if judged necessary.

Both houses chose their own officers as they saw fit -- as it would turn out, both parties would have majority leaders in both houses of Congress, with the House majority leader generally being the Speaker of the House, the body's presiding officer. However, the Constitution only dictated that there be a House Speaker, not how the Speaker will be chosen, and the majority leader rule is not a rigid one. The presiding officer of the Senate was the vice-president -- though the vice-president had no vote, except to break a tie. The Constitution specified a "president pro tempore" for the Senate, to take the place of the vice president when necessary.

The fact that the vice president could break a tie vote was different from normal parliamentary procedure of the era, in which a tie vote was the same as a NO vote. Obviously, this was done to give a bit of an edge to the executive branch, permitting the executive to tip the scales if they were evenly balanced.

Note that it took a two-thirds vote for a house of Congress to expel a member. It should be noted in this context that the Constitution did not explicitly define normal voting rules; the unstated assumption was that, by default, votes would be by a simple majority. Although underlined by the fact that the Constitution did declare exceptions, like the 2/3rds rule for expulsion, the majority-vote rule is not a rigid one.

* Of course, having defined the structure and general rules of operation of Congress, there was the issue of the "enumerated powers" of Congress, as listed at length in Section 8 -- including:

• The power to tax, through the "Taxing & Spending Clause", for defense and the general welfare of the nations -- as per the subordinate "General Welfare Clause" -- with the provision that taxes be uniform -- as per the subordinate "Uniformity Clause".
  
  
• The power to regulate commerce, through the "Commerce Clause", incorporating the subordinate "Foreign Commerce Clause", "Interstate Commerce Clause", and "Indian Commerce Clause".
  
  
• The power to regulate the naturalization of foreign-born citizens, through the "Naturalization Clause".
  
  
• The power to regulate patents and copyrights, under the "Copyright Clause".
  
  
• The power to declare war, under the "War Clause".
  
  
• The power to govern districts in the USA under Federal control, under the "Enclave Clause".
  
  
• A power to take any action not denied by the Constitution to perform its duties, under the "Necessary & Proper Clause" AKA "Elastic Clause".

That's only highlights, Section 8 having a total of 18 clauses:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

[THU 19 APR 18] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for March included:

-- 01 MAR 18 / GOES S -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2202 UTC (local time + 4) to put "GOES S" AKA "GOES 17" into orbit, this being the second next-generation geostationary weather satellite for NASA and NOAA. GOES-S was built by Lockheed Martin and had a launch mass of 5,192 kilograms (11,466 pounds). It was the second of four to be launched through 2024. The booster was in the "541" vehicle configuration with a 5-meter (16.4-foot) fairing, four solid rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

-- 06 MAR 18 / HISPASAT 30W-6 -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 0533 UTC (local time + 5) to put the "Hispasat 30W-6" geostationary comsat into orbit for Hispasat of Madrid. It was built by Space Systems / Loral, and had a launch mass of about 6,100 kilograms (13,400 pounds). It was placed in the geostationary slot at 30 degrees west longitude -- replacing the aging Hispasat 30W-4 spacecraft, launched in September 2002 -- to provide communications across the Atlantic, using three communications payloads:

• 40 Ku-band transponders, focusing on two coverage areas in Europe and North Africa, and over the Americas ranging from Canada to Patagonia.
  
  
• 10 C-band transponders, providing communications services to the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America.
  
  
• Seven high-rate Ka-band beams, covering Spain, Portugal, other regions in Europe, plus North Africa. The Ka-band payload provided internet connectivity to rural areas in Spain and Morocco through a partnership between Hispasat and Eurona Wireless Telecom, a Spanish communications company.

The comsat also carried a modular microsat named PODSat, flown by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. PODSat was ejected by the comsat; no further details were released. Due to high seas, the Falcon 9 booster was not recovered.

-- 09 MAR 18 / O3B F4 -- A Soyuz ST-B booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1710 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the fourth set of four satellites for O3b Networks in orbit. The satellites were built by Thales Alenia Space; they carried a Ka-band relay payload with ten spot beams. They were put into an orbit with an altitude of 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), joining 12 other O3B satellites, launched in 2013 and 2014. O3b provides broadband service to international businesses & organizations.

-- 17 MAR 18 / LKW 4 -- A Chinese Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0710 UTC (local time - 8) to put an Earth observation payload designated "LKW 4" into orbit. It was announced as an Earth survey satellite, but was judged to be a military optical surveillance satellite.

-- 21 MAR 18 / SOYUZ ISS 54S (ISS) -- A Soyuz FG booster was launched from Baikonur at 1744 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 54S" AKA "MS-08" crewed space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) support mission. The crew included Oleg Artemyev of Russia's RKA (2nd space flight), Drew Feustel of NASA (3rd space flight), and Ricky Arnold of NASA (2nd space flight). The capsule docked with ISS's upper Poisk module two days after launch, with the Soyuz crew joining the ISS Expedition 55 crew of Anton Shkaplerov, Scott Tingle, and Norishige Kanai.

-- 29 MAR 18 / GSAT 6A -- An ISRO Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 2 booster was launched from Sriharikota at 1126 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the ISRO "GSAT 6A" geostationary comsat satellite into space. GSAT 6A had a launch mass of 2,140 kilograms (4,720 pounds); the satellite carried 10 S-band / 1 C-band transponders and demonstrated advanced technologies, including a 6-meter unfurlable antenna and other network technologies for future satellite-based mobile communications applications. Unfortunately, contact with the satellite was lost after it reached orbit.

-- 29 MAR 18 / EMKA (COSMOS 2505) -- A Soyuz 2-1v booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1738 UTC (local time - 4) to put a classified satellite designated "EMKA" into orbit. It was based on a new satellite bus.

-- 29 MAR 18 / BEIDOU 3M x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1750 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put two "Beidou 3M" navigation satellites into orbit. These were medium Earth orbit satellites, using a new bus with a phased array antenna for navigation signals, plus a laser retroreflector, and a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds) each.

-- 30 MAR 18 / IRIDIUM NEXT 41:50 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1414 UTC (local time + 7) to put ten "Iridium Next" satellites low-orbit comsats into orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage had been flown on a previous mission; it was not recovered.

-- 31 MAR 18 / GAOFEN 1 x 3 -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0322 UTC (local time - 8) to put a triplet of "Gaofen (High Resolution) 1" civil Earth observation satellites into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. They followed a Gaofen 1 pathfinder satellite launched in 2013.

The Gaofen 1 satellites were based on the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) small satellite bus designed; they were built by China Spacesat Company LTD, the commercial subsidiary of CAST. Each satellite had a launch mass of 805 kilograms (1,775 pounds), carrying a payload including a 2-meter (6.5-foot) resolution CCD camera; an 8-meter (26.25-foot) resolution multi-spectrum imager; and a 16-meter (52.5-meter) resolution wide-field multi-spectrum imager.

[WED 18 APR 18] DIVERSE RIBOSOMES

* DIVERSE RIBOSOMES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("There Are Millions Of Protein Factories In Every Cell / Surprise, They're Not All The Same" by Mitch Leslie, 21 June 2017), it is a basic fact of genetics that the double-stranded DNA molecule codes for proteins, with DNA producing a single-stranded "messenger RNA (mRNA)" molecule that is read by a cellular organelle called a "ribosome" to turn out the protein.

The traditional view was that one ribosome was pretty much like another, and can synthesize any protein. However, a recent study suggests that some ribosomes, like modern factories, are specialty manufacturers, only producing certain classes of proteins. Such tailored ribosomes might give cells additional control over what proteins are generated, and could also account for certain puzzling afflictions.

The question of if ribosomes specialize is not really new, and some researchers remain unconvinced that they do. Others have been impressed by the study. Jonathan Dinman -- a molecular biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park -- says: "This is really an important step in redefining how we think about this central player in molecular biology."

A single mammalian cell may contain as many as 10 million ribosomes; the cell can devote up to 60% of its energy to constructing them from RNA and 80 different types of proteins. The focus on ribosome production is not surprising, since they're the source of the proteins required by the cell. Dinman says: "Life evolved around the ribosome."

There have been hints of the specialization of ribosomes for decades. For example, molecular and developmental biologist Maria Barna -- of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California -- and colleagues reported in 2011 that mice with too little of one ribosome protein have short tails, extra ribs, and show other anatomical defects. That suggested the protein shortage was due to trouble with ribosomes specialized for manufacturing proteins key to embryonic development.

Actually pulling a signal out of the noise is troublesome. For one thing, determining the concentrations of proteins in naturally occurring ribosomes has been difficult. In the paper, Barna and her team determined the abundances of various ribosome proteins with a method known as "selected reaction monitoring" -- which is based on mass spectrometry, in which molecules are sorted by weight.

When the researchers analyzed 15 ribosomal proteins in mouse embryonic stem cells, they found that nine of the proteins were equally common in all ribosomes -- but four were absent from about a third or the ribosomes. Among 76 ribosome proteins measured with another mass spectrometry-based method, seven varied enough to suggest ribosome specialization.

If ribosomes specialized, then what proteins did they specialize in? A technique known as "ribosome profiling" allowed the researchers to pinpoint which mRNAs the organelles were reading, and so determine their end products. The specialized ribosomes often concentrated on proteins that collaborated to perform particular tasks; for example, one type of ribosome built several proteins that control growth.

A second type generated out all the proteins that allow cells to use vitamin B12. Barna says that it was surprising to find that each ribosome focused on proteins crucial for a certain function: "I don't think any of us would have expected this."

Ribosome specialization might explain the symptoms of several rare diseases, known as "ribosomopathies", in which cellular organelles are defective. In "Diamond-Blackfan anemia", for instance, the bone marrow that generates new blood cells is defective, while victims also have birth defects such as small heads and misshapen or missing thumbs. The researchers suggest these different symptoms might be the result of a defect in a specialized ribosome, the problem being manifested in early development.

Molecular biologist Harry Noller of UC Santa Cruz suspects that the different ribosomes are just variations on a basis theme. One might think that in the distant past, ribosomes were indeed standard, but over time variations on them arose. If cells tailor their ribosomes, Noller says "the cheaper way to do it" would involve modifying a universal "stem" ribosome structure, instead of building custom ones.

[TUE 17 APR 18] THE AMAZON EFFECT

* THE AMAZON EFFECT: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Amazon Effect Is Hiking Pay and Fueling Land Rush in US" by Michael Sasso & Steve Matthews, 27 February 2018), the rise of online retailers like Amazon.com has led to the decline of brick-&-mortar retailers. Of course, that doesn't mean retailing is at all dead, it just means it's changing form.

Jackson County in Georgia, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Atlanta, is on a warehouse boom. Since 2015, at least 31 e-commerce fulfillment centers and other distribution depots have opened, or are under development, with the list of participants including Amazon, Williams-Sonoma, and FedEx.

Larry Feinstein -- chief executive officer of Hire Dynamics, a regional employment service -- says the local labor market was already tight when Amazon opened a 1,000-person fulfillment center in the county in 2017, and since then his firm has been scrambling to find warm bodies. According to Feinstein: "Amazon comes in and sucks up all the labor. Every one of our clients up there has raised their pay rates at least $2."

Forklift drivers are particularly in demand; they can get at least $15 USD an hour, and up to $17.50 USD in some places in Georgia. Unskilled workers have similarly seen their wages bumped up to $12 or $13 USD an hour -- at least 30% more than what most cashiers in the state earn, and a bit more than what retail salespeople earn. Unemployment in Jackson County was 3.3% in December 2017, about a percentage point below the US national average.

As retail outlets fade, warehouses are on a roll, changing the economies of areas that were once based on farms or factories. Between 2013 and 2017, US developers added about 78.5 million square meters (848 million square feet) of warehouse space, near to three times the capacity built over the five previous years. The number of stock clerks and order fillers -- as they're designated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' designation-- grew by almost 311,000 in the decade to 2016.

It's not just workers who are in short supply. Utilization rates for existing industrial space are very high, while the shortage of tracts big enough to site a warehouse, as well as with access to highways and utilities, has caused industrial land prices to double in a few years.

Companies have always put their distribution hubs on the edge of urban areas. However, the "edge" keeps creeping outward as the size of warehouses has doubled to a typical 92,500 square meters (a million square feet). That means long commutes that are not only time-consuming, but a troublesome financial drain for low wage earners. Amazon, which has 70 fulfillment centers in the USA, operates shuttles for employees at some locations, and hands out gift certificates to those willing to carpool.

Jackson County residents also have to deal with complications due to the warehouse boom -- such as monster traffic jams that not only make it hard for the locals to get around, but also are bad for businesses, since customers can't get to them. Some locals have showed up at county meetings wearing red tee shirts marked: NO MORE WAREHOUSES. Some officials are ambivalent, uncertain that local services are adequate to support the warehouses, and concerned that automation will gradually kill off the jobs the warehouses bring.

Others believe the warehouses are a net plus. Jim Shaw of the Jackson County Area Chamber of Commerce says that locals who once depended on its now-shuttered textile mills or its still-active poultry processing industry are finding night shift work in warehouses: "We've filled a lot of jobs in the distribution centers over the past few years, I often wonder if, as hard as that work may be, it seems a lot easier than working in a broiler house."

* ED: If a company operated a free shuttle-bus service to handle the commute from the city to a facility, that would actually be a good deal for workers, even if the commute were an hour each way. A worker could sleep on the bus and then have a shorter night, without losing much time out of the day for the commute; or, if the bus had a wi-fi connection, surf the internet and otherwise have fun.

[MON 16 APR 18] LEFT BEHIND (1)

* LEFT BEHIND (1): As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Left In The Lurch", 21 October 2017), changes in industry, the advance of technologies, and the internationalization of commerce has awarded opportunities to those equipped to seize them. However, it has also inevitably meant losers as well.

Scranton, a city in north-east Pennsylvania state, went into decline from 1902, when the steel industry moved out. Coal remained important in keeping the city alive, at least up to 1959 -- when miners broke through the bed of the Susquehanna River. Twelve miners died; the longer-term calamity was that the flooding of the mines destroyed the coal-mining industry in the region. Today, the area is littered with shuttered factories. The city of Scranton just barely evaded bankruptcy in 2012. Nonetheless, more than a half-million people still live in Scranton and its outliers.

The same story can be seen elsewhere, not just in the USA, but in Britain, France, almost every developed country: cities that have been left behind by change, but linger on, impoverished. Politicians have tried to rescue Scranton, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade into infrastructure and renewal projects. One estimate suggests the state of Pennsylvania spent over $6 billion USD between 2007 and 2016 on corporate subsidies, more than any other state, for Scranton and other depressed regions in the state.

The efforts did not pay off well; obviously, policy-makers need to figure out better ways of dealing with the problem than just trying to throw money at it. They have to, since the problems are festering. Resentment, a feeling of being left behind in an age of globalization, led voters in north-east Pennsylvania to help hand Donald Trump the state. In much the same way, regions of Britain, like Teeside, voted for Brexit; and why the French in that country's economically troubled north favor the Front National of Marine le Pen.

Trump, Brexit, Marine le Pen are all about populist nationalism -- which equates, to a substantial extent, to anti-globalization. "Stop letting the rest of the world step on us!" the demagogues shout. "Stop letting weakling leadership sell us out! Put us in charge, and we'll make our country great again!" It's hot air, simplistic answers to difficult problems: nothing in their troglodyte agenda will make the Scrantons of the world a bit better off.

Libertarians, single-mindedly enthusiastic about the "magic of the market", are inclined to the "solution of no solution" -- just leave things be, so that thinking goes, and they'll fix themselves. That's not unreasonable on the face of it; indeed, mainstream economists once believed that inequalities between regions were inherently self-repairing. Rich places with more money than investment opportunities would sink money into poorer ones, seeing them as bargains, while technological innovation would float everyone's boats.

The history of the postwar period seemed to back up that optimistic scenario. Following World War II, underdeveloped industrialized countries, working from a low economic base, grew much faster than the more highly developed one. In 1950, for example, real output per person in Italy was 33% of that in America -- but by 1973, it was 62%. From 1880 to 1980, income gaps between American states closed at an average annual rate of 1.8%: real personal income per person in Florida grew from 33% of that in Connecticut, to 82%. Much the same was observed across Japanese prefectures and European regions.

At the same time, as globalization initially took root in industrialized countries, the gap between them and the rest of the world grew. American incomes, adjusted for living costs, were a bit less than nine times those in the world's poorest countries in 1870, but nearly 50 times larger by 1990. The disparity was less due to the impoverishment of undeveloped countries than to their failure to advance; those in industrialized countries had no cause to feel guilty that they were getting richer so much faster. The inequality between the haves and have-nots wasn't seen as so much of an issue, at least to the haves.

However, in the 1990s, the two trendlines began to change direction; regional inequality within rich countries increased, while poorer economies began catching up with richer ones. From that time, the rate of economic convergence between American states fell off; now the gaps are effectively static. Rich cities boomed, while struggling cities like Scranton fell further behind. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) found that, among its largely industrialized member countries, the average productivity gap between the most productive 10% of regions and the bottom 75% has widened by nearly 60% over the past 20 years. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 13 APR 18] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (9)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (9): The proportional representation scheme of the House of Representatives had two significant catches, summed up by the 3/5ths Clause: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... by adding to the whole Number of free Persons ... [and] three fifths of all other Persons."

The first catch was the apportionment of representatives among the states. Given a certain level of population, a state would get a roughly proportional number of representatives -- but left, in accordance with the principle of States' Rights, the electoral process up to the states, as stated in Section 4.

The Congress could in principle intervene in state electoral processes, but the bias was not to do so, unless things were going very badly in a state. Each state got a certain number of Congressional districts, but was under no Constitutional obligation to set them up fairly according to population. One district might have many citizens; another, well fewer citizens.

It was the second catch -- about "three fifths of all other Persons" -- that, as much as it tried to conceal it in ambiguity, revealed an ugly agenda and a national confusion in apportionment, since "other Persons" read as "slaves", and everybody knew it. On a modern reading, that seems like an outrageous declaration: slaves were only 3/5ths people? The true outrage, which the antislavery faction of the convention knew perfectly well, was that slaves were counted at all.

The 3/5ths Clause was a meaty bone thrown to the slave states, allowing them to obtain greater representation and power in the House on the basis of ownership of slaves, who had no real rights. A slave state could acquire more power by accumulating more slaves -- and it should be noted that Section 9 of Article I said, in so many words, that there would be no limitation of the slave trade before 1808. The 3/5ths Clause was also permanent, there being no intent to gradually phase it out -- though a case might have been made for doing so. No such case was made, and the slave states would, in the following decades, of course use their political slave subsidy to extend their power.

Yes, as modern apologists like to point out, the 3/5ths Clause also increased the potential tax obligation to the Federal government of the slave states, but only in principle; at the outset, the Federal government would obtain its revenue from levies on imports, rendering the tax assessment issue mostly irrelevant. Besides, if the only effect of the 3/5ths Clause on the slave states had been to increase their tax obligation, they wouldn't have wanted their slaves counted at all.

Indeed, during the convention, delegates from slave states had wanted slaves counted as full persons for purposes of representation; but not as persons for purposes of taxation. The 3/5ths Clause demonstrated the fundamental confusions of slavery, between a straddling of the fence between regarding slaves as persons, in some awkward political sense of the term, and regarding them as property, which is what they actually were. This was even more confused, because there were no other property requirements in the Constitution.

Those who, in modern times, sanctify the word of the original Constitution as absolute and unchallengeable ignore the fact that it was clearly loaded in favor of slavery, with built-in defects that would eventually have disastrous consequences. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 12 APR 18] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: In local tech news from Loveland, Colorado, our city emergency medical service (EMS) workers -- that is, the people who race to the scene of an accident in an ambulance -- have reported with pride their acquisition of leading-edge EMS technology, in the form of the Ferno "IN/X" robotic stretcher system, more officially the "Integrated Patient Transport & Loading System".

It's not a radical departure from older stretcher technology -- but it's slick, the primary improvement being an electrically-driven scissor legs to raise and lower the stretcher. Each set of legs can be raised or lowered independently, to help get up or down stairs, and to get the stretcher in or out of the ambulance. The height of the ambulance bed can be programmed into the stretcher to eliminate fussing around in an emergency. The ambulance bed, incidentally, is fitted with lockdowns to keep the stretcher in place should the vehicle roll over.

The INX has an array of LED lamps, with a flashing mode, to allow EMS personnel to "see and be seen". There are many other features, if many of them not all that different from those found on traditional stretchers -- including a stretcher bed that can be tilted to a seat configuration; equipment hanger hooks; a deployable IV pole; storage nets; a rack for an oxygen bottle; as well as equipment mounting platforms and rails. The INX is another example of just how much there can be to a technology that we take for granted and hardly think about.

* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Supercomputer Redesign Of Aeroplane Wing Mirrors Bird Anatomy" by Elizabeth Gibney, 4 October 2017), engineers have used a supercomputer, running software that mimics evolutionary processes, to design an aircraft wing that is as strong as a conventional aircraft wing, but far lighter.

Comparable optimization software has been around for decades, but it's only been used with smaller structures, such as individual wing components. Niels Aage -- an engineer at the Technical University of Denmark, near Copenhagen -- decided to tackle the 27-meter (89-foot) long wing of the Boeing 777 with the Curie supercomputer in Bruyeres-le-Chatel near Paris.

They took the 777 airfoil and broke it down into 1.1 billion "voxels" -- volume pixels, 3D pixels -- each about the size of the smallest Lego brick. This resolution was about 200 times greater than any earlier effort. The software began by simulating the force exerted on every block, and placing material in response to where the wing experienced loads. The program then went through hundreds of iterations, until it was able to provide a wing structure that could handle the stresses of flight with a minimum amount of material.

The resulting wing design looks like the original 777 wing from the outside, but does not contain the conventional wing spars, crossed by a series of supports. Instead, it looks like it had been grown: curved supports fan out at the trailing edge of the wing, resembling the bones in birds' wings, while intricate support structures in the leading edge look like the internal structure of a beak.

While the new wing is as structurally robust as the old, the new wing weighs 2% to 5% less than the original, resulting savings of hundreds of kilograms of weight -- in turn saving tens to hundreds of tonnes of fuel a year. According to Aage, the technique could be applied to other industries, for example to design high-rise buildings for earthquake-prone regions.

The design software is very computation-intensive, demanding a supercomputer to allow it to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. However, the software could be used to inform machine learning systems that would be able, after being suitably trained, to obtain similar designs with much less computing power. The new wing design is also too elaborate and intricate to be built by contemporary manufacturing methods; it could be built by 3D printing, but that's not practical for such a large assembly at present. Aage believes that the new wing design could be used to guide the design a more practical wing that could be build by conventional manufacturing methods.

* As discussed by a note from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New, Star-Shaped Structures Could Mean Longer Lasting Dental Fillings & Circuit Boards" by Rachel Crowel, 28 October 2016), dental fillings wear out eventually -- sometimes from fresh cavities, sometimes from acidity, sometimes from thermal expansion and contraction. Now, a team of researchers have developed a composite material that will stand up to thermal cycling.

It isn't just the composition of the material that gives it its special properties, it's the geometric configuration. The researchers used 3D printing to create an interlocked matrix made up of star-shaped cells -- like skeletons of pentagonal dice -- on a millimeter scale, made of a copper-based material for the outer frame and a polymeric material for the inner beams. The structure causes the matrix to shrink when heated, giving it a "negative thermal expansion".

Microscopic materials with negative thermal expansion have been demonstrated before, but they only shrank in two dimensions; the new material is the first to show shrinkage in three dimensions. The researchers found that by changing the concentration of copper present in the outer beams, they could tune the extent to which these structures shrank. When properly combined with materials that expand when heated, this shrinking composite material could be used to help products maintain their shape -- a useful property for machinery that has to endure tough thermal cycling, as well as teeth.

[WED 11 APR 18] THE SYNESTHESIA PUZZLE

* THE SYNESTHESIA PUZZLE: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("People With Synesthesia Sometimes 'See' Sound As Colors" by Michael Price, 5 March 2018), there are a small number of people, known as "synesthetes", whose senses are oddly scrambled. They may interpret a particular music note as "blue", for example, or find that certain words have a specific taste. Obviously, there's some neural scrambling in their brains, but nobody has figured out any of the details. Now, researchers have figured out genetic markers of synesthetes, as a first step towards acquiring a better understanding of the phenomenon.

For decades, many psychologists and neuroscientists were leery of studying synesthesia. It seemed a bit too loopy, and it was hard to know subjects claiming to be synesthetes weren't simply playing tricks on researchers. However, refined study methods have confirmed that, though there may be some tricksters out there, there are also subjects who have enhanced sense perception -- able to easily discriminate in tests between things ordinary folk have trouble telling apart.

Synesthesia has been thought to have a genetic linkage, since it tends to cluster in specific families. However, up to the present, nobody has been able to identify specific genes that might be responsible for the condition. Now a team led by neuroscientist Simon Fisher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has managed to spot candidate genes. The researchers used a gene-sequencing technique known as "whole-exome sequencing" that targets only the DNA that encodes proteins, cataloged virtually every significant DNA variant in three families in which synesthesia is common.

They obtained sequences from four or five synesthetes and at least one non-synesthete from each family, covering three generations. The synesthetes had a common variant of the condition, which crosswires perception of sound and color. The researchers managed to find 37 genes that predicted if a family member was a synesthete. There wasn't a neat genetic correspondence to the condition -- there was no "synesthesia gene" -- but on inspecting the cluster of genes, the team noticed that six of the variants were in genes related to the development of the connective feature of neurons known as "axons". Furthermore, these genes are expressed in both the auditory and visual cortices of the brain during childhood development.

That's particularly interesting, since brain imaging studies of synesthetes have suggested they might have an abnormally high number of neuronal connections. Fisher suspects that an unusually high degree of connectivity in certain brain regions might predispose people to have synesthesia.

The findings are tentative and need to be replicated. However, if they are validated, they may prove useful to autism researchers. Many victims of autism spectrum disorder also have an enhanced sensitivity to stimuli such as sounds or touch, and there's growing evidence that abnormal brain connections -- more in some regions, fewer in others -- may play a significant role.

* In somewhat related news, as discussed by another article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Babies Get Strokes, Too -- Here's How Their Brains Recover" by Roni Dengler, 18 February 2018), while strokes are stereotyped as an injury of the elderly, they can also strike babies -- it seems because birth is so stressful, and hard on a baby's circulatory system. However, unlike adults, babies who suffer a stroke in the region of the brain supporting language skills retain the ability to communicate.

A new study shows that teenagers who had strokes after birth had no particular language impairment. To investigate why not, the researchers imaged the brains of these teenagers while they listened to sentences read forward and backward. In healthy adults, this test makes language processing areas on the left side of the brain to light up with activity. That area was damaged in stroke survivors -- with activity having shifted to a region in the right hemisphere that's the mirror image of the normal left-hemisphere language region.

This right hemisphere region is almost never used for understanding language in healthy people, and adults who have had a stroke do not use it for speech processing. The researchers suspect that the infants have a window during development when the brain is flexible enough to bypass the damage; and believe that figuring out how that happens may help adults who have suffered strokes regain their ability to speak.

[TUE 10 APR 18] IPHONE ECONOMICS

* IPHONE ECONOMICS: As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Designed In California, Made In China: How The iPhone Skews US Trade Deficit" by Adam Jourdan, 21 March 2018), American President Donald Trump loves to send tweets from his Apple iPhone -- often complaining about China's "$375 billion USD trade deficit" with the USA. However, a closer look at that iPhone throws that figure into confusion.

The big trade imbalance between the US and China is due, in large part, to Americans buying Chinese electrical goods and tech. However, as the iPhone shows, Americans are not necessarily buying Chinese products; the iPhone is an American product, with parts from a global network of suppliers, and is only assembled in China. Reflecting the discussion of globalized manufacturing run here in 2017, China is only getting a small part of the money.

For example, the components for the Apple iPhoneX are estimated to cost a total of $370.25 USD. Of that, $110 goes to Samsung Electronics of South Korea for the display, while $44.45 goes to Japan's Toshiba Corporation and South Korea's SK Hynix for memory chips. The rest of the components are supplied by vendors from Taiwan, the US, and Europe. Assembly of the iPhone X in China -- by contract manufacturers like Foxconn -- only accounts for 3% to 6% of the product's manufacturing cost, and much less of its retail cost. Global bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO) believe the current schemes for accounting trade deficits don't factor in where value is added.

Rethinking the accounting schemes could make a big difference. Apple shipped 61 million iPhones from China to the USA in 2017. Using the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus as a baseline, the manufacturing cost is about $258 USD per phone. Multiplying that by 61 million means that iPhones added $15.7 billion USD to the US trade deficit with China, about 4.4% of the entire deficit -- and about 22% of the $70 billion USD in cell phones and household goods the US imported from China.

However, the manufacturing value doesn't include the intellectual property value Apple adds through engineering and design work done in its headquarters in Cupertino CA, as well as margins taken by distributors. The iPhone X has a manufacturing cost of about $400 USD, an $800 USD wholesale cost, and a $1,200 USD unsubsidized retail cost. Of the list price, only a small fraction ends up in the pocket of the Chinese. When a user asks Siri, Apple's digital assistant, where she's from, she replies: "Like it says on the box: I was designed by Apple in California."

Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics research at Oxford Economics, comments that the global supply chains used to manufacture products like the iPhone means that a trade fight between the US and China would also nail innocent bystanders: "That is an important reason why US-China trade friction will cause 'collateral damage', especially in other Asian economies."

Kuijs says that if value-added terms are factored in, the US trade deficit with China was only $239 billion USD in 2017, 36% lower than the headline number. Apple management does say they are trying to obtain more suppliers in the USA. What that means in practice is that Apple is attempting to promote automated production in the US that will source parts at equal or less cost than those from elsewhere. To be sure, that's all for the good as far as Trump is concerned, but those automated plants won't generate so many jobs in themselves -- and will only accelerate the end of the era of low-skill, high-wage labor.

The talk of a trade war clearly has an element of show. Major US corporations and trade associations have pleaded with the White House not to slap tariffs on China -- warning they would be "particularly harmful" to the US economy and consumers, with US stock markets also getting the jitters from the trade war talk. A 10% tariff levied on Chinese electronics imports would slow the growth of US output by $163 billion USD over the next 10 years, and a 25% tariff would slow output by $332 billion USD, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. Kuijs believes that restraint will prevail, since all-out trade war "would cause major economic damage globally."

* A broadly related article from ECONOMIST.com ("It Ain't Necessarily So", 10 March 2018), started out with:

BEGIN QUOTE:

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The article went on to detail the reasons why it is wrong:

• The trade deficit means that Americans are prosperous enough to consume more than the country produces. This is a bad thing?
  
  
• It also means that the USA owes money to the rest of the world, in the form of low-yield bonds. The rest of the world likes to buy American bonds, and America benefits from selling them.
  
  
• Trying to use tariffs to eliminate the trade deficit is self-defeating. By reducing foreign trade, foreigners will get fewer dollars. That means a stronger dollar, which makes American exports less attractive, with the result that the trade deficit remains the same. That doesn't even factor in the reality that, if the US sets up trade barriers, so will America's trading partners, further choking off US exports.
  
  
• Trying to use tariffs to protect jobs backfires, too. Consider Trump's aluminum and steel tariffs. They're intended to help America's metal producers -- but they hurt all of America's metal consumers, who have to pay higher prices. It's a truism: one can only protect producers at the expense of consumers, and all producers are, one way or another, consumers. Trade protectionism helps a handful of producers, while imposing a penalty not only on everyone else, but directly or indirectly on themselves as well.
  
  
• Besides, the major issue in the decline of jobs in US manufacturing is ever-expanding automation. Attempting to halt automation would render the businesses uncompetitive, and help kill them off.
  
  
• Engaging in tariff / trade warfare instead of working through the WTO is another self-defeating blunder. Trying to get nations that are economically competing in the global economy to play fair requires an impartial referee to pass judgement on the inevitable conflicts. Discard the referee, and the result is a spiral of conflict that does no one any good.

There's a lot of complaint over economic globalization, but it's the reality; it's not going away because people complain; it does pose difficulties, but on the whole we're better off with it. It makes no more sense to reject global commerce than it would to blow all the bridges across America's borders. Trump's tantrums over America's trade deficit are made even more ironic by his willingness to run up, and willfully ignore, staggering US government budget deficits. The article concludes by pointing to Trump's belief -- bolstered by his egotism and a booming US economy -- that "trade wars are easy to win":

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

[MON 09 APR 18] UNDERSTANDING AI (18)

* UNDERSTANDING AI (18): The concept of "generative adversarial networks (GAN)" was discussed earlier in this series. An article from TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.com ("The GANfather" by Martin Giles, 21 February 2018), took a closeup of Ian Goodfellow, who came up with the idea.

It all began in 2014, when Goodfellow went out to a Montreal night spot to celebrate the graduation of a fellow doctoral student. The conversation, of course, tended toward the technical, with other members of the party commenting that they were working on an artificial intelligence system that could make up photos on its own.

AI researchers were already tinkering with artificial neural networks (ANN) as "generative" systems to come up with plausible data, but weren't having much luck. Images of a computer-generated face, for example, might be blurry or missing ears. Goodfellow's colleagues wanted to leverage off an elaborate statistical analysis of images to do the job. Goodfellow thought that would require too much number-crunching to be workable ... but then, over beers, he had a brainstorm: why not pit two neural networks against each other?

The others were skeptical, but the more Goodfellow thought about the idea, the more exciting it seemed. When he got home, he coded into the dark hours of the morning, and then gave his new system a try. It worked right away -- and so the GAN was born.

In 2014, AI was already deep into "supervised learning" schemes, in which AI systems are trained by giving them extensive sets of examples in their target application. However, supervised learning systems have no imagination; they don't know any more than they can learn from examples, and it requires a lot of examples to teach them anything useful. That's not only labor-intensive and costly, such systems don't cope well with input data that's outside in their training set.

What Goodfellow proposed was "unsupervised learning", in which an AI system (mostly) generates its own data set and trains itself. There's no need to build up a huge training set; the system, working from a baseline training set, can devise a big a training set as desired on on its own, one that's more thorough and lets less to slip through the cracks. Goodfellow is now a research scientist on the Google Brain team, at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. He's an AI superstar, if not by any intent of his own, calling his prominence "a little surreal."

GANs operate by rivalry between two ANNs, engaged in a competition that's compared to a counterfeiter working against a banker to come up with better counterfeits. The two networks do have to be given an initial modest baseline training set, a few hundred samples, to get a grasp of the basic features of their target, but then they do the rest of the training on their own. The first ANN, the generator, produces artificial outputs, such as photos or handwriting, in effect interpolating between the gaps in the baseline set. The second, the discriminator, compares the generator data with genuine images from the original data set, and tries to determine which are real and which are fake, screening against interpolations inconsistent with the baseline set. The discriminator tells the generator the result, with the generator refining its counterfeit data. Over iterations, the discriminator finds it ever more difficult to detect the fakes.

In 2017, researchers at chip-maker Nvidia, which is heavily involved in AI, created a GAN that, starting with an initial training set of celebrity photos, created the faces of fake celebrities. Not all the fakes were convincing, but a number of them were -- faces that looked familiar, but nobody could name who they were.

GANs are not wildly imaginative. If trained to create dog photos, a GAN will generate a convincing fake image of a dog, but only a dog like those that were found in its initial training set -- say, a fake dog with a different pattern of spots than a real one. The quality of the initial training set makes a big difference, too. For example, a GAN began producing pictures of cats with random letters integrated into the images -- because it pulled in pictures of cats with text labeling from the internet, and didn't know to screen the text out.

GANs can be touchy as well. If the discriminator is too easy to fool, the generator's output won't look realistic. Trying to get the generator and discriminator in sync so they work together can be difficult. If they don't, they can produce bizarre results, like images of dogs with two heads. There are also things that simply don't interpolate well, and so don't work with GANs -- and it's not easy to know what works well or doesn't until it's been tried.

Nonetheless, GANs are hot right now, with energetic research on putting them to work. The most obvious immediate applications are in areas that involve a lot of imagery, such as video games and fashion: what, for instance, might a game character look like running through the rain? Goodfellow, however, believes GANs have much more potential: "There are a lot of areas of science and engineering where we need to optimize something. That's going to be the next big wave."

For example, in high-energy physics, researchers use supercomputers to simulate the possible interactions of hundreds of subatomic particles in machines like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. These simulations are slow and require massive computing power. Researchers at Yale University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a GAN that, after training on existing simulation data, can generate pretty accurate predictions of how a particular particle will behave, and do it much faster, with less computing horsepower. Work smart, not hard.

Medical research, dependent on large trials, tends to require a lot of crunching through medical records, and medical records aren't always accessible. GANs can take modest trials sets and perform a much better analysis on them by generating fake records. However, that skilled fakery means GANs are capable of churning out very convincing fake news. AI tools are already being used to put pictures of the faces on celebrities on the bodies of porn stars and put words in the mouths of politicians.

That sort of fakery is not new, but GANs make it much easier and more capable. Fake videos can be detected by the fact that fake people don't breathe the way real ones do -- but then again, GANs are likely to get smart enough to handle that detail as well. GANs present a particular threat to cybersecurity, since they allow the Black Hats to second-guess defenses and figure out stealthy ways around them.

Goodfellow is now heading a team at Google focused on machine learning and security, and cautions that those pushing earlier waves of computer innovation didn't anticipate the ingenuity of the Black Hats, to end up being blindsided. He believes that modern AI technology isn't that far behind the learning curve: "Clearly, we're already beyond the start, but hopefully we can make significant advances in security before we're too far in."

Goodfellow doesn't think that technology will, by itself, defeat the Black Hats; instead, kids should be taught critical thinking so they can see fake news for what it is. Unfortunately, achieving that state of grace may be a task for a future civilization. [END OF SERIES]

[FRI 06 APR 18] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (8)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (8): While the US Constitution established that representatives were to be selected by popular vote, as stated in Section 2, the franchise for the vote was determined by the various states. The states were inclined to have property requirements for voting. Since there was a lot of land on the frontiers open for settlement, that did mean a fairly large voter base -- if one that was all male, nobody in positions of responsibility seriously contemplating at that time that women should be given the vote.

In any case, given the impracticality of imposing a uniform specification of voter franchise on the states, the Constitution chose the broadest franchise available in each state, that underlying the "most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." There had been some talking of imposing property restrictions in the Philadelphia Convention, but the tide went against it -- Benjamin Franklin pointing out how the "common people" and "lower class" had carried much of the burden of the Revolutionary War. American sailors captured by the British were offered a chance to escape imprisonment by joining the Royal Navy; the sailors generally refused.

Given the "virtue and public spirit" of these men, Franklin asked, then how could they be denied the vote? Besides, a broader franchise meant more support for the government. As Connecticut's Oliver Ellsworth put it: "The people will not readily subscribe to the Natl. Constitution, if it should subject them to be disenfranchised."

The qualifications for membership in the House, as stated in Section 2, were even more liberal: at least 25 years old, a citizen of the US for at least seven years, and currently an inhabitant of the state he was to represent. There was no requirement that he have extended residence in the state; no requirement for property ownership; no requirement for religious qualifications. States, at the time, often did have property or religious qualifications; the Constitution could do no more for state law than set an example.

During the convention, James Madison had pushed for broad membership, warning against establishing an "aristocracy or oligarchy" in Congress. Franklin, taking an internationalist perspective, noted that the Constitution "would be much read and attended to in Europe" -- and that: "A great partiality to the rich ... will not only hurt us in the esteem of the most liberal and enlightened men there, but discouraging the common people from removing to this Country."

Franklin wanted the United States to be an attractive destination for those economically or socially dissatisfied at home; they were, as far as he was concerned, welcomed here to help build the great American nation. For much the same reason a naturalized citizen, having been in the US for seven years, was entitled to run for a seat in the House. There were suggestions in the convention for four years, and Alexander Hamilton -- born in the West Indies -- pushed for no such restriction at all; but there were worries that a wealthy and powerful man, dissatisfied in his home state, might move to another state and make a grab for power there. Such practices were well-known in Britain.

The Senate had much the same statement of qualifications, but with the bar raised a little, as stated in Section 3: a senator had to be at least 30 years old, and nine years a citizen of the USA. One of the motivations in raising the age was the concern that the wealthy would attempt to place their offspring in the Senate as early as possible, to create a dynasty of "haughty heirs with distinguished names." It was unlikely that a mere youth who didn't have money backing him would otherwise make it into the Senate. Specifying 30 as the age limit helped level the playing field -- though political dynasties would prove common in American history.

By the same token, the fact that the Federal government paid the salaries of the members of Congress prevented Congress from becoming the preserve of the independently wealthy, and also ensured that members of Congress would not be at the financial mercy of state governments. There would be concerns against abuse of the system; since Congress established the law, that meant Congress in principle set its own pay. There was an obvious threat of lawmakers milking the system, and a less obvious threat of the wealthy lowering the pay to drive out the relatively poor. In practice, given the public visibility of Congressional actions, the issue of Congressional pay would persist indefinitely in an awkward tension. Article I also made it clear that members of Congress could not also be officials of the executive; they couldn't wear a hat in both the legislative and executive branches.

Another awkward consideration was the number of representatives in the House and the assignment of corresponding Congressional districts in each state. There was a push and shove during the convention as to whether the number of representatives should be large -- leading to an unwieldy assembly, but one with closer connection to voters -- or small -- leading to a more manageable assembly, but one that was more elitist. The Constitution established 65 representatives at the outset; Madison had pushed for doubling that to 130, but was voted down. The less geographically central the states, the less enthusiastic they were for raising the number of congressmen -- it seems largely because it was so much more troublesome and expensive to travel in those days.

Nonetheless, George Washington himself had broken his usual aloofness from discussion in the convention to push for greater representation, saying that a small House would be "an insufficient security for the rights and interests of the people." Washington commanded everyone's attention, with matters then arranged so that the number of House seats would grow in time, and it did, following the first national census -- reaching 142 in a decade. Future expansion was effectively guaranteed by the creation of new states in the West, which would be full partners in the proportional representation scheme.

To ensure further engagement of the public, the House established as a procedure from the start that sessions would be conducted with open doors. The Constitution didn't specify that, merely saying that Congress would keep and publish journals of proceedings -- but it seemed so perfectly in the spirit of the new Republic, as expressed in the Preamble, that there was no serious question of conducting secret sessions. Journalists could observe House sessions and report on them to the public. The Senate kept closed sessions for a few years, then caved in and opened the Senate doors as well. The custom was one of the first elements of the "unwritten Constitution", established by sensible implication from and extension of the formal text of the document. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 05 APR 18] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Artificial Intelligence Is Learning To Read Your Mind" by Matthew Hutson, 27 October 2017), researchers now have, in a bit of irony, used artificial intelligence to probe the human brain. First, the researchers put together a model of how the brain encodes information. Three test subjects spent hours viewing hundreds of short videos, with a functional MRI machine measuring signals of activity in the visual cortex and other regions of the brain. A neural network built for image processing then correlated video images with observed brain activity.

Once the neural network worked out the patterns, it was able to predict brain activity as the subjects watched more videos. Going beyond that, through the use of a secondary neural network, the brain activity could show what the subject was watching -- the videos being in 15 categories, such as "bird", "aircraft", or "exercise". The accuracy was about 50% if the system could match the subject to learning earlier obtained from that subject; only about 25% if it could not.

At present, the neural network is not able to reconstruct the video, but the researchers believe they will ultimately be able to reconstruct mental imagery. This could lead to a powerful mind probe for psychological research, direct brain control of machines, or communications with paralyzed patients who can't otherwise communicate.

* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Huge Microwave Observatory To Search For Cosmic Inflation" by Edwin Cartlidge, 30 October 2017), the Universe has a pervasive "cosmic microwave background (CMB)" corresponding to the electromagnetic radiation from a black-body emitter at 2.7 degrees Kelvin. The CMB is a relic of the Big Bang that was the start of our Universe. It is, however, not entirely uniform, with the deviations from uniformity providing clues as to the events following the Big Bang.

To obtain more data on the CMB, US researchers are now pushing for development of a "CMB Stage 4 (CMB-S4)" facility that will provide a map of the CMB in unprecedented detail. It would consist of three six-meter and 14 half-meter telescopes, placed at a site in Antarctica and a site in Chile's Atacama high desert. At these locales the air is very dry, and so transparent to microwaves. CMB-S4 would be two orders of magnitude more sensitive than existing ground-based CMB experiments.

A high priority for CMB-S4 would be to search for distinctive patterns in the polarization of the CMB known as "B modes" -- markers for the existence of primordial gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, having now been detected, are hot news, and cosmologists are interested in tracing them back to the early Universe. Current ground-based CMB experiments typically detect microwaves using a few thousand pixels. None so far have picked up the B mode; even with improvements, they're not up to the job.

According to the task force commissioned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) to come up with the design, the price tag for CMB-S4 would be $400 million USD. That's a lot of money, dictating a collaboration of research organizations. Initial work began in 2013, with a DOE panel giving its stamp of approval in 2014. However, the researchers will have to wait until 2020 to see how they fare in the once-per-decade survey of astronomy and astrophysics that the NSF uses to assess funding priorities. CMB-S4 won't happen overnight.

* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Bed Bugs Love Your Stinky Laundry. Here's How To Keep Them Away" by David Shultz, 28 September 2017) bedbugs, once on the fade, have roared back in recent years, their population growing and extending range. They are not known to transmit disease, but they are a particularly tough and troublesome biting pest.

The puzzle is why bedbugs are on such a roll. They don't often leave the beds and couches where they reside, and they don't stay on their hosts. How, then, do they end up getting from place to place? A study now shows that their dispersal is in part due to transport via dirty laundry. Bedbugs, it turns out, are attracted to the body odors of the target species -- as far as we're concerned, meaning us -- including such odors on clothing.

William Hentley, an entomologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, got to wondering how bedbugs got around: "To me, hitchhiking seemed like the best explanation. That then led me to this question of whether they're attracted to our clothes and the smell of humans."

To test the question, Hentley and his colleagues checked to see if the insects were attracted to soiled clothing. They set a cage full of bed bugs in the middle of a room and placed two cotton bags at equal distances -- one filled with clean clothes and the other filled with dirty socks and T-shirts collected from volunteers. The researchers released the bed bugs from the cage, to let wander freely for 96 hours.

The result was that about twice as many bugs were attracted to the dirty clothes as to clean ones. That's consistent with other experiments that have shown that bed bugs can smell more than 100 compounds produced by human skin, many of which could linger on clothes. They also tested whether bedbugs were attracted to concentrations of CO2, which would imply a breathing host, and has long been suspected to be used by bedbugs for targeting. They found that enhanced CO2 concentrations made bedbugs forage more, but not in any particular direction.

Hently suggest that travelers stow their baggage on the metal racks in hotel rooms, since bedbugs find it difficult to crawl up on them. He says: "The biggest thing is not keeping your luggage on the bed." He also suggests that travelers, on returning home, wash and dry their clothes on high heat: "Heat is the Achilles heel of the bed bug."

[WED 04 APR 18] SMART SPEAKERS FOR MEDICAL CARE

* SMART SPEAKERS FOR MEDICAL CARE: As discussed by an article from HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ("What Will Health Care Look Like Once Smart Speakers Are Everywhere?" by Carla E. Small, Daniel Nigrin, Kevin Churchwell, & John Brownstein, 7 March 2018), virtual assistants -- like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana -- are becoming commonplace. Studies suggest that by 2020, half of all searches will be performed by voice, and there will be "smart speakers" like Alexa in 55% of US households by 2022.

The US medical profession is embracing the technology as well, with a survey of pediatricians showing that over 60% have used voice-assistant technology, while a third own at least one smart speaker. Voice dictation software like Dragon is now common in clinical settings, being used to capture clinical notes. However, voice assistants are far more capable than that -- for example, they can be used to fetch vital information for clinical action teams.

The "Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA)" effort at Boston Children's Hospital is now working toward wider use of voice-assistant technology in healthcare. The IDHA began in 2016 by hosting a "Voice in Healthcare" hackathon that featured voice-powered demonstrations:

• In a simulated patient's room, parents learned how to clean a catheter.
  
  
• In the intensive care unit (ICU), nurses were "talked through" instructions for collecting specimens.
  
  
• In the operating room (OR), physicians practiced using voice to document images from an endoscopy procedure.
  
  
• In a mock outpatient setting, the technician received spoken lab results.

Brainstorming sessions followed. Following the hackathon, the IDHA then introduced voice technology to hospital practice in three pilot exercises:

• ICU: An intensive-care unit has to main sterile conditions to prevent infections. Voice technology has obvious advantages in such an environment, granting hands-free, immediate access to data. In Boston Children's Hospital, nurses can now request important administrative information: "Who is the charge nurse on 7 South?" "How many beds are available on 8 East?"
  
  Clinicians can simply ask for information that would otherwise involve picking up the phone, searching through documents, or going down the hall. A few minutes lost in an ICU can be fatal; being able to get information immediately can make a big difference. IDHA foresees that machine learning will allow the system to anticipate needs, providing information immediately when needed.
  
  
• Organ transplant: Boston Children's is a highly active pediatric transplant-surgery hospital. The transplant team asked IDHA for help in streamlining the pre-operative organ-validation and checklist process. The IDHA team came back with a real-time, hands-free, voice-prompted checklist process. It's very much a prototype, but all involved are enthusiastic about the project.
  
  
• Home health decisions: Voice technology can also be useful for parental decision-making. KidsMD, widely available through Amazon Alexa, allows parents to converse with Alexa around symptoms of common illnesses -- ear infections, fever, colds, and so -- and receive in response customized guidance and education from Boston Children's Hospital, including suggestions for when to visit the doctor, and how to care for a sick child at home. The IDHA team is working to expand the domain of assistance available via KidsMD.

A survey of pediatricians conducted by the hospital on voice technology showed that 48% wanted to use it in their clinical setting, with only 16% opposed, the rest not sure. Many, however, said they were uncomfortable with the idea of consulting a voice assistant in earshot of patients, since patients might not understand when a doctor decides against the canned advice. They do like the idea of using voice technology in the waiting room and at the homes of patients, allowing patients to ask as many questions as they like. Voice technology also promises to streamline the notoriously obnoxious process of filling out medical questionnaires.

Voice technology is still fairly primitive and not all that smart, which tends to undermine users' faith in it. The voice technology, in short, is less the bottom line than the capability and utility of the information system backing it up. If users can't easily get useful information back from their queries, they'll give up. There are also concerns about data security; nobody likes the idea of the Black Hats tapping into smart speaker systems. Further work is needed to address these concerns.

[TUE 03 APR 18] POWER SHIFT

* POWER SHIFT: A series on the turmoil the changing market is inflicting on the energy sector was run here in 2017. As discussed by an article from VOX.com ("After Rising For 100 years, Electricity Demand Is Flat -- Utilities Are Freaking Out" by David Roberts, 27 February 2018), that turmoil continues to afflict US electrical power utilities. Natural gas and renewables are booming, while coal and nuclear are in decline. The Trump Administration's attempts to reverse their decline have been ineffectual theatrics.

It's easy to overlook a subtler reality: that due to improvements in energy efficiency, globalization of heavy industry, and distributed power generation by customers, demand for utility power has been flat for a decade, with GDP growth and electricity demand growth becoming decoupled. That quiet fact has dramatic results of its own.

Every five years, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) -- the Federally owned regional planning agency that, among other things, supplies electricity to Tennessee and parts of surrounding states -- develops an "Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)" to assess customer needs for the next 20 years, and determine what actions the TVA needs to take in response.

The last IRP, completed in 2015, anticipated that there would be no need for major new investment in power generation, that energy efficiency and distributed energy generation would mean no growth in demand. That was far-sighted, but as it turned out, not far-sighted enough. Now the TIMES FREE PRESS reports: "TVA now expects to sell 13% less power in 2027 than it did two decades earlier -- the first sustained reversal in the growth of electricity usage in the 85-year history of TVA."

To help cope with the changing energy landscape, the TVA has moved up the schedule for its next IRP up a year, to 2019. The shifting ground is not so problematic for the TVA; as a government-owned, fully regulated utility, TVA management sees their mission as "low cost, informed risk, environmental responsibility, reliability, diversity of power and flexibility to meet changing market conditions." If power demand is declining, the TVA simply will scale back its operations accordingly -- troublesome but manageable.

However, investor-owned utilities (IOUs), which provide electricity for well over half of Americans, have to make money for investors. Since they're government-regulated monopolies, they can't make money selling electricity; instead, the IOUs make money through investments in infrastructure. What happens when the existing infrastructure is more than is needed? In the present, there's been cost-cutting and consolidation among power generation utilities, and increased investment by local distribution utilities. Neither of these approaches are sustainable for long.

The US utility sector was created on the assumption of perpetual growth. Nobody seriously questioned that assumption; if it crossed anyone's mind, the answer was: "We'll deal with that when it happens." Now it's happened. Utilities have to adapt to a new model, providing flexible, diverse, low-emissions power supply, using a "smart grid" to make the system workable. Utilities have to get away from the model of building new infrastructure, and focus on a less tangible system of services. Achieving that goal will require the help of regulators and politicians, as well as risky experiments. Only a handful of states -- New York, California, Massachusetts, a few others -- are now testing the waters.

The irony is that the changes in the energy sector are broadly for the good of the USA. Not only are emissions being reduced, but in the long run we will have access to cheap energy. Unfortunately, utilities were set up to guarantee resistance against energy efficiency, renewable energy, and distributed energy. It's hard to blame them for being what they were made to be -- but the bottom line is that it's going to take far-sighted leadership, and an inevitable period of difficulty, to cross the bridge to the new reality.

[MON 02 APR 18] ANOTHER MONTH

* ANOTHER MONTH: An item on THEVERGE.com tipped me off to a German firm named Festo AG out of Esslingen am Neckar. On the face of it, Festo comes across as a thoroughly Germanic firm -- a maker of industrial gear including ...

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Dull as dust, right? I think so, and I'm an engineer! However, a closer look at Festo shows the company has a lively streak, spending a fraction of R&D time and money on building animal-inspired robots. Over the past years, Festo has created mechanical ants, butterflies, flying jellyfish and penguins, kangaroos, seagulls, and more. Now the firm has come up with a robot flying fox / fruit bat and a robot spider. Festo is particularly proud of the wing membrane for the flying fox, announcing:

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This robot can fly untethered, though its flight is tracked by camera, with command updates provided through a wireless link -- most of the smarts are in the "ground station". However, the flying fox robot is much less impressive than the spider robot -- the "BionicWheelBot". It's based on the "flic-flac" spider of the Sahara, which will go into controlled tumbles when it's in a hurry. The BionicWheelBot, like any good spider, has eight legs, driven by 15 motors. When it gets into a hurry itself, it curls six of the legs into neat dual wheels, then uses the remaining two legs to push itself around.

While Festo obviously builds elaborate toys like the BionicWheelBot for the publicity -- and they do a good job for the company on that basis -- it seems like the company also likes to do "blue sky" engineering, focused on bionic systems, to see if the toys lead to practical products. However, getting into details of their bionics-based products is more than can be considered here.

* With regards to my discovery of Youtube music videos, as reported last month, I've got my musical discovery process down to a method:

• Every morning I check new videos from my list of subscriptions, downloading in MP4 format those that seem promising on a quick listen, stashing them in a stockpile directory.
  
  
• Later that morning, I take three videos from the stockpile and use an audio editor to clean them the music -- trimming off silent space from the leading and trailing edge of a tune; running it through compression if necessary, to balance the quiet and loud parts; normalizing it in an attempt to make sure its volume level is not too low or too high, which is tricky -- and then save it as an MP3 audio file.
  
  
• When I get 50 MP3 files, I copy them to a USB microdrive, and plug them into an old laptop I have in the secondary bedroom in my house -- which I use as a mini-gym -- to give a good listen to the tunes while I'm working out. Typically, I'll decide I don't really like five to ten of the batch, and delete them. In the meantime, I'm piling up another 50 MP3 files; when I complete the new batch, I file the survivors of the current batch in my music library, to then evaluate the new batch in turn.
  
  
• In parallel, I go through the library, copying 20 MP3 files at random to another USB microdrive every Saturday, which I plug into a USB-compatible boom box in my bathroom. That allows me to review the library while I'm in the bathtub, mostly to see if I need to audio-edit some of the tunes.
  
  
• When the next Saturday rolls around, I yank the USB microdrive from the boom box, then plug it into a notebook computer that I have in my living room, so I can listen to it for another week while I eat meals. Of course, when I put the USB microdrive into the notebook, I yank the one already there from the previous week -- to load it up with another 20 tunes, and plug it into the boom box in the bathroom. Eventually I review all the library, and then start all over again.

Yes, I am methodical to a fault. However, it's become exciting, in the sense that I'm rediscovering music. When I was a lad, I was an enthusiastic musical explorer, digging into jazz and avant-garde music, to then chase after the emerging electronic music scene of the 1980s. Going into the 1990s, my explorations slowed to a crawl. I still listened to music, but I didn't exert myself to find anything new. Having an open-ended -- for now -- source of music on Youtube has given me a new world to explore. It's not the same exercise as it was in my youth; it's much less pretentious, I'm mostly after music that seems fun and amusing, if nothing more than that.

A lot of it is just canvassing, recovering, and consolidating all the musical styles I encountered in the past. It's a kick to listen to some of the Retrowave tunes, which sometimes come across as techno shopping-mall music of the 1980s. I run across stuff that I never knew existed, too, such as "Trend Orchestra" -- a creation of a UK film / game music composer named Marcus Hedges, in which video game themes are given full symphonic treatments. They sound like they're being played by a real orchestra, too; if it's synthesized sound, it's very convincing.

I was thinking that I would get finicky after a while and be more selective about what I wanted to keep out of the downloads, but so far it's been much the opposite: if I get a tune that sounds like filler, I don't have a problem keeping it. By piling up a big archive of tunes, I don't hear any one of them often enough to get too tired of it. There's also a difference in that now I can play an m-keyboard, and I listen with an ear towards playing the tunes I hear -- not that I'll ever have time to learn to play more than a fraction of them.

Along another front, I downloaded and am trying to learn to use the MuseScore music composition software package, which has a particular benefit in that it can read MIDI files, to then display them as a score, and also convert scores to MIDI. I'm never going to be more than a toy musician, but MIDI music files will allow me to actually produce something that I can hand out to the world.

* The Real Fake News for February was more of the same -- with an emphasis on the word "more". The month began with a White House declaration of a 25% tariff on steel imports and a 10% tariff on aluminum imports. The tariffs set off a storm of protests, both domestically and internationally, with economists deriding the action -- most saying they would economically harm the USA, the rest saying that they wouldn't do any good.

As the month went on, however, the tariffs became ever more conditional, to the point where it was unclear who would be affected by them. What also became increasingly clear was the USA had lost patience with Chinese protectionist measures -- most notably attempts by the Chinese government to force technology transfers from US companies to allow them to participate in China's market. The Chinese then took pains to say that wouldn't be policy in the future. In short, the tariffs may have been Trump merely raising the stakes in negotiations, though matters haven't been settled yet by any means.

The noisiest news about the Trump Administration was the continued legal agitation over claims by porn star Stormy Daniels that she'd had an affair with Trump over a decade ago. She was under a nondisclosure agreement, with Trump's lawyers legally threatening her; she didn't seem particularly intimidated, even threatening legal actions of her own in retaliation.

It seems there's mostly another game of bluff going on, since Trump would have to prove damage to his reputation to sue -- and nothing in this matter has painted Trump out to be anything but what everyone already knows he is. Even his admirers know he's a bad boy, they like it, even as they pretend everything is just fine. Incidentally, Daniels' mother is a hardcore Trump supporter, saying that she would vote for him "every time". Well, if she doesn't mind her daughter being a porn star, then she won't mind Trump being president. First Lady Melania Trump, inclined to keep a low profile to begin with, has become almost invisible to the public.

The ongoing turmoil in the White House continued, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson given the boot by Trump on 13 March. There had long been tensions between the two men, with tales that Tillerson called the president a "moron" to his face -- which Tillerson neither confirmed nor denied. In his farewell address at the State Department, Tillerson encouraged staffers to maintain their personal integrity, adding that Washington DC could be a "mean-spirited" place; there was a bit of laughter, then applause, with Tillerson giving a wry smile. He gave no word of thanks to the president while going out the door. Trump wants to replace Tillerson as secretary of state by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, seen as much more a Trump loyalist.

While Trump was fending off personal legal attacks and evicting his secretary of state, he was also trying to come to grips with the Robert Mueller independent investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and possible connections to the Trump campaign. On Friday, 16 March, Trump fired Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI, two days short of McCabe's retirement. The action was clearly vindictive; Trump, unable to fire Mueller, had to choose an easier target.

Following that, Trump ramped up his Twitter attacks on the investigation and the FBI. It is unclear if his attempts to smear the investigation will do anything but dig himself in deeper. The next Friday, incidentally, the Trump White House issued another military transgender ban; the inclination of the White House is to take controversial actions late on Fridays to reduce the pushback from the news media. It is unclear where the new transgender ban is going, if anywhere.

Trump's luck with Congress wasn't much better. Congress passed a budget deal on 21 March, providing government funding to the end of September. Trump threatened to veto the bill, because it didn't fund his border wall with Mexico -- yes, it did provide $1.6 billion USD for border security, but just to fix existing fencing, and provide more funding to Customs & Border Patrol for operations. The Democrats dug in their heels at more funding for the Immigration & Naturalization Service; they didn't want more INS agents hunting down illegals and deporting them.

Trump's threat to veto his own budget was absurd, like holding a pistol to his own head and taking himself hostage. Democrats quietly laughed, saying he'd get a worse deal if he did veto the bill; Congress has the power of the purse, and there's really nothing Trump can do to force the legislature to give him money. He quickly caved in and signed the bill. The incident got very little press, apparently because it was so absurd that nobody took it seriously.

Nonetheless, it was significant, since it was the last chance Trump had of getting his border wall; it's flatly not going to happen. It appears that he realized this, since he then contemplated having the Pentagon build the border wall. As first revealed, it seemed an idle thought that Trump wasn't too serious about, and was likely to quickly abandon in the face of its lack of realism; but then, follow-up reports suggested he was very obstinate about the idea. He's the commander in chief, right? He can tell the Pentagon what to do, and the Pentagon has piles of money -- so what's the problem?

The problem, as was apparently repeatedly explained to Trump, is that Congress approves the Pentagon's budget on a line-item basis: how much for pay, how much for base maintenance, how much for specific new weapons programs, and so on. There's a lot of line items in the budget; none of them involve a border wall. The Pentagon's budget is not a piggy bank that Trump can loot to satisfy his whims. The idea was desperation and will go nowhere -- but it is equally certain that he's going to keep flogging his border wall. One suspects Congress will get to the point of not even bothering to comment any more when he does: "Oh dear, not this again."

That wasn't the worst of his frustrations at that time. The day before Trump signed the new budget, he had congratulated Vladimir Putin on winning a fourth term as Russia's president. On the 21st, the news media ran a leak that informed the world Trump's own advisors had recommended to him: DO NOT CONGRATULATE. Trump was infuriated, even by his own volatile standards -- with Chris Cillizza of CNN suggested the leak had to have come from a high level, and represented the frustration of staff at being ignored by the president. Leaks, Cillizza said, seemed to be the only way to exert any influence on Trump.

Cillizza's view was reinforced the next day when Trump fired his national security advisor, Army General HR McMaster. The firing had been anticipated; Trump was not comfortable with McMaster, partly because the general didn't toady up to the president, and also because his briefings were too detailed and analytical: McMaster operated beyond Trump's attention span. McMaster is to be replaced by John Bolton, a notoriously loud and abrasive Right-wing troglodyte. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis offered reassurances that the national security advisor was more an "aggregator" than a maker of policy, and that he, Mattis, could work with Bolton. In short: Bolton talks big, don't pay it too much mind.

Along with the reports that anticipated the firing of McMaster, there were suggestions that the White House chief of staff, Marine General John Kelly, was going to get the boot as well. It is not at all a rumor that the hard-nosed Kelly rides herd on White House staff, imposing order as best he can on the disorderly circus. Of course, staffers don't like being bossed around like that, and prefer to return to a state of disorder. At last notice, Kelly still had his job.

Last year, it seemed like losing imposing figures like Tillerson and McMaster would be a major blow to the Trump Administration, but in the event, it's business as usual. Trump manages -- well, after a fashion -- by chaos, and so what's more chaos? The strange thing is that we've got so used to it that it seems normal, sort of. Those of a future era will look back on the Trump Administration and marvel that it both endured, and muddled on through somehow.

Nonetheless, the Trump Administration retains its ability to surprise, and did so on 26 March by expelling 60 Russian diplomats, in response to the attack in the UK on ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, using a nerve toxin. The expulsion was part of a coordinated effort by Western governments. Although Trump persists in his public attempts to cozy up to Vladimir Putin, the reality is that American policy transcends individuals, and all factors force Trump to go along with a hardline doctrine towards Russia. Of course he resents it.

Alongside usual turmoil in the White House was a drive for gun control by the survivors of the mass killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland FL on 14 February. Students of the school are leading the effort, which involved mass walkouts from schools on 14 March; the walkout lasting 17 minutes, in memorial to the 17 students killed in the massacre. The student leaders -- most notably Emma Gonzalez, a buzzcut Cuban-American girl -- came under attack from the Right, though those who did so were raked over the coals in the media, to be made to regret it.

The USA had become too used to massacres on a regular basis, with the utterances of leadership to offer "thoughts and prayers" in response becoming widely mocked. Something was going to give sooner or later, and now it has. The movement is unlikely to be a flash in the pan either, all the more so because more massacres are going to take place until responsible action is taken. It is likely that Gonzalez and some of the other Parkland kids represent a future US leadership group. The contrast between them and the current White House gang could not be greater -- and it's not one that favors the White House.