* 20 entries including: US Constitution (series), technology & African development (series), cheap catalysts for solar-to-fuel conversion, bitcoin is a bust, Amazon fulfillment robotics, electroshock pain therapy, generic pharma under pressure, paying for user data, face recognition, & Parker Solar Probe.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR SEPTEMBER 2018: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Keeping It Together", 2 August 2018), for the past four years, senior officials from a group of leading democracies, calling themselves the "D10", have quietly been meeting once or twice a year to discuss how to advance the liberal world order. Foreign ministry policy-planners, and a few think-tank wonks, discuss how to respond to Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other trouble spots -- but keeping a low profile. The meetings are to exchange ideas; actions are to be taken elsewhere.
At the D10 meeting in Seoul in September, however, the group had an altered focus: how to deal with the departure of the US from its traditional global leadership role. US President Donald Trump doesn't want to trade ideas, doesn't want to advance the liberal world order; he just wants to kick over the applecart, seeking pretexts to light into allies, starting trade wars, and discarding international agreements -- with no greater goal than to make headlines.
While Trump is clearly a passing affliction to America and the world, he has discouraged America's allies, who now wonder if the USA can ever be relied on again. That's an overwrought read on events, but it is still a fair question. Trump will be gone sooner or later and his style of leadership, such as it is, repudiated; nonetheless, nobody has any clear idea of what America after Trump will be like, and so any planning based on benign assumptions of future American policy is inevitably uncertain.
The D10 group, then, is now focused on determining a stable world order that isn't dependent on unpredictable American behavior. The D10 is part of a broader trend of intensifying efforts to rally the "like-minded" to that end. There are four different schemes towards that end.
The first scheme involves getting in touch and dealing with Americans of influence outside of the Trump Administration -- in Congress, state governors, America's business and civil leaders. Canada has been particularly energetic in pursuing this strategy. Its ministers, mayors and diplomats have reached out at the state and local level to point out the many American jobs and industries that depend on trade with Canada. Such efforts have drawn Trump's anger, but so what else is new? The bigger issue is that such lower-level efforts can only partly mitigate the chaos emanating from the White House.
Accordingly, the second approach is to bypass the USA, bringing the like-minded together from around the world -- with ex-presidents, former prime ministers and retired diplomats try to save the world they used to run. The D10 process has led to a new, wider enterprise, called the "Democratic Order Initiative (DOI)". It was launched on 23 June 2018 in Berlin by the Atlantic Council, with backing from:
The DOI's aims are to articulate core principles of the rules-based order, while mobilizing public and official backing for them. Along the same lines, the "Alliance of Democracies Foundation" was set up in 2017 to "strengthen the spines" of the world's democracies. A brainchild of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister and NATO secretary-general, it held an inaugural "Democracy Summit" in June 2018 and envisages annual winter gatherings in Colorado, as well as summer ones in Copenhagen.
The first initiative of the foundation's global "campaign for democracy" is a Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, to strengthen defenses against outside interference -- read, broadly, as "Vladimir Putin". It is co-chaired by Rasmussen and Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security in America; Joe Biden, America's former vice-president, is among the other 13 commissioners.
Characteristically, it is French President Emmanuel Macron who is the most assertive, driving a "Paris Peace Forum" for November 2018. The forum is envisioned as an annual event, bringing together governments and civic groups to discuss the world's problems. The idea is to show that "there is still a constituency for collective action, among states and civil society ... beyond populism and interstate tensions."
Macron wants ideas from all sorts of organizations, including governments, business associations, NGOs, trade unions, religious groups, and think-tanks. The model is COP21, the summit in 2015 that produced the Paris accord on climate change. That leads to the third scheme, based on efforts to keep international deals alive in America's absence, or even outright hostility.
No other country has given up the Paris climate accord; all the other 194 signatories are sticking with it, and expect that America will rejoin, after working out temporary difficulties. Within America, state governments, cities and businesses have in many cases committed themselves to carbon reductions in the spirit of Paris.
European attempts to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive without America are proving tougher, since the Trump Administration is sanctioning international businesses that deal with Iran. Iran is getting squeezed, hard, and is being given a strong incentive to restart its nuclear program. America didn't live up to the agreement, so why should Iran? Why should Iran consider any new agreement, if the other side has demonstrated it won't abide by those it made? It's surprising that Iran has been as patient as long as it has.
However, the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal intended to counterbalance Chinese economic influence in the Pacific region, is alive and quite well. The loss of the USA from the trade group was a blow -- a baffling one, given Trump's resentment of China's trade clout -- but the pact has survived, as the 11-member "Comprehensive & Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)", signed in Chile in March 2018, and to go into effect by the end of the year.
Japan and Australia led the effort to keep the TPP alive. Both countries are also active in the fourth way of clubbing together: new coalitions between like-minded countries in the pursuit of shared interests, from trade to defense. On 17 July 2018, Japan signed a free-trade deal with the European Union, eliminating most tariffs and creating the world's largest open economic area -- covering over 600 million people, and nearly a third of global GDP.
Australia has looked to America for support for decades, but for the time being, the US has largely abandoned the Australians. The Australians have reached out to Japan, establishing closer defense ties. Japan and Australia have also held joint talks with India, raising the prospect of joint naval exercises. Australia and India are similarly in talks with France, Macron speaking of a "Paris-Delhi-Canberra axis" that will establish a joint Indo-Pacific strategy. Of course, Macron is also working to strengthen international ties in Europe, having pushed through a "European Intervention Initiative (EII)"; nine countries, including Britain and Germany, signed up in June. The concept of the EEI is to improve strategic cooperation to pave the way for joint action in a crisis.
What these arrangements amount to remains to be seen; it's never been easy to coordinate international coalitions, and there are always disagreements among the members. Such collaborations would be hard-pressed to match Chinese clout in Asia, and American power is sorely missed. The USA spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined, produces 23% of global GDP and has the world's dominant currency. Still, with America in a sulk, doing something is far better than doing nothing. There's certainly nothing to lose in doing so.
Out of necessity, the European Union has made some common cause with China in defense of the global trading order. A summit between the EU and China in July 2018 led to a declaration by Chinese President Xi Jinping that the two sides should "join hands to defend multilateralism and a rules-based free-trade system." -- with a joint communique to that end. However, cooperation with China only goes so far: Europeans do not care for Xi's authoritarian ways, and are in agreement with Donald Trump that China is not inclined to play fair on trade. The Europeans simply don't think Trump is trying to address the problem in a sensible way.
More ominously, China is attempting to establish an international order of its own, having established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; the "16+1" gathering of 16 central and eastern European countries plus China; and the world's largest regional grouping, in terms of population: the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, which includes China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Of course, China's flagship international project is the Belt & Road Initiative, a grand plan to build infrastructure along China's trade routes. Xi publicly says that "the world is moving toward multipolarity" and speaks of building "a new type of international relations" -- one in which China plays the biggest role. What else might be expected?
European nations are even having more discussions with Russia's Vladmir Putin, though well-founded suspicions are likely to make sure they remain limited in scope. Donald Trump, with his boundless egotism, envisions himself as a force in the world. He is indeed, but ends up being less a master strategist than a mindless agent of chaos, upsetting the international order with no concern for the consequences. In time, the Trump Show will be canceled, and normalcy will be restored. America will still carry an enormous weight in the world, and America's traditional friends will be relieved to find the USA adopting sensible policies again. The new normal after Trump is not going to be exactly the same as the old normal before him -- but the mechanisms being set up in the era in Trump are likely to strengthen the renewed order, instead of weaken it.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Smokestack Lightening", 25 August 2018), US President Donald Trump has aligned his presidency on the simple principle of undoing everything his predecessor, Barack Obama, had accomplished. Trump has now claimed to have killed off Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP) -- a blueprint for changing America's electrical grid to get it off hydrocarbons and put it on track to a clean future.
The reality is that Trump is a creature of low theater, and in no place is the split between talk and action more evident than in environmental policy. Trump sees killing off the CPP as a plank in his effort to bring back coal -- but the irony is that the CPP has been hung up in the courts from day one, and has never actually put into action. Yes, the CPP clearly works against coal, but it has had nothing directly to do with coal's problems, which were mostly due to the rise of natural gas and renewable energy. No matter what, coal was, and will continue to be, on a fatal downward slope.
Nonetheless, the Trump Administration still wants to get rid of the CPP, the weapon of choice being the administration's proposed replacement, the "Affordable Clean Energy (ACE)" plan. The name is, as so much else that comes out of the Trump White House, a fraud: projections show it won't save consumers money, and it will mean more burning of coal. One skeptic says it is best to think of ACE as not "a climate policy, but a coal-subsidization policy." What else might be expected when the Trump Administration has loaded the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with officials friendly to the coal industry?
The fundamental irony of Trump's effort to save coal is that coal is such a small part of the US economy, with only about 50,000 workers employed in the sector -- a small fraction of a percent of America's workforce. Trump raised coal miners to mythic stature in the 2016 presidential campaign; he continues to pump up the myth, oblivious to the fact that he really can't save coal. As THE ECONOMIST put it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Finalizing regulation takes time. Like the CPP, the Trump Administration's proposal will probably face lengthy lawsuits. Its cost-benefit analysis is particularly ripe for challenge. The proposed rule is unlikely to go into effect within two years. This means that Mr. Trump would have to win re-election for his environmental agenda to be seen through. A greener president would probably seesaw back towards the CPP. But as Democrats and Republicans spend years shadow-boxing over the future of energy policy, climate change will continue unchecked.
END QUOTE
That is an overly pessimistic read on events, since renewables continue their advance, while other technologies and schemes for addressing climate change continue generally on course. Nonetheless, the lack of direction from the top in the USA is sorely missed.
* Donald Trump, despite his outspoken contempt for the "mainstream media", has done a pretty good job of turning the MSM into the Trump Channel, overwhelmingly dominating the news. It is something of a relief, then, to consider events elsewhere that don't really involve Trump -- in particular, Britain's efforts to exit the European Union.
On the face of it, the question for Britain is "hard Brexit" or "soft Brexit", with hard Brexit being a complete cut-off from the EU, while soft Brexit would retain Britain's economic ties to the union. Hard-core Leavers are pushing for hard Brexit, correctly pointing out that soft Brexit would be the worst option, leaving Britain under EU rules, but with no say in them. The government, in response, has conducted a public information campaign to inform the British people of just how impractical and disastrous a hard Brexit would be. Hard Brexit would leave the UK as dissociated from the EU as if Britain were teleported to Mars.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has pushed for a Brexit deal that would give the UK what it wants from the EU, while giving back as little as possible in return. That's a predictable bargaining position, but to no surprise, EU officials haven't been agreeable, with May reprimanding them and saying "they need to engage with us now in seriousness."
It was somewhat surprising that the reply from the EU was so muted. Get serious? The predictable response on their part could only be: "What's in it for us?" May's bargaining position is very weak. Being an experienced politician, obviously she knows that, and so her complaints about the EU were for public consumption.
Britain's Labour Party, after considerable waffling, has now come out and said that a hard Brexit would not be acceptable, and is even willing to consider another referendum. Everyone seems terrified of that prospect, since the votes in 2016 and 2017 backfired disastrously. The ferment in the UK appears to be reaching a critical level. Nobody can say what happens next, but the sense that events are going to come to a head before the end of the year is very strong. [ED: It's almost 2021 now, and matters have still not been resolved.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Airborne Recovery Could Expand Operations By Unmanned Aircraft" by Graham Warwick, 27 April 2018), the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- DARPA, the Pentagon's "blue-sky" research arm -- has been working on an air-launched & recovered (ALR) swarming drone scheme known as "Gremlins", last mentioned here in 2015.
DARPA has now selected the Dynetics firm to demonstrate Gremlin ALR, with Dynetics winning out over General Atomics. Dynetics has demonstrated a Lockheed Martin C-130A with the air capture system, which operates as follows:
The docking system is designed as a "roll-on / roll-off" module that requires no modification of the C-130 carrier aircraft, and may be used with other platforms. The tests did not use a fully-functional air vehicle.
Team member Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems is developing the new-design Gremlin drone, which is powered by a Williams International turbojet. The drone will be initially test-flown using ground recovery, via parachute and airbag. Payload systems are not being developed as part of Gremlins, with Kratos pursuing them on its own. Phase 3 of the Gremlins effort will culminate, by late 2019, in a flight demonstration of the recovery of four Gremlin drones within a half-hour.
* Early this year, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) announced that the service was acquiring the "CamCopter" helicopter drone, developed by Schiebel of Austria. The CamCopter is one of the more popular drones, with hundreds obtained by a fair list of customers; the US military has evaluated it.
The CamCopter has a conventional main-tail rotor helicopter configuration, with twin-blade main rotor. The current version is the "CamCopter S-100", with a payload capability of 50 kilograms (110 pounds), a top speed of 240 KPH (150 MPH), and an endurance of six hours. It has a length of 3.09 meters (10 feet), and maximum take-off weight of 200 kilograms (440 pounds). It is powered by a 35 kW (50 HP) Diamond heavy-fuel engine -- early production used a gasoline rotary engine, but naval forces don't like handling flammable gasoline on ships. The earlier "CamCopter 5" had much the same configuration but was less than half the size, with a length of 2.68 meters (8 feet 10 inches) and a loaded weight of 68 kilograms (150 pounds).
Schiebel has displayed an armed version of the S-100 with twin Thales "Lightweight Multirole Missiles (LMM)", a multirole evolution of Blowpipe / Javelin / Starstreak infantry-portable guided missile family. The drone can also be fitted with an external fuel tank. During its trials with the RAN, the JP-5 heavy fuel-powered Camcopter S-100 drone demonstrated its ability to operate at ranges of up to 110 kilometers (70 miles / 60 NMI), and at altitudes above 3,050 meters (10,000 feet), while delivering imagery from an attached Wescam MX-10 imaging turret payload.
An imaging turret is the typical CamCopter payload, but it has two payload bays and external mounting points, so payload configuration is highly flexible. The entire system, including control kit and the drone, can be hauled in a standard-size 9-meter (20-foot) container.
* As per an article from FLIGHTGLOBAL.com ("Northrop Proposes Canister-Launched UAV For E/A-18 Upgrade", Leigh Giangreco, 7 December 2017), aerospace giant Northrop Grumman is now offering the "Dash X", a piston-powered small tactical drone with folding flight surfaces that can be carried in a Tactical Munitions Dispenser (TMD) -- normally used to carry cluster munitions -- and deployed by a combat aircraft.
Northrop Grumman is partnering with composites manufacturer VX Aerospace on the Dash X. Although the design is not finalized, it will be 3.66 meters (12 feet) long and have a similar wingspan. Any combat aircraft could carry it, to then use the drone to give a close-up inspection of a battle area. While the drone is not stealthy as such, its small size and low speed would mean it wouldn't attract much notice.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SOLAR CATALYSTS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Cheap Catalysts Turn Sunlight And Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel" by Robert Service, 6 June 2017), there's been work for years into using sunlight to convert carbon dioxide from the air, along with water, into fuel.
It's a nice idea -- but it's just been too expensive, partly because of the price of catalysts for the conversion. Now, a cheap new chemical catalyst has carried out part of that process with record efficiency, using electricity from a solar cell to split CO2 into energy-rich carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen. It's still not efficient enough for commercial use, but it's a step in the right direction.
The transformation begins when CO2 is broken down into oxygen and CO, with CO combined with hydrogen to make a range of hydrocarbon fuels. Adding four hydrogen atoms, for example, creates methanol, a liquid fuel that can power cars. Over the last two decades, researchers have discovered a number of catalysts that enable that first step and split CO2 when the gas is bubbled up through water in the presence of an electric current. One of the best studied is copper oxide, which is cheap and, to a degree, effective.
The biggest problem with copper oxide is that it splits more water than it does CO2, making molecular hydrogen (H2), a less energy-rich compound -- according Michael Graetzel, a chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, whose group has long studied these CO2-splitting catalysts.
In 2016 Marcel Schreier, one of Graetzel's grad students, was investigating how copper oxide catalysts work. He put a layer of them on a tin oxide-based electrode, which fed electrons to a beaker containing water and dissolved CO2. Much to Schreier's surprise, instead of splitting mostly water -- like the copper oxide catalyst -- the new catalyst generated almost pure CO.
Graetzel suspects the tin deactivates the catalytic hot spots that help split the water, meaning the electricity pumped into the electrode went into splitting CO. Graetzel's team then worked to improve the efficiency of the process, rethinking their electrode as an array of copper oxide nanowires, which have a high surface area for carrying out the CO2-breaking reaction, topped them with a single atom-thick layer of tin.
The scheme was very successful, converting 90% of the CO2 molecules into CO, with hydrogen and other byproducts making up the rest. They also hooked their setup to a solar cell and showed that a record 13.4% of the energy in the captured sunlight was converted into the CO's chemical bonds. That's far better than plants, which store energy with about 1% efficiency, and even tops recent hybrid approaches that combine catalysts with microbes to generate fuel.
Those working in the solar-to-fuel arena are encouraged by recent progress, but they warn that they're still not close to producing fuels at competitive prices. However, renewable energy installations now occasionally generate more power than can be used, with that power going to waste. It may be perfectly competitive to use excess power to generate hydrocarbon fuels, as a form of energy storage.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RAT POISON: An essay from ECONOMIST.com ( "Show Me The Money", 30 August 2018) finally came out and said it: bitcoin, all cryptocurrencies, are worthless. OK, bitcoin does have worth, but only as much as people want to attach to it. That is actually true in general of all money, but the value of government-issued currency like the dollar is pegged in various ways to the national and global economic system. There is no similar linkage with bitcoin.
The price of a bitcoin was about $900 USD in late 2016, rising to $19,000 USD a year later. What goes up, comes back down; bitcoin has since fallen to about $6,500 USD. Rival cryptocurrencies have declined in pace. It is not easy to predict the future course of a speculative mania; it is particularly hard to do so with cryptocurrencies, because by design, they're not pegged to much of anything.
Bitcoin started life as a utopian libertarian project to devise an online currency, independent of governments and banks. As a currency, it has proven a bust -- troublesome to deal with, volatile, insecure, and not generally accepted as payment. It has also proven an energy hog, since synthesizing a bitcoin requires a long calculational process that is hard to perform, but easy to check and validate.
Claims that bitcoin reflects the value of the energy invested in creating it are nonsense: although valuable things may require a lot of resources to create, it is not then equally true that using a lot of resources to create things grants them value. We could cook soup by burning a pile of hundred dollar bills, but it would still be soup; the energy used in creating bitcoin is squandered. The obstacle to creating bitcoin does limit its supply, of course; and by the same coin, so to speak, passes much of what control there is over the currency into the hands of those who digitally "mine" it. It appears that the real reason to overthrow government control of currency is to allow a private faction to control it instead.
The whimsical valuation of bitcoin, however, has proven useful for speculation -- on the "greater fool" theory, that it's worth buying at a high price, in hopes that a greater fool will buy it at an even higher price. Some people have got rich off of bitcoin, but in the end there will be nothing left but suckers. Other cryptocurrencies haven't really got off the ground.
Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Lack of wide acceptance and extreme volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria; it's not a question of if people are gaming the system, the question is whether the system amounts to anything but gaming. Although regulators are starting to move in on cryptocurrencies, they don't appear likely to simply disappear right away -- but there's no reason to think they will ever be any more than a confusing and dodgy casino game. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously compared bitcoin to "rat poison".
Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain technology, with considerable interest in using blockchains in other domains. Blockchains are best thought of as validated databases, in which records are copied among all the system's users and not maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Advocates see blockchains as useful for all sorts of tasks, from streamlining bank payments and authenticating medicines, to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees.
The first problem with blockchain tech is its linkage to cryptocurrency, with bitcoin advocates tending to be cryptocurrency advocates as well -- guilt by association. In practice, blockchains also have limitations in themselves, most importantly being cumbersome: maintaining a blockchain across a number of users means communicating every update to the blockchain to all the users. This overhead, of course, gets worse as the number of users of a blockchain increases. Its security is also over-rated: while it's impossible to "cook the books", to alter an entry in a blockchain once it's been added, there's no inherent way in blockchain technology to know if an entry has been forged.
Of course, that's true of any record-keeping scheme; but might not a less cumbersome document-certification scheme do the job just as well? Libertarians do not like the idea of handing validation over to centralized secure authentication authorities -- particularly since it would be predicated on a robust, government-backed universal ID scheme. Fortunately, libertarians don't run things, and users will prefer an efficient scheme that works over an unwieldy one that doesn't work as well. Enthusiasm for blockchain is starting to cool. A few organizations -- such as SWIFT, a bank-payment network, and Stripe, an online-payments firm -- have abandoned blockchain projects, concluding that the costs outweigh the benefits. Other projects remain experimental.
Blockchain is certainly an interesting technology -- but so far, it hasn't lived up to expectations. Blockchain may end up being yet another technology of a future that keeps sliding over the horizon; or maybe, one day, just sinks beneath the waves and disappears.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA EVOLUTION (10): A related article from ECONOMIST.com ("Empowering Villages", 12 July 2018), shifted focus from Africa to Narotoli, a village in the forests of the Indian state of Jharkhand. It is home to adherents of Sarna, a nature-worshipping tribal religion, and has long been off the grid. Infrastructure has been slow to reach Narotoli, matters not being improved by the presence of Maoist Naxalite insurgents -- discussed here in 2008 -- known locally as "the guys".
Recently, electrical lines have been extended to Narotoli, courtesy of a push by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to electrify the country. Unfortunately, an Indian business executive says the power lines are so "reliably unreliable" that they might as well be washing lines. However, two years before the arrival of the grid Mlinda, a non-governmental organization (NGO), had set up a mini-grid, consisting of a set of solar panels and a bank of batteries, generating about 2.5 kilowatts of power to scores of homes via a set of poles and wires. It's thinking in somewhat wider terms than selling a solar panel with a battery to individual villagers.
The mini-grid provides expensive power, but it's vastly more cost-effective than no power, and the people of Narotoli don't need so much -- just power to run LED lamps, charge mobile phones, and irrigation pumps. It's much cheaper than what they had before, like kerosene for lighting and diesel for the pumps. Possibly more significantly, the electricity promotes economic development; along with the irrigation pumps, needed to help grow crops, the power drives a seed-crushing machine for cooking oil and supports a poultry farm.
Mlinda and other mini-grid boosters see development, not personal gadgets, as the big selling point of the technology, advising villagers on how to develop businesses using the reliable electricity. Vijay Bhaskar of Mlinda says that People have to be taught how to make the most of power: "Bringing energy is the easy part. The hard part is finding productive ways to make use of it."
Jaideep Mukherjee, the boss of Smart Power India, an NGO supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, says their job is to "demonstrate the benefits, train, and then propagate". This understanding is spreading throughout rural parts of South Asia and Africa, where mini-grids are increasingly seen as one of the most promising ways of connecting the 1.1 billion people in the world who don't have access to electricity.
Havil Bilung, a Naratoli farmer, is receptive to the message. Just having electricity to run irrigation pumps has allowed him to grow an extra harvest of pumpkin and okra in the pre-monsoon months, boosting his income. Electricity helps women make mustard-seed cooking oil, which sells in Kolkata. An independent study for Mlinda found that GDP per person in eight villages with mini-grids rose by over 10% on average over the first 13 months, compared with less than half that in a group of similar villages without them.
The rest of the village is getting the message as well, the collective being willing to pay out 55,000 rupees ($800 USD) on average a month -- a small fortune -- to keep the mini-grid running. They'd rather not pay a penny to the local utility for the unreliable grid, and they don't make much use of it.
Mini-grids are popping up at the rate of just 100 or so a year, from Myanmar to Mozambique. That's encouraging, but still thinking small. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that hundreds of thousands of them could connect 440 million people by 2030, with the right policies and about $300 billion USD of investment.
African countries used to focus almost exclusively on expanding national electricity grids -- but now some, including Nigeria and Togo, have started to emphasize mini-grids. Nigeria, which has the second-largest number of people without electricity after India, recently obtained help from the World Bank for a $330 million USD program to encourage private firms to build 850 mini-grids, serving 300,000 households and 30,000 small businesses. The program includes subsidies for initial outlays, and auctions to encourage lowest-cost bidders. Other promising markets include Kenya and Tanzania.
The experience of Engie, one of several big European power companies playing with mini-grids in Africa, illuminates their impacts. The firm's "PowerCorner" mini-grid effort has 3,500 clients supplied by eight mini-grids in Tanzania; company officials didn't see that the clients developed new businesses so much as they literally charged up existing ones, such as carpentry and milling. Engie provides easy loans for energy-efficient machinery, and teaches people how to make good use of the power -- company personnel being shocked to find out, for instance, that customers unplugged their fridges each night. About 20% of clients consume 80% of the electricity, indicating the importance of a few "anchor" users.
Payback on a mini-grid can take at least seven years. That's not all that bad for infrastructure, but it means that developers need long-term certainty about electrification policies:
Mini-grids and national grids are not necessarily opposed concepts; there's no reason that mini-grids can't be hooked together, as well as into the national grid, with distributed power complementing central power. However, state-controlled utilities are inclined to see mini-grids as a threat to their monopolies and subsidies. The Nigerian master plan attempts to reconcile the two factions, setting out where it is and isn't feasible to extend the grid.
Mini-grids are typically green, mostly driven by solar. That's really not such a big selling point, since they're not important factors one way or another when it comes to climate change. The big deal is the literal empowerment of users. Mlinda says it is during weddings that the locals most appreciate their new, reliable power: the world no longer comes to a stop when the Sun goes down. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (29): On 30 April 1789 George Washington, then age 57, was sworn in as the first President of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York. He had been unanimously voted in by the electoral college. New York City was the nation's capital at the time, though the government would soon move to Philadelphia and remain there until 1800, when Washington DC was a going concern. The oath was administered by Robert Livingston, the Chancellor of New York, there being no Supreme Court and no chief justice at the time. It is known that Washington swore the oath on a Bible, though there was no constitutional requirement that he do so; it is debated that he ended with: "So help me God." -- there being no contemporary record that he did.
Washington had to assemble a government almost from scratch. The Constitution was no more than a framework, that he had to fill in using his good judgement. Congress agreeably set up his departments, including the State Department, the Department of War, and the Treasury Department, with Washington selecting his cabinet secretaries to run them, plus an attorney general and a postmaster general. The president regarded the cabinet as a consultative body, to which he was attentive -- but the decisions were his. Although thoroughly conscious of his own authority, Washington nonetheless rejected grandiloquent titles for his station, being known as no more than "Mr. President".
At the outset of his administration, Washington took the notion of "Advice and Consent" of the Senate very seriously. In August 1789, he went to the Senate to discuss details of negotiations with the native tribes. The session did not go well, being an exercise in mis-match; Washington was a decision-maker, not happy with decisions by committee, while senators found his presence intimidating. There wasn't a profitable discussion, and Washington ended up leaving "much dissatisfied", with legend saying that he muttered as he left the Senate chamber: "I'll be damned if I'll ever go there again."
He didn't, and future presidents wouldn't directly interact with the Senate either, instead dealing with the Senate at their own discretion -- the president calling senators to the presidential offices, and informing them of decisions as seemed necessary. Congress didn't really have a problem with the president staying out of their assemblies either, and the 1st Congress was highly cooperative with Washington in putting the government together. Nonetheless, senators remained peripheral to Washington's decision-making; he actively sought out the opinions of his cabinet secretaries, but only consulted the Senate as necessity demanded.
One of the first significant measures of Congress was the Judiciary Act of 1789, establishing the Supreme Court, at the outset with a chief justice -- the first was John Jay -- and five other justices. The Judiciary Act also set up district and circuit courts, plus an administrative US Marshal for each district. Other acts of the 1st Congress set up laws for regulation of patents and copyrights, naturalization of citizens, relations with the native tribes, and (in 1791) creation of the First Bank of the United States.
The First Bank was the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury. His intent in establishing the First Bank was for it to provide credit to the government, as well as to private interests working towards the public good. The bank ran into intense opposition, with critics -- most prominently Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson -- declaring it unconstitutional, Hamilton replying that it was allowable under the Elastic Clause. The decision fell to George Washington, who endorsed the First Bank, making the first significant use of the Elastic Clause, as interpreted by executive power.
George Washington had been not much more than a presence at the Philadelphia Convention, a reminder to the delegates to do their duty; as president, he was now shaping the Federal government, establishing practical precedents that would cast a long shadow.
* Another issue for the new government was the immediate amendment of the Constitution. During the Philadelphia Convention, a number of delegates had expressed worries that the Constitution didn't have a real articulation of rights; they signed on the basis that an amendment process would be promptly initiated to address that issue. There were a few states still holding out on ratification, and a Bill of Rights might well help bring them into the fold.
Federalists had been very suspicious of a Bill of Rights, Madison being among the most suspicious -- the belief being that the push for amendments was meant to unravel the Constitution as ratified. Publicly, Madison raised a number of objections:
However, there was also pressure towards a second Constitutional convention, which Madison rightly saw as unraveling the deal arrived at in Philadelphia. A Bill of Rights was well the lesser of two evils -- and so Madison then did an about-face, becoming an enthusiastic promoter, proclaiming its virtue and necessity. Of course, he was the one drafting and driving the amendments, it seems following the principle: "If I can't beat them, take control."
Madison's Bill of Rights did reflect the concerns of states demanding it, but he was still able to head off amendments that he feared would tie the Federal government's hands -- and also tailor the amendments so they reinforced the Constitution as ratified. The amendments were duly processed through Congress, with ten ratified by the states. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for August included:
-- 07 AUG 18 / MERAH PUTIH -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0518 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Merah Putih" geostationary comsat into orbit for Telkom Indonesia. Merah Putih, previously known as Telkom 4, was built by Space Systems/Loral, and was based on the SSL 1300-series platform. It had a launch mass of 5,800 kilograms (12,785 pounds), a payload of 60 C-band transponders, and a design life of 16 years.
The space platform was placed in the geostationary slot at 108 degrees east longitude to provided telecommunications services over Indonesia and India, replacing the aging Telkom 1 communications craft. The Falcon 9 first stage, which had been flown previously, performed a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge. It was the 28th time SpaceX has recovered one of its first stage boosters intact, and the 15th re-flight of a Falcon first stage. The Falcon 9 first stage was the first "Block 5" article, featuring improved reusability.
-- 12 AUG 18 / PARKER SOLAR PROBE -- A Delta 4 Heavy booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0731 UTC (local time + 4) to put the Parker Solar Probe into space. It was to be the first mission to directly probe into the Sun's corona.
-- 22 AUG 18 / AEOLUS -- A Vega booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2120 UTC (local time + 3) to put the European Space Agency's "Aeolus" satellite into orbit. The satellite had a launch mass of 1,365 kilograms (3,010 pounds), and carried a laser-based instrument to map the world's winds.
-- 24 AUG 18 / BEIDOU x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 2352 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Beidou 3-M5" and "Beidou 3-M6" navigation satellites into orbit. They had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds) each, and were placed in a medium Earth orbit with an altitude of 13,350 miles (21,500 kilometers) and an inclination of 55 degrees. They were third-generation satellites.
The Beidou system is being developed and deployed in three phases:
The new Phase 3 satellites had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds). They featured with a phased array antenna for navigation signals, plus a laser retroreflector for orbital tracking. Three more pairs of Beidou 3M satellites will be launched by the end of 2018.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SEEKING FULFILLMENT: As discussed by an article from WIRED.com ("Your Online Shopping Habit Is Fueling a Robotics Renaissance" by Matt Simon, 6 December 2017), the rise of Amazon.com and other online retailers has meant a revolution in shopping. Instead of searching through stores to find some obscure item, we can search online through an endless array of goods, and have them delivered overnight, or within a few days.
That means enormous volumes of parcels being packed up and shipped out across the country -- hundreds every second. It's a lot of effort and overhead; inevitably, robots are picking up as much of the job as they can. Today, robots at fulfillment centers roll around and fetch items, bringing them to humans who handle the packaging, then rolling away the parcels to be shipped to customers. Robots, at present, don't have the manual dexterity to do that job.
Amazon's Picking Challenge is out to develop robots that are smart and dexterous enough to do the packaging as well. According to roboticist Pieter Abbeel -- originally of the University of California at Berkeley, now running Embodied Intelligence, a startup company:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Robotics for the longest time has been really just about research, and not about putting things in the real world because it was too hard. And I think the Amazon Picking Challenge is kind of one of those things where people are saying: "Wow, this is a real-world thing, a real need, and we can do research on this."
END QUOTE
At Kindred, a San Francisco startup, engineers are teaching robots to handle fulfillment, using a scheme called "imitation learning". The robots have to handle a wide variety of items -- some soft, some hard, some light, some heavy, some sturdy, some fragile -- and writing a program to teach them how to handle all the possibilities would be an exhausting task. Instead, the robots are educated in handling the objects by having them do it. The robots refine their skills through "reinforcement learning", using trial and error to improve on dexterity and speed. When they have to deal with new products, they just learn how to handle them in turn.
Of course, one of the traditional issues with robotics has been control over the robot's environment: it's a complication for the machine when things are moving in, around, or out of that environment. That's not such an issue for a robot that's welding car assemblies, but it is an issue for robots working in the fulfillment environment -- since they have to collaborate with humans to get the job done.
Establishing that collaboration drove Amazon, with 100,000 working robots, to ask the humans the robots would be working with exactly what the robots should be doing. Amazon spokesperson Nina Lindsey says: "Our associates actually got as granular as giving feedback on the fabric of the shelf and the color of the pods. And that design has actually made it more efficient for our associates to find items."
That suggests people helping to put themselves out of work, but that's not what's happening. Along with more robots, Amazon has hired more people. It's not so much a question of replacing people as making them more productive. According to David Schatsky, who studies robots in the workplace: "Technology is extremely good at performing tasks that people do, but jobs are more than tasks. So jobs will change, but I don't see a wholesale elimination of lots and lots of job categories."
The automation of jobs is nothing new. At the end of the 18th century, in America 90% of the labor force worked in agriculture -- but now it's a bit more than 1%. Warehouse work is harder to automate, and for the immediate future humans will be needed to do the job. However, the technology for automation, particularly sensors and AI, is becoming much more capable and cost-effective. Robots will increasingly predominate in fulfillment, and in the process become more widely used in other jobs as well. Exactly how we'll adjust remains to be seen.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SHOCKING AWAY THE PAIN: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Shocking the Spine Offers an Alternative to Opioids" by Michelle Cortez, 21 May 2018), Rick Surkin of Huntington Beach CA once led an active life -- until the fire-fighter grabbed onto a heavy ladder the wrong way, and ruptured a disk in his spine. Over a decade and a half, four major surgeries and seven procedures failed to stop the pain. He ended up reliant on the powerful painkiller OxyContin, taking it three times a day, but it didn't allow him to return to his previous active life. Surkin says: "You can take enough pills to mask the pain, but they take over your life,"
Now he's been fitted with a medical implant that fires 10,000 pulses of low-voltage electricity through his spine per second. The series of tiny shocks, known as "neuromodulation", has kept Surkin pain-free enough to ditch the pills, allowing him to resume surfing and other activities, and be a more agreeable companion to his wife.
Neuromodulation has been around for decades, but only now is it becoming a mainstream alternative to painkillers. Sales of spinal stimulators, used mainly to soothe hurting legs and backs, rose 20%, to $1.8 billion USD, in the USA in 2017. The implants are pricey, but the prices are likely to fall with wider use. Doctors see potential for similar therapies to treat migraines, neck pain, and other ailments that afflict millions.
The idea goes to Roman times, when people used controlled shocks from electric fish such as the black torpedo to treat everything from migraines to gout. The first modern spinal implants emerged in 1967, the technology having been derived from heart pacemakers. The early devices were touchy, prone to generating large shocks if the patient moved wrong, greatly limiting their usefulness. There wasn't much improvement for decades, the technology suffering from a chicken-&-egg problem: without widespread use, improving the implants was difficult, but until the implants worked right, they couldn't be put into widespread use. Even if the implants could be made to work right, they were overkill for dealing with temporary pain, which could be dealt with at less expense and trouble using painkillers.
Rick Surkin had tried an implant in 2010 -- but found it generated a nasty numbing tingling, along with annoying vibrations, and gave it up. In 2016, his doctor told him about the much more effective Nevro HF10. He jumped at it, waiting more than six months to get approval from his insurance company for the $30,000 USD device.
The implant features a thin wire, a lead, with an array of electrodes attached, threaded along the spine. The lead is connected to a module that includes a battery and a neurostimulator, typically implanted in the lower back. The Nevro HF10 uses high-frequency pulses, in contrast to the steady low-frequency waves of older models. Even at $30,000 USD, about 60,000 people a year are getting the implants -- but an order of magnitude more people are candidates, particularly if the scheme is expanded to deal with other sources of pain. That could mean a market worth tens of billions a year.
However, wider use is predicated on reducing the stiff pricetag, and persuading insurers that the implants are the most cost-effective solution. According to Nevro, a 2016 clinical trial showed that after two years, about three-quarters of patients using the HF10 reported a 50% reduction in pain. Rick Surkin's experience is the best case, Surkin having has no tingling or awareness of the device at all, being among the 40% of patients using the device who've been able to stop taking opioids entirely. Now he's catching waves on his surfboard: "I'm back to what I used to be able to do."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA EVOLUTION (9): The wave of globalization in the last decades of the 20th century made Asia prosperous; Africa, in contrast, fell behind. In 1990 African countries accounted for about 9% of the developing world's manufacturing output; by 2014, that share had fallen to 4%.
Why such a disparity? A study from the Center for Global Development in Washington DC startlingly found that labor costs in Africa are about 60% higher than in comparable countries such as Bangladesh -- and worse, the capital cost of employing a worker in Kenya, at $10,000 USD, is about nine times as much as in Bangladesh. This is partly due to indirect costs caused by unreliable infrastructure, crime, corruption, and weak regulation that account for about a quarter of the total costs inflicted on firms in Africa.
The question is, then, can technology leapfrog Africa's barriers, or should African governments focus on getting power, telecommunications, and transport to work? Akinwumi Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank, isn't enthusiastic about the "leapfrog" model -- even though he pioneered the use of mobile-phone wallets to distribute fertilizer subsidies in a previous role as Nigeria's agriculture minister. It's not that he's dismissive of modern tech, it's just that it's not enough: "You cannot develop in the dark. It requires a major effort to fix structural problems as well as infrastructural problems in Africa, so we shouldn't kid ourselves that we can just bypass those."
Of course, as he would admit, it's not a question of one versus another, it's more an issue of "both". Distributed solar-power facilities can be building blocks in a national / continental grid system; drones can be a significant element in a transport system. To be sure, infrastructure elements like ports, roads, and railways mean big construction projects that are not, in themselves, much different than they were 50 years ago. However, having access to the internet makes a big difference: a recent paper for the World Bank found that African firms using the internet are nearly four times as productive per employee as those that do not.
21st century technology offers great leverage. When venture capitalists made big bets on African e-commerce firms such as Konga and Jumia, they did not understand the painful difficulties such enterprises would encounter. Cities such as Lagos had no reliable street maps and addresses; no heavyweight logistics firms; no electronic payments systems to bill customers. Delivery drivers on motorcycles would keep having to ask for directions, making deliveries more time-consuming than expected. Customers would often not be able to pay cash on delivery.
Now companies such as Flutterwave and Paystack are building electronic payments systems that will reduce costs across the economy and enable others to build internet-commerce firms on them. What3words, a British firm that has invented a way of mapping places down to a grid reference identified by three words -- mentioned here in 2016 -- is helping governments like Nigeria's to assign a unique postcode to every home.
Asking if modern tech is enough to raise Africa out of poverty is the wrong question. Of course, it makes a difference for the better, but there is the bigger picture -- and Africans see no cause for pessimism in that bigger picture. Who knows? The solutions the Africans come up with for their problems may prove very helpful for solving problems in the developed world. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (28): Article VI covered debts; the authority of the Constitution, as per the "Supremacy Clause"; and oaths of office:
BEGIN QUOTE:
1: All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
3: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
END QUOTE
The first clause stated that debts incurred under the Confederation Congress were to be honored by the new national government. The second clause, the Supremacy Clause, stated that the laws established by the Federal government overrode state law: if there were a conflict between the two and the Federal judiciary said the national government was within its rights, the states would always lose. This was a huge step up from the Articles of Confederation -- which allowed the central government make rulings that could be ignored with impunity by the states.
The Constitution still gave great respect to States' Rights; but at the outset, the demarcation between the rights of states and the Federal government was defined in specifics. There was an ambiguity in the Supremacy Clause in that it elevated "Laws" and "Treaties" as the "supreme law of the land" ... okay, so what would happen if a law and treaty were in conflict?
The only specification in the Constitution for the oath of office of members of Congress, the judiciary, and high officials of the executive was to support the Constitution; the Constitution forbade a religious test. Congress got to define the oath, which is currently of the form:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. [So help me God.]
END QUOTE
The: "So help me God." -- ending is, as shown, optional; if it were not, that would establish a religious test. Use of the ending is an individual choice, and does not imply any establishment of religion in the Federal government.
* Article VII simply defined ratification of the Constitution itself:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.
The Word "the", being interlined between the seventh and eight Lines of the first Page, The Word "Thirty" being partly written on an Erazure in the fifteenth Line of the first Page. The Words "is tried" being interlined between the thirty second and thirty third Lines of the first Page and the Word "the" being interlined between the forty third and forty fourth Lines of the second Page.
END QUOTE
On obtaining 39 signatures -- of the 55 men who attended, some left early, and three refused to sign -- copies of the Constitution went out to the states for ratification at conventions. Conventions were specified instead of direct referendums, it seems mostly as a practical measure, though there were also concerns among Federalists that direct referendums would be too easily swayed by demagoguery. Conventions also bypassed state legislatures, which Federalists believed would not be enthusiastic in voting for a superior central government.
In any case the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Some scholars claim that the ratification was a very near thing, but that's impossible to say. History isn't a controlled experiment; we can only give idle guesses of what else might have happened. Enough to say that the Articles of Confederation had proven clearly inadequate, and had the Constitution not been ratified, everyone would have been left with the same dire problems that led to the Philadelphia Convention in the first place.
To be sure, there were loud objections to the terms of the Constitution and a bitter struggle to ensure its ratification, but it was a case of "take it or leave it". The Constitution was what the delegates had been able, after exhausting debate, to agree upon, and it wasn't realistic to reject the document on the hopes of getting a better deal. Those states, most notably Rhode Island, that were the unhappiest with the Constitution had, as more states ratified, no choice in the end but to sign up, or be left out. If they chose to be left out, they would be small outsiders surrounded by a far more powerful nation -- that would have little cause to make concessions. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: An article from WIRED.com ("What Is Sinkholing?" by Lily Hay Newman, 2 January 2018) discussed "sinkholing" -- a straightforward but under-appreciated data-security scheme.
Sinkholing is simply redirecting traffic from its targeted destination to an alternate server. The technique can be used maliciously, to divert legitimate traffic from its intended recipient; but it is more commonly used by network managers for analysis and maintenance, and by security professionals as a means of studying and responding to cyber attacks.
When bots in a botnet call back to their command and control server, for instance, a security analyst might sinkhole the domain they're calling -- to monitor their activity, find out what IP addresses are contacting the domain, and prevent the bots from getting in touch with their home base. Law enforcement and security services use sinkholing in their investigations.
Typically, sinkholes are implemented by manipulating the "Domain Name System (DNS)" -- the internet's "phonebook". Taking over a domain name may require a court order, though it's also possible to "hijack" a domain name if it expires. Sinkholes can also be more locally implemented in a specific firewall or router.
Well-known security researcher Marcus Hutchins AKA MalwareTech, famously set up a sinkhole that halted the massive May 2017 WannaCry ransomware outbreak. As WannaCry spread, Hutchins and security researchers around the world worked to reverse-engineer it. Hutchins noticed that Wannacry was programmed to check whether a certain nonsense URL led to a live web page, but the domain wasn't owned by anyone. Hutchins then spent $10.69 USD to register the domain himself.
That worked better than he expected, since Wannacry was designed to shut itself down if that domain was active -- it was a "kill switch", in other words. The designers of Wannacry erred in pointing to a static domain, instead of one that changed at random. The exercise helped buy time to get control of the situation, with security being patched up, and Wannacry becoming history. Of course, malware will be back; but security researchers keep finding more tricks to deal with it.
* As discussed in an article from GEEKDAD.com ("Infinite Rides From Infento" by Michael Kaufman, 17 June 2018), the crowdfunded Infento company has developed a set of modular construction kits to allow kids to build scooters and tricycles, with the more elaborate kits allowing construction of bicycles and go-karts. Skis are also available.
Infento is now introducing a new series of kits, including kits that support "ePulse", with an electric motor. The system has two speed settings, keyed for parental control -- either 4.8 KPH (3 MPH) or 11.25 KPH (7 MPH). The firm is offering a baseline Explorer kit, capable of building 11 vehicles, to backers for $179 USD, with kits ranging up to the $999 Legend kit, which can be used to build all 32 different rides.
* As discussed by an article from WIRED.com ("The Las Vegas Resort Using Microwaves to Keep Guns Out of its Casino" by Robbie Gonzalez, 11 December 2017), the state of Nevada has no problems with its citizens carrying firearms, and indeed permits concealed carry with a permit. However, anyone who goes to a resort hotel / casino on the Las Vegas strip and who is attentive to details can easily see security much in evidence.
The security is low profile -- no sense in intimidating customers -- but there's still telltales like plenty of security cameras and armed guards. In other cases, it's not quite so obvious. The Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino is now testing out a new, unobtrusive security system, in the form of the "Patscan Cognitive Microwave Radar (CMR)", marketed by Canadian security outfit PatriotOne. It's a short-range radar system, set up at entryways and other chokepoints to scan people coming through, without forcing them to go through checkpoints.
Each radar unit consists of a system box and two antennas -- one transmit, one receive -- with the footprint being about the size of a movie poster. The transmit antenna emits a thousand microwave pulses, in the band from 500 MHz and 5 Ghz. The pulses are very low power, the system having a range of only about two meters to ensure that it doesn't interfere with other microwave devices. The receive antenna picks up the return echo signal. Different objects have different radar signatures; Patscan's processing system includes an expandable library of known signatures, allowing it to distinguish between weapons and benign objects.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GENERIC PAIN: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Why We May Lose Generic Drugs" by Cynthia Koons), the price of innovative superstar drugs has been skyrocketing -- one reason, among others, being pressure on the bottom line of Big Pharma companies from low-cost generic drug manufacturers.
9 out of 10 of the drugs prescribed in the USA are generics, including antibiotics, arthritis treatments, medicines for diabetes and high blood pressure. The uncomfortable irony is that manufacturers of generics are in big trouble. It's not a business with high profit margins at the best of times, and there's so many firms in the sector that they're locked into lethal price wars -- the problem being compounded by ruthless price-squeezing from insurers and other big buyers.
Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries LTD is the foremost supplier of generics in the USA. Teva is now laying off 14,000 employees and shuttering about half its 80 manufacturing plants. Brendan O'Grady -- Teva executive vice president who heads its North American commercial business -- comments: "We're one of the companies that continues to make antibiotics, and we've asked ourselves for years why we continue to still make them."
There are three major generics manufacturers: Teva, Mylan, and the Sandoz generic drug division of Novartis AG. They have nothing resembling a lock on the market, controlling only about a third of sales. The rest of the market is divided up among a horde of small players -- in some cases, set up by former managers of other generics companies who hire contract manufacturers around the globe to make their drugs, and try to get an edge by cutting prices to the bone. Market research shows that generic drug prices are falling about 11% a year, while brand-name drugs are getting spendier by about 8% a year.
What really brought on the crisis in generics was that, about five years ago, middlemen in the drug-delivery supply chain started to form buying consortiums to gain more leverage over drugmakers. Now only four groups control 90% of the drug buying in the USA:
Such groups buy drugs for retail giants like CVS Health, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart. The end result of the consolidation is that it is increasingly unprofitable to sell some important but low-margin drugs. Paul Campanelli -- chief executive officer of Endo International PLC, the fourth-largest generics maker in the USA -- is blunt: "We have supported the consortiums to the point where we're discontinuing products and shutting facilities. We are not in the position to provide more price reductions."
Endo has slashed its workforce in half, to about 3,000, from 2017, closing manufacturing facilities in Huntsville AL and Charlotte NC. When buyers ask Campanelli to restart production of a particular drug, he lets them have it: "The answer is NO. And even if we could, pricing is still so low we wouldn't be able to bring back a product."
Adam Fein, CEO of consultant Drug Channels Institute, calls the big buyer groups the "Four Horsemen of the Generic Apocalypse"; Fein wrote in a blog post that "the forecast calls for generic pain." The buyer groups are unsympathetic, with Econodisc President Jan Burkett firing back: "For many complex reasons, generic drug manufacturers are being challenged to become more efficient and institute more nimble supply chains. The notion that group-purchasing organizations are somehow to blame for generic drugmakers' woes is a red herring."
The generics manufacturers are on the back foot in the controversy, having been tarred by the difficulties of the pharmaceutical industry in general: sharp price increases, accusations of price-fixing, and pressure from lawmakers. The system is evolving towards a game of "last man standing", in which certain drugs will only be available from a single manufacturer, who will then be able to set a higher price. It may well evolve to different generics producers tacitly agreeing to stake out their own "turf" in generic drugs -- which regulators may find a bit too much like collusion in restraint of trade. The system is unstable; it is hard to see when it will settle down -- and exactly who is going to be happy when it does.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE VALUE OF DATA: An essay from ECONOMIST.com ("Data Workers Of The World, Unite", 7 July 2018) pointed to the way the modern world runs on information, to then ask the question: What if people had control over their personal data, and those who wanted the data had to pay for access? What would such a "data economy" look like?
There was a time in the past when people simply used land and water, taking it because it was freely available. Now land and water are owned and traded, so why not data? However, does the concept of a market for data make any sense? Unlike physical resources like land and water, personal data are an example of what economists call "non-rival" goods, meaning they can be used more than once -- and the more data is used, the stronger the machinery of society turns. Besides, it's obvious in the 21st century that it is very hard to control the distribution of data, with attempts to do so undermining or eliminating its value.
Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer, and Glen Weyl, an economist at Yale University -- both work for Microsoft Research -- believe that the way out of the confusion is to invoke an analogy with labor. Labor, like data, is a resource that isn't as easy to pin down as land and water. Workers were not properly compensated for labor for most of human history; even when people became free to properly sell their labor, it took generations for wages to reach liveable levels, and for people to similarly accept that labor was worth liveable wages.
Weyl, in his book RADICAL MARKETS -- co-written with Eric Posner of the University of Chicago -- argues that, while it's not a good bet that the future trajectory of data will closely track the past history of labor, it may still rhyme. Weyl believes that in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), data can be seen as a form of labor.
The key is that AI, at present, is focused on machine learning, in which AI systems are trained using floods of human-generated examples -- allowing them to learn how to translate languages, understand speech, or recognize objects in images. Data generated by humans for the machines, then, does clearly represent a form of labor, ending up being something like intellectual property -- which is also an oblique form of labor.
As the data economy builds up steam, such data work will take many forms. Much of it will be passive, incidental to people going about their activities: posting on social media, listening to music, recommending restaurants, all of which can provide relevant data to services. However, some of it will be active, with people making judgements -- labeling images or driving a car through a busy city -- that can be used to train AI systems.
The difficulty is that few people are going to be inclined or able to track all the information they generate, much less press for compensation. Weyl suggests that, echoing the rise of value of labor after the establishment of unions, information will become valuable because of the efforts of what he calls "data-labor unions" that perform collective bargaining for the data provided by their members. Data-labor unions will keep track of the data generated by their members; negotiate rates and ensure payments; and ensure the quality of data, for instance by keeping reputation scores. The data-labor unions could hook up users in need of specialized data with members who can provide it, or even conduct strikes -- shutting off data to users who don't play fair.
That sounds far-fetched. Why should Google and Facebook, for example, give up their current business model of using free data to sell targeted online advertising? In 2017, they raked in a combined $135 billion USD in ad dollars. The business wouldn't be so profitable and attractive if they had to pay for data. Meanwhile, efforts to set up schemes along the lines of data-labor unions have gone nowhere.
Nonetheless, tech giants are already paying for data, though they don't talk much about it. Mostly through outsourcing firms, they employ armies of raters and moderators to check the quality of their algorithms, and target content that is illegal or offensive. Other firms use crowd-working platforms, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, to farm out data work such as tagging pictures. Mighty AI, a startup based in Seattle, pays thousands of online workers to label images of the street scenes that are used to train the algorithms for robocars.
The emergence of machine-learning systems promises to accelerate the trend. AI systems get smarter when fed more high-quality data, and so people who can provide that data will be in a position to charge for their efforts. If smarter AI systems mean more profit, tech giants may be willing to pay money to trainers to feed those smarter AI systems. A trainer might, after pouring a cup of coffee in the morning, check a personal dashboard on a data-labor union website, to select from a personalized list of available jobs; from watching advertising, the computer's camera collecting facial reactions; to translating a text into a rare language; to exploring a virtual building to see how easy it is to navigate. Of course, the dashboard would provide past history of jobs and earnings, show ratings of the trainer and users, suggest opportunities, and allow interaction with other trainers.
This is not going to happen without the legal framework to support it. The European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May 2018 and was discussed here at the time, already gives people extensive rights to check, download, and delete personal data held by companies. Along with that, the technology needed to keep track of data flows needs to become much more capable. Finally, people will have to develop a keener awareness of the value of their data. Right now they complain about the lack of protection of their personal data, but give it away for nothing -- a contradiction known as the "privacy paradox".
The question remains of if there really is any money in personal data. If Facebook shared out its profits across all its monthly users, for example, each would get just $9 USD a year. However, in the modern information economy, it's not hard to track micro-sums, and people don't complain about petty compensation. Hookups could be made with store loyalty-card programs, for example, which are effective, well-liked, and also can be seen as paying for information -- that is, a store tracking the buying habits of customers.
Besides, the data era is in its infancy, and is poised for huge expansion. Of course, there will be difference between casual -- passive -- and "professional" data producers, but Weyl argues that there is an emerging need for professional data, and professional data generation won't generally demand high skills; or to the extent it does, it will demand a very wide range of them, providing opportunities for people with specialized knowledge. This can already be seen in website that provide "crowdsourced" legal advice.
Besides, if we're concerned about fairness in exploitation of data, there's no way it could be less fair than now -- when all the value of data is in the pockets of Google, Facebook, and the other big tech players. Once this lopsided playing field becomes publicly obvious, it will no longer be sustainable.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA EVOLUTION (8): As a footnote to this series, innovative technology is also helping preserve Africa's wildlife, which is a major source of tourist revenue. In the past few years, South Africa has lost more than a thousand rhinos a year to poachers, in spite of the efforts of armed rangers, drones, and particular tracker dogs. Rhinos are very troublesome to protect, since they range over vast areas of veld where poachers can easily operate undetected.
Artificial intelligence is now helping the rangers. One system was developed by a team of computer scientists who had previously used AI to detect roadside bombers in Iraq, and insurgents in Afghanistan. In South Africa they used machine learning to predict where rhinos were most likely to be feeding the following day. The system also factored in poaching incidents to suggest where poachers were most likely to strike next. Rangers and drones could then be sent in to patrol "hot spots", hopefully staying a step ahead of the poachers.
Scientists from IBM took a different approach to protect rhinos in the Welgevonden game reserve near Johannesburg in South Africa, using radio collars and a data network. The collars they developed beam back the position and the speed at which the animals wearing them are moving. Instead of attaching these to the rhinos, which aren't so easy to collar, they're collaring other animals such as impala or zebra that normally move alongside rhinos. The data sent back is monitored for specific patterns of movement. If a natural predator gets into a herd of zebras, they will scatter -- but if a man with a gun approaches, the animals will all start to move in the opposite direction, providing the rangers with an early warning of intruders. How effective these schemes are remains to be seen, but they're obviously an improvement, and not the last word in the effort.
* As another footnote, foreign visitors to the Africa have traditionally found it difficult to get even simple things done. It was less a question of a lack of Africans to get things done, it was just a question of finding them, and not instead dealing with people who were far more interested in pocketing money than in getting anything done. The sharing economy has changed things; a visitor can now get a ride from the airport via a ride-sharing app, and go straight to an apartment in Lagos or Accra lined up through a rental app; the apps give reviews, and though reviews can be gamed, they can't drive out serious feedback.
Of course, the sharing economy also presents big opportunities for Africans. Consider Moovr, an Uber for cows that was founded by a group of students at King's College London. The idea behind Moovr is to hook up truck drivers with farmers in remote areas who need to cattle to market. Traditionally, farmers will each walk a single cow to town, sometimes taking a week or more, and then have to take whatever price they are offered. Now, in principle, they can sell via the phone, and then deliver.
For another example, consider Flare, which calls itself "an Uber for ambulances". Nairobi doesn't have a centralized ambulance-dispatch system -- see comments above about the difficulty of getting ordinary things done in Africa -- and so getting an ambulance may take hours, after sorting through dozens of hospitals and ambulance companies. Flare is very much along the lines of Uber, with the app sorting through the thicket to get an available ambulance to somebody who needs one.
Similarly Lifebank, a Lagos startup, is working on an app system that will do much the same for blood deliveries in a city without a central blood bank. Other Nigerian entrepreneurs are putting together a tractor-sharing service, while a Kenyan group is extending the Moovr model to allow people who need to ship things to find somebody with a truck to ship them. James Middleton, one of the co-founders of Moovr, says that compared to rich countries: "Africa has a lot more inefficiencies but that also means more opportunities. Just as Africans skipped past fixed phone lines straight to mobile phones, they can skip past owning a vehicle straight to the shared economy." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (27): The last three articles of the Constitution are brief, and so are discussed as a block. Article V covered amendments to the Constitution:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
END QUOTE
The Articles of Confederation had notably lacked any useful mechanism of amendment, which proved a great flaw -- indeed, one fatal to it. The Philadelphia Convention had been originally proposed to amend the Articles of Confederation, but it quickly became obvious they would instead have to be junked and replaced. The Constitution accordingly provided an amendment mechanism, though it was carefully made to be difficult to use.
An amendment to the Constitution could be proposed either by Congress -- via a two-thirds vote in both chambers -- or a convention of states, created by two-thirds of the state legislatures. The executive branch had no direct involvement in the process. Ratification was by a YEA vote from three-quarters of states, each state having an equal vote. The vote was either by state legislatures or ratifying conventions, as specified by Congress. Only one amendment, the 21st, ratified in 1933 to repeal Prohibition, used the convention scheme. In any case, while Congress might propose an amendment, it was strictly the decision of the states as to whether it would be ratified. As far as the judiciary went, once an amendment was passed, the Federal courts were bound by it.
Note that Article V blocked the 1808 Clause of Article I -- allowing slave imports to that time, and Article I's stipulations on direct taxes -- from being amended to that time. There's something funny about the idea of an unamendable clause of the Constitution: if the Constitution could be amended, then any declaration in the Constitution that a clause could not be amended could be revoked by amendment. The Framers saw the irony in the idea -- but it didn't matter, since it was so hard to pass an amendment, and the Southern states were not going to be agreeable to ratifying an amendment that revoked any of their slave privileges. Eventually, slavery would be decisively amended out of the Constitution, and no longer be an issue.
The statement that no state could have its equal representation in the Senate revoked without its consent was subject to the same irony; but again, it didn't matter, since the Framers could not believe that any amendment to overthrow equal representation in the Senate could be ratified. The statement was merely declarative, underlining Article I, and added just to reassure the smaller states. Constitutional scholars still argue about the idea of unamendable clauses, but it's inconsequential: there's never been any serious push to eliminate equal representation in the Senate, there's no prospect there ever will be, and no later amendment to the Constitution had unamendable clauses. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: There's a morbid fascination with parasites, since they tend to have devious adaptations to their lifestyles. As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How One Parasitic Wasp Becomes The Victim -- Of Another Parasitic Wasp" by Mitch Leslie, 30 April 2018), a particularly devious example is a parasitic wasp that afflicts other parasitic wasps.
As is often the case with evolution, it's an issue of ironic consequences. The parasitoid wasps that afflict caterpillars have trickery to protect their larvae from the caterpillar immune system -- but in doing so, the caterpillar helps generate a chemical that cues "hyperparasitoid" wasps to parasitize the larvae in turn.
The hyperparasitoid wasps find the afflicted caterpillar from an odorant a plant emits when being eaten by a caterpillar. However, this odorant is influenced by a virus the parasitoid wasps inject into the caterpillar to disable its immune system, protecting the wasp larvae. It appears that the virus alters the caterpillar saliva, which in turn alters the plant behavior to tip off the hyperparasitoids. Consider it the revenge of the plant on the caterpillar, as well as the revenge of the caterpillar on the parasitoid wasps.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This Parasitic 'Love Vine' Is Sucking The Life Out Of Freeloading Wasps" by David Shultz, 21 August 2018), researchers have found another devious twist in the tale of parasites of parasites.
There is a class of parasitic wasp, known as "gall wasps", that lay eggs in trees, with larvae of the wasps secreting growth hormones that trick trees into growing tumorlike structures to protect the growing larvae, with the "galls" also providing the larvae with a steady stream of nutrients. A study has found that the larvae are sometimes parasitized by plants in return -- specifically a creeping plant known as the "parasitic love vine" (Cassytha filiformis).
In the course of a survey of Belonocnema treatae gall wasps in southern Florida, researchers noticed the vine kept turning up in samples of the galls. On closer inspection, they discovered the vine was actually penetrating into the wall of the wasp's growing chamber, sucking out nutrients and leaving behind a mummified corpse.
Just to make sure they weren't jumping to conclusions, the researchers obtained more samples -- to find that, in 51 cases in which the love vine attached itself to the B. treatae gall, more than half contained a dead wasp. Where there was no vine, only two out of 101 galls contained a dead wasp.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Stick Insects Travel Long Distances -- By Being Eaten By Birds" by Michael Allen, 28 May 2018), the ironies of evolution are no clearer than in the self-described stick insect, which has acquired a method of propagation that requires it to be eaten.
Many plants use birds for propagation: birds eat the fruits, and seeds along with them. The seeds aren't digested, to be ultimately deposited on the soil in bird droppings. While most insect eggs usually can't survive a trip through the digestive track, stick insects have eggs with a very hard shell. A research team wondered what the point of the hard shell was. Possibly it was to allow it to pass through the digestive tract of a bird unharmed? That would explain the wide distributions of stick insects.
The researchers fed eggs from three species of stick insect to brown-eared bulbuls (Hypsipetes amaurotis) -- a medium-size bird common in East Asia, and one of the main avian predators of stick insects in Japan. A few hours later the birds passed the eggs, with the researchers finding that for all three stick-insect species, from 5% to 20% of the eggs had survived unharmed. In a few cases, the eggs were observed to hatch. As the saying goes: evolution is cleverer than we are.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANYBODY I KNOW? As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Nowhere To hide", 9 September 2017), the human brain is wired to recognize and interpret faces. We quickly learn to recognize different individuals, and are quick to pick up on emotional signals from facial expressions.
Now machines are getting in on the act big-time. In the US, machine facial recognition is used by churches to track attendance; in Britain, by retailers to recognize known shoplifters. In 2017, Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China, it verifies the identities of ride-hailing drivers, allows tourists to enter attractions, and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone uses facial recognition to unlock its homescreen.
So far, there hasn't been much objection to facial-recognition technology. It's not like it's an invasion of privacy to identify people in public; humans do it all the time, so why not a machine? However, the ability obtain and inspects images of faces -- cheaply, quickly, on a vast scale -- does have major implications for privacy.
One big difference between faces and other biometric data, like fingerprints, is that face recognition works as a distance, while fingerprints mean a direct contact. FindFace, an app in use in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a social network; it can identify people with 70% accuracy. Facebook's bank of facial images is not accessible to outsiders, but Facebook might well get pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to push ads for cars on them.
On top of recognizing faces, there's a lot of work on extracting information from those faces. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, such as Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, much earlier than is possible now. Systems that sense emotion may help autistic people get a grasp of social signals they find elusive.
The technology, of course, has its threats. Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated that, when shown pictures of one gay man, and one straight man, their facial-analysis system could identify their sexuality correctly 81% of the time -- while humans could do it only 61% of the time. In lands where nonconforming sexuality is criminal, such a capability could have vicious consequences. Authoritarian states could similarly use facial recognition to spot the potentially rebellious, and might not be very concerned if those targeted really were rebels.
More subtly, facial-analysis systems could be developed to screen job applicants; the system doesn't like their looks, they don't get hired. Nightclubs and sports events could screen crowds to pick out individuals who seemed inclined to violence. The difficulty is that facial-recognition systems only work on the basis of probabilities; they make their judgements with no concern for impartiality or fairness. In addition, in the US, facial-recognition systems are largely trained on white faces, the result being an implicit bias against nonwhites.
Another potential problem is that facial recognition could be used as an ersatz "mind-reading" technology, which could be troublesome at work, or in a marriage, or in any relationship at all. Democratic governments are taking these concerns seriously.
European regulators have embedded a set of principles in forthcoming data-protection regulation, decreeing that biometric information -- including "faceprints" -- belong to its owner, and so use of that information requires consent of the owner. In Europe, Facebook could not use face recognition to peddle car ads. Of course, anti-discrimination laws would prohibit companies from making arbitrary decisions on hiring on the basis of facial-recognition systems, and also require sellers of facial-recognition systems to undergo testing for bias.
For better and for worse, facial recognition is here, and it's only to become more important as cameras become more ubiquitous, particularly in wearable gear. People are already trying to figure out ways to trick facial-recognition systems, using makeup or sunglasses; work is ongoing to build systems that can see through disguises. Google has renounced use of matching faces to identities, seeing it as nothing but trouble; but facial recognition is key to Facebook's plans, while both Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services offer facial recognition.
Democratic governments will inevitably make use of facial recognition. As disturbing as the prospect of being picked out everywhere one goes is, there's no legal basis for stopping it; people go out in public, others may recognize them, and the law has long issued WANTED posters of criminals in hopes that citizens might spot them. There's no different principle in having machines spot criminals out in public. The only thing that can be done is to provide safeguards on the use of that data; beyond that, we have no alternative but to get used to it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MISSION TO THE SUN: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Death-Defying NASA Mission Will Make Humanity's Closest Approach To The Sun" by Alexandra Witze, 18 July 2018), the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration's (NASA) "Parker Solar Probe (PSP)" was launched by a Delta IV Heavy booster from Cape Canaveral on 12 August 2018, on a mission to probe the solar corona.
The PSP started life as a NASA study in the 1990s, leading up to the "Solar Orbiter" concept, which was canceled in 2003. The mission concept was revived as a "new mission start" in 2009, with the initial expectation being the launch of the "Solar Probe Plus" in 2015. The mission moved into the design phase in 2012, with the launch date shoved out to 2018. The mission was formally named the "Parker Solar Probe", in honor of Dr. Eugene Parker, a pioneering solar physicist. This was the first time a NASA mission was named after somebody who was still alive.
Although other space platforms have been flown to investigate the Sun, the PSP will be the first to dive into the Sun's atmosphere, the corona, on a trajectory that will take it to within 6 million kilometers (3.7 million miles) of the Sun, or 8.5 solar radii -- where it will examine the solar wind pouring out of the Sun, to understand the mechanisms that drive the wind. It will pay specific attention to the small proportion of particles that are driven out at near-light speeds.
To survive the dash through the corona, the PSP is fitted with a heat shield and a cooling system. The heat shield, AKA the "solar shadow-shield", is made of reinforced carbon-carbon composite -- a material used to build the thermal protection tiles on the space shuttle. The shield is 2.4 meters (94 inches) wide and 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) thick. Although the face of the shield will reach temperatures of almost 1,400 degrees Celsius (2,500 degrees Fahrenheit) at closest approach, the temperature behind the shield will be only 29.4C (85F).
The PSP's solar panels will peek out from behind the shield during closest approach, to keep spacecraft systems powered. A specialized cooling system will keep the exposed ends of the array to a temperature of 160C (320F) or less. The system uses water as a coolant, that being seen as the only coolant fluid that could handle wide extremes of temperature. The payload will include four instruments:
Although it might seem that shooting a space probe at the Sun would be straightforward, it's anything but. To fall down to the Sun, the probe will need to shed a large amount of the Earth's orbital velocity -- that is, the booster is intended to get the probe out of Earth's gravity well, and then slow down its orbit around the Sun, so it falls inward. It won't actually shoot the probe towards the Sun; instead it will shoot it towards Venus, for the first of seven "gravity assist" flybys of the planet to line it up for repeated passes through the Sun's corona.
In any case, although the PSP only weighs 685 kilograms (1,510 pounds), it was sent into space by a big booster, the Delta IV Heavy, to provide the needed "delta vee" -- and it still needs the Venus gravity assists to perform its mission. Had the launch been delayed beyond 23 August, it would have had to be put off to May 2019 to get the right alignment again. First flyby of Venus will be on 2 October 2018, for a pass by the Sun on 5 November. Over the next seven years, it will perform 23 more flybys of the Sun, getting nearer and nearer on each pass.
Other solar study projects are in the works. In 2020, the European Space Agency plans to launch its Solar Orbiter spacecraft, which will study the Sun at higher latitudes and from a more distant point in space than the Parker Solar Probe will. Also by 2020, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) will come online in Hawaii, where it will make daily maps of the solar corona. Its 4-meter (157-inch) mirror will make it twice the size of existing solar telescopes.
The 91-year-old Parker says that he is looking forward to seeing the waves and turbulence in the solar wind -- which he predicted -- measured by the probe that bears his name. Parker says: "I expect to find some surprises."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: I've long wished to get rid of my telephone. I don't use the phone very much, really prefer email to the phone, and I don't like having to pay extra for phone service -- hey, I get email with my ISP service, why not voice? The fact that the vast majority of traffic on the phone is spam really makes paying more exasperating. The spam's so bad that I turned off the ringer on the phone, always letting the calls go to voicemail. Some spammers insist on leaving messages, which is even more annoying.
A few years back I got a Google Voice number, which allowed calls to go to a webpage; the immediate reason for doing that was to receive text messages, which I couldn't handle on a landline phone, but I could see Google Voice had further potential. It transcribed voicemail messages to text, sending them to me on email -- the transcriptions sometimes mangled phone numbers and names, but no worries, I could doublecheck against the voicemail recording -- and also reported numbers, along with the capability to easily block them.
The only problem was that I couldn't call out -- but then, some months back, I found out about Google Hangouts, which was another web page that allowed me to make calls. That meant I needed to get a phone to hook up to my PC. First I tried a bluetooth ear headset; it didn't work well, voice quality being a problem, and there was also the difficulty that it wasn't easy to know if it was really working. That failing, I found a cheap phone handset that plugs into the USB port on my PC.
The USB phone did the trick, and I was quickly calling up family as a test exercise. I did have some problems with Windows not always hooking up to the phone at first, until some trial-&-error showed me I needed to make sure it was recognized:
Once properly configured, it worked every time. Anyway, under Hangouts, I can call anywhere in the USA, no charge, no phone service required -- though I can't call the 911 emergency number. I did find out that if I didn't add an area code for a local call, Voice would tell me I didn't have enough credit to make the call.
As a backup, I decided to get my Android smartphone to work with Hangouts. I don't have a SIM chip / contract for the phone, I use it as a pocket computer, not a phone -- but I don't need a contract for Hangouts, I can talk via wi-fi. The first issue was that, in initial experiments, I had tried to use it like a phone handset, holding it up to the side of my head, but that felt awkward. On rethinking things, I found it more comfortable to plug earbud headphones into the smartphone, and use the smartphone like a handheld mike -- which, in principle, would also be useful for video calls. Incidentally, even without a SIM chip in my smartphone, I can still call the 911 emergency number, but it's not like I'm going to try.
It was a bit confusing to configure Android to handle calls. I downloaded a Google Voice app, allowing me to get into voicemails, and a Google Hangouts app to make calls. However, the Hangouts app told me to download a Hangouts Dialer as well -- and when I did so, I found out the Hangouts app was unnecessary. It appears that Google's implementation of their phone service has been a moving target, and the implementation is still a little dodgy. Why not have Voice and Dialer in the same app? In any case, with the smartphone, I can make calls from anywhere there's a wi-fi connection.
I was finally able to drop of my phone service, cutting my communications bills in half. The fact that incoming calls always go to voicemail -- I don't see them until I get an email -- is actually of a plus, dropping phone spammers off my radar. If they insist on leaving messages, or keep calling and don't leave messages, I can block them easily. Before I lost my landline phone, I called in to my Google Voice page, left a message, blocked the number, and then called in again to get: TWEEDLE-DEE! "The number you have reached is not in service."
That left me with a perfectly good landline phone I had no use for, but didn't know what to do with. The block postal box is on my property; after some puzzling, I packed the thing up, with cables and manual, put a note on it -- TAKE IT IF YOU WANT IT -- and put it on top of the mailbox. I was wondering how long it would take for it to disappear, but I've pulled the same trick before, it works; I put it out in the morning, it was gone by noon.
Also, when I chatted with my provider to drop the phone service, they upgraded me from 1.5 MBPS on my internet service -- which worked fine, no big problem downloading low-res video, I don't have a display system that makes HD worthwhile -- to 12 MBPS, for the same monthly charge. When I finally got 12 megabits, I didn't notice right away; I gradually realized I was doing a lot less waiting on pageloads, and video downloads weren't as balky, either.
* Incidentally, using Google Voice made me finally appreciate Google Contacts. When I finally got a smartphone a few years back, I just wanted to use it with email, and thought it quite a bother to need a separate app to log email addresses. Now that I've got Google Voice, it makes much more sense; I can conveniently log a phone number along with an email address, with the contacts list transparently accessed from Outlook email and Voice on my smartphone. Even better, if I update a contact on my smartphone, it then works with Outlook and Voice on all my platforms.
As another not-closely-related incidental, while I was tinkering with this tech, I had some business with a financial-services house. I had to sign some paperwork, and was asked if I wanted it sent email. I said OK, thinking I would have to print it out, sign it, and mail it back through the posts. However, what I got was an interactive email that worked through a validation service named "DocuSign" to allow me to do it all electronically.
That's the first time I've ever used such a service, and it seems years overdue. DocuSign is nothing so new, it was founded in 2003, which makes it frustrating that nobody's ever used it with me. I suspect that within a year or two, electronic signature will be the norm in the USA. It's convenient, but the validation protocol is klunky; there's a screaming need for a robust ID scheme -- but given how jumpy Americans are of robust ID, that may take time.
* In the Real Fake News for August, the early part of the month was quiet, at least by the standards of the Trump Administration, with no major outrages, no big surprises, just the disorderly business as usual to which America has become accustomed.
The month began with public revelations by one Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former Trump aide, who wrote a most unflattering memoir of her time in the White House, titled UNHINGED. By all accounts it was grotesque, but allowing for a bit of exaggeration, not surprising -- describing Trump as a whimsical boss, given to management by chaos, fond of playing his people off against each other, and willing to step on them if he just feels like it. This is news?
Nor was it news when Omarosa suggested Trump's mental faculties were failing, comedian James Corden saying:
BEGIN QUOTE:
And there was another huge revelation from Omarosa this weekend: She said the Trump administration was "deceiving this nation" by hiding how mentally declined President Trump actually is. Oh, come on. We see his tweets. He's not fooling anyone.
END QUOTE
Inevitably less noticed, meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier -- a university administrator and former vice-chair of the governing board of the US National Science Foundation -- was tagged by Team Trump to be director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). The OSTP boss is usually, if not always, the president's science adviser. The nomination is long overdue, having been left hanging since Trump took office.
Droegemeier was a bit of a surprise, considering that the tilt of the Trump White House had previously been towards recruiting climate-change deniers for the science-policy wonk job. Droegemeier is no climate-change denier, though he was evasive on that topic during Senate confirmation hearings; those who knew him said he was solid on the science, he just didn't want to start out in the White House by contradicting the Trump line. One has to be sympathetic with a responsible scientist, going to the White House in hopes of having influence, reporting to people who don't like science; indeed, don't like material facts in general. [ED: Drogemeier was confirmed in the post, and then effectively disappeared. He had no influence in the White House.]
* That unfortunate mindset is being demonstrated by the Trump Administration's continued assault on Barack Obama's environmental legacy -- with the war not going so well for the White House. One of the targets in the "down with environmentalism" drive is the Obama automotive fuel standards, the big obstacles to the White House being that California is insisting on staying with them, and a number of other states following California's lead. If California doesn't budge, US auto companies can't get out from under the Obama regulations.
The attempts by the White House to overthrow California's emissions standards met with a biting response from ex-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:
BEGIN QUOTE:
For 48 years -- since one of my heroes, then-Governor Ronald Reagan, requested it -- California has had a waiver from the federal government to clean our own air. If the president thinks he can win this fight, he's out of his mind.
I am sick and tired of these fake conservatives who believe in states' rights to make their own policies -- as long as state policy is to pollute more. If you want to clean your air, they throw federalism right out the window. I've had it with so-called pro-business conservatives who ignore what actual industry leaders say is best for business. The car companies' own lobbyist said they hoped the administration would "find a solution that continues to improve fuel efficiency standards." Let's be clear: this is a stupid policy, and nobody asked for this. Businesses prefer certainty -- not policies that change with the whims of each new White House.
I hope some conservatives with a conscience will act in Washington to defend California's waiver based on these historic Republican values. But if not, I'd remind them that California has won this battle before. We will win again.
END QUOTE
[ED: It is now almost 2021, Trump is a lame duck. He was entirely defeated in his war with California over emission standards.]
In late June, in an online video, Schwarzenegger had similarly let the White House have it over Trump's attempts to save coal:
BEGIN QUOTE:
So, President Trump [AS speaking to Trump bobblehead doll] I know you really want to be an action hero, right? So take it from the Terminator: you're only supposed to go back in time to protect future generations.
[TERMINATOR clip: "Come with me if you want to live."]
But your administration attempts to go back in time to rescue the coal industry, which is actually a threat to future generations. I just read that you want to actually force energy utilities to buy coal power. I mean, this is, to put it in your own terms:
[TRUMP: "A terrible deal." "A horrible, one-sided deal." "A deal that punishes the United States."]
It is foolish to bring back laughable, outdated technology to suit your political agenda. I mean, what are you going to bring back next? Floppy disks? Fax machines? Beanie Babies? Beepers? Or Blockbuster!
Think about it. What if you tried to save Blockbuster? Let's say it's 2010, and Netflix is just about to surpass Blockbuster as the leading video rental service -- and people absolutely love the fact that you can order movies from home, instead of having to drive all the way to store to rent them.
That's where you come in. Instead of letting Netflix succeed, you declare that everyone has to rent videos from Blockbuster in order to keep that franchise alive. I mean, as a businessman, you'd have to admit that it makes absolutely no sense to go through all this effort to keep a failing business afloat, right?
So then, why the hell are you going through all this effort to rescue coal? Coal is the Blockbuster Video of fuel sources. It's on the way out. Just like Blockbuster failed because it was worse than Netflix, coal is much worse than natural gas -- and even much, much worse than environmentally friendly ones, like wind, solar, and geothermal.
And there are consequences to standing in the way of progress that are much worse than putting Blockbuster on life support. Not only are you forcing an inferior product on consumers, but you're also propping up a fuel source that pollutes our air, our ground, and our water.
And it kills people. 7 million people die every year because of pollution. Listen, I know bringing back the coal industry was one of your major campaign promises, and I get it, why you'd want to go back to the days when coal and Blockbuster were on top.
I mean, the 1980s were very good to both us, right? [Old movie clips.] But now you're President of the United States, so it's time to start looking to the future, instead of the past -- and that means letting the coal industry go the way Blockbuster went. It is time to start investing in renewable sources that provide for our energy needs without poisoning the environment.
And if you really want to save the coal miners, which I think is a brilliant idea, focus on securing them jobs in new, safer industries, rather than propping up a dying industry. Train them for the jobs of the future, jobs where they don't have to toil thousands of feet underground, breathing deadly air. Trust me, in California, our workers who left the oil fields for the solar fields are very happy.
Give the coal miners the same chance. Because, Mr. President [AS talking to bobblehead again], that's what a real action hero would do.
END QUOTE
There's a lot of hysteria over Trump -- which is understandable, but it is still a relief to see Schwarzenegger taking careful aim in his shots. Oh, and to round out the thrashing, earlier in June he had let Trump have it over immigration, posting on Twitter:
BEGIN QUOTE:
As an immigrant, I know the magnetic power of America's greatness. As a former border Governor, I know the importance of securing our border and fixing our absurdly broken immigration system. As an American, I know that kids shouldn't be pawns while the "adults" figure it out.
The administration is right that we need to fix our immigration system. But if anybody is going to be in a cage while we wait for a comprehensive reform, let's make it the politicians who don't do their jobs in the cages, not innocent kids.
END QUOTE
In his second year, Trump has dropped all pretense of restraint, but he has clearly run low on grandstand plays. He won't change direction unless he has to; but it is an interesting possibility that Trump's third year will be one of no choices, leading to turnarounds, or at least wild inconsistency. We'll see.
* For now, Trump is continuing to be noisy and troublesome, in particular stirring up a hornet's nest in mid-month by revoking the security clearance of John Brennan, previously a CIA director, who had been publicly critical of the Trump Administration. There was a loud outcry among other ex-officials against the pettiness of the exercise, with a few of them suggesting their own security clearances be revoked as well.
The dust-up over security clearances disappeared into the background on 21 August, when Michael Cohen, Trump's attack-dog lawyer, and Paul Manafort, at one time Trump's campaign manager, were both convicted in separate trials of a confusing mosh of charges of bank fraud, tax evasion, and campaign finance violations. Cohen may not be punished too severely, since he's been singing like a canary, the song not being flattering to Trump.
Trump was reduced to angry sputtering on Twitter, at one point claiming that the Robert Mueller investigation was the biggest witch-hunt since McCarthy. At the present time, Trump doesn't seem to be at any tangible hazard in consequence of the convictions; nonetheless, there's going to be consequences, it's just not obvious what they will be.
Trump's grumps, however, were upstaged in turn by the death of Arizona Senator John McCain on 25 August. McCain, who had been one of Trump's toughest critics in Congress, had been suffering from an aggressive brain cancer. McCain used his death as a snub to Trump, saying in funeral arrangements that the president should not attend the funeral -- incidentally, Sarah Palin, his running mate in his 2008 election shot, was asked not to come either, it appears at the suggestion of Cindy McCain, the senator's wife.
McCain tapped ex-Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush to deliver funeral eulogies, and released an inspiring farewell message to Americans:
BEGIN QUOTE:
My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans, Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.
I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else's.
I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America's causes -- liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people -- brings happiness more sublime than life's fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.
Fellow Americans -- that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.
We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.
We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times.
We will come through them stronger than before. We always do. Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening. I feel it powerfully still.
Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history. Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America.
END QUOTE
Trump didn't take shots at McCain in the wake of his death, but there were signs of restlessness with having to be quiet -- such as raising the flag on the White House from half-mast before McCain's internment, then lowering it again in the face of protests.
McCain's farewell letter never named Trump, instead pointing with dismay at the current disorder of the USA, and expressing his, McCain's, hopes that Americans would, should, prove better than that. The real irony, as was pointed out in commentaries, was that if McCain had made any expressions of principle at all in his letter, he would have unavoidably skewered Trump. McCain is gone; the focus moves on towards election day 2018. Never has more weight been placed on a mid-term election.
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