* 23 entries including: US Constitution (series), public security & data privacy (series), AI detects viruses & viral specialization, deregulating hemp, saildrones, America's baby bust, battlefield MANET, sunbox energy storage, the time before time, India's pollution, and bright young sun paradox & quick-freeze Earth.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JANUARY 2019: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("The EU and Euro Keep Defying the Doomsayers" by Alan Crawford, 2 January 2019), the European Union may seem under threat, menaces including Britain's imminent departure from the EU; the populist Italian government's attacks on Brussels; the spread of nationalism in the bloc's east; the eventual exit from power of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the pillars of the union; and the loud protests against French President Emmanuel Macron, an enthusiastic EU booster.
The EU, however, is not faced with imminent collapse. Ten years ago, a debt crisis brought Greece to its knees, with Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus following Greece in asking for international aid. The crisis led to tension between the wealthier, mostly northern donor nations, and poorer bailout recipients on the periphery. It seemed like the euro, the EU common currency, was doomed.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi took a stand with his pledge to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the single currency. Angela Merkel backed him up, proclaiming: "If the euro fails, Europe fails." The crisis galvanized the EU, with measures taken such as implementation of the 500 billion euro ($568 billion USD) European Stability Mechanism bailout fund, along with efforts to improve surveillance of euro member budgets to spot and deal with problems before they went out of control. Now the euro is more popular than ever: Bulgaria and Croatia are moving to adopt the single currency, bringing the number of EU participant nations to 21.
Europeans have not, by and large, forgotten their long history of fratricidal conflict, and recognize the era of continental peace brought by union; Merkel and Macron have persistently reminded them of it. However, there are also practical economic reasons why even the EU's surliest members are unwilling to push nationalist policies to the point of bailing out of the EU.
Poland, for example -- where the nationalist government clashed with Brussels over judicial reform that EU officials said contravened the bloc's democratic norms -- is the biggest net recipient of EU funds, having received 27 billion euros for transportation and environmental projects alone in the current budget period of 2014 to 2020. That's equal to about 6% of Poland's annual gross domestic product. Money talks: Poland backed down on the "reforms" at the last minute.
Similarly, the possibility of an "Italexit" has faded as the unlikely coalition of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-immigration League has pulled back from its dubious fiscal policy. There are still worries: Italy is too big to rescue with the tools devised in the wake of the debt crisis. Nonetheless, Italy is showing no real signs of bolting from the EU -- the League having its base in richer northern Italy, with members in the business community who dread the idea of leaving the union. In addition, a poll in November 2018 showed 57% of Italian voters thought the euro was a good thing, up 12% from the previous year.
The gilets jaunes protests against Macron have certainly put his leadership under strain -- but the movement is spontaneous, composed of elements with different grievances, and suffers from weak leadership. The movement is not, in electoral terms, going anywhere in particular. Macron is wisely making modest concessions and engaging in dialogue, with the crisis likely to gradually dissipate.
In much the same way, although Germany's ruling Christian Democratic party has been under pressure from the Right that has sapped Merkel's influence, it has not wavered from the center, with her preferred successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, holding to the trajectory Merkel has set for Germany. Polls suggest the pressure from the Right is declining. Freed from CDP leadership, Merkel can focus on European unity in her remaining three years in office. Merkel is intelligent and determined; she may have been weakened, but it would be unwise to count her out.
The EU tends to emerge stronger from its crises. When Britain voted for Brexit in 2016, there were fears there would be a rush for the exits -- but the rapid descent of the UK into political chaos made everyone much more willing to stay inside. 62% of EU citizens see their country's EU membership as a positive, the highest figure recorded in 25 years, according to an October 2018 Eurobarometer survey for the European Parliament.
Indeed, it is not at all clear if Britain will actually go through with Brexit, having reached the point of either leaving the EU without a deal -- unilaterally severing most of its connections with the Continent -- or calling it off. Sony Kapoor, managing director of Re-Define, a London-based think tank, comments:
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The European Union has been written off several times before, but has always proved far more resilient than its critics have assumed. It has lived and even thrived through the fall of the Berlin Wall; a huge, ambitious, and ultimately successful integration of former Soviet states; an existential euro crisis; the conflict in Ukraine; the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism; and now the farce of Brexit. Yes, there are always urgent, critical, problematic, and important problems to confront -- but the EU has proven its resilience beyond all doubt by now.
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There is no cause for complacency. Europe's economy is slowing, and bloc-wide elections in May could undermine support for the union. The biggest danger lies beyond its boundaries. President Vladimir Putin is emboldened by Russian success in Syria and President Trump's decision to pull out US forces, while Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is preparing to ramp up the fight against Islamic State. That hands Putin and Erdogan control over a potential new wave of refugees directed toward Europe, which would re-energize European nationalists.
Trump is clearly waffling on the Syria withdrawal -- actually increasing US forces in the country for the moment, in principle to cover a withdrawal -- and his noisy trade war game is similarly hard to read. Trump's inconsistency and incoherence don't reassure Europeans, but the pressures are strengthening, not weakening the union. As Benjamin Franklin put it during the American Revolution: they can all hang together, or they can all hang separately.
ED: The mad dark comedy of Brexit appears to be reaching a crescendo as the country stumbles towards Brexit on 29 March. As discussed below, Parliament has rejected the deal with the EU negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May, and talk of altering it has been firmly rejected by the EU: "Take it or leave it."
The satirical website THE ONION ran an article with the title: "Fed-Up EU Rejects United Kingdom, Gives British 30 Days To Vacate Europe". The article had a picture of European Council President Donald Tusk, whose normal expression conveys: "I haven't slept well, I have indigestion, and you're saying nothing to make me feel any better."
* As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("South America Votes Right While Leaning Left" by Raymond Colitt, 19 December 2018), at the beginning of January, Jair Bolsonaro was sworn in as Brazil's president -- with the result that 85% of South America's 415 million people are now being governed by Right-leaning, market-friendly leadership.
Given the continent's collective $3.2 trillion USD economy, that could mean billions freed for investment, merger activity, and trade partnerships, particularly with the USA. However, that would imply reversing traditional protectionist policies that rely heavily on government subsidies to support weak industries, coupled with a workforce that's not up to global standards in education and skill.
There lies the contradiction, in that South America hasn't really undergone a Right revolution at any deep level, Right-leaning leaders being faced with Left-leaning citizens. In Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, voters and institutions have stubbornly resisted change. None of the conservative leaders elected in the past three years took office with the absolute legislative majority needed to avoid a runoff, or to form a clear governing bloc. Many pursued austerity policies on entering office, only to find their approval ratings sinking, with their efforts to modernize economies, strengthen up public finances, and generate growth bogging down.
Daniel Zovatto -- Latin America director at the Stockholm-headquartered International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance -- comments: "The Right is in power, but it's weak, often unpopular, and faces an unfavorable global scenario." Throughout South America, budgets are strained, while America's turn toward trade wars are discouraging. Zovotto adds: "Investors betting on magic formulas and quick solutions will be very disappointed."
Bolsonaro has promised to get the budget of the continent's biggest economy under control, deal with a looming pension crisis, and sell off state companies. He also wants to stop the runaway crime that plagues the country. He'll need help from lawmakers to do all that -- but Bolsonaro has also reduced the number of cabinet-level posts traditionally doled out to rival parties to keep them happy. They're not happy.
It's roughly the same story elsewhere in South America: Ivan Duque in Colombia, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and Sebastian Pinera in Chile were elected with ambitious agendas, only to bog down and suffer in public approval polls. The underlying problem is restless, ambivalent voters -- many of which want a developed-world standard of living, but are deeply suspicious of capitalism and free-market doctrines.
Chile pioneered market-friendly policies in Latin America; by 2004, it had become the region's richest nation by per capita income. However, Chileans have become restive, with protests over inequality in education and income forcing the government to reinforce social services. Pinera promised to increase pension pay and improve health care, with pressure on him to do even more.
Such pressures tend to encourage the emergence of populists with magical solutions that don't work. They also make fiscal belt-tightening, always troublesome, even more so. In countries with growing income inequality, chronic poverty, and inadequate public services such as health and education, it's hard to cut fuel subsidies, deregulate labor markets, or reduce pension benefits.
Today's struggling Rightists don't have the padding of a commodities boom that got Leftists such as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil or Argentina's Nestor Kirchner re-elected more than a decade ago. Mexico's firebrand leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is the exception that proves the rule: even after achieving a landslide victory, he proposed a restrained budget that does little to upend the priorities of his more conservative predecessor. He doesn't have the backing or the money to do much more.
Bolsonaro appointed a group of pro-market University of Chicago-trained technocrats to cabinet and administration positions to pursue opening up the country's notoriously closed economy. Unfortunately for him, having avoided a meaningful discussion of economic issues during the campaign, he doesn't have a clear mandate to downsize Brazil's costly and unwieldy social welfare state. Says Murillo de Aragao, head of Brasilia-based consulting firm Arko Advice: "If he can get done half of what he plans, that would be a success."
ED: In more specific South American news, following a dubious election that gave the odious Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro a new term, Juan Guaido -- the leader of the opposition, which had boycotted the election -- simply declared himself to be president, and moved to gain control of the government.
The Trump Administration recognized Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, as did a number of Latin American states and other countries. The Russian and Chinese government denounced Guaido. So far, widespread violence has been avoided; but the amount of obvious trolling on Twitter and other social-media systems in favor of Maduro skyrocketed. It is unclear if the trolling is being orchestrated by the Maduro government, or by the Russian government in support of Maduro. One ends up wishing for the quick fall of Maduro -- just so the trolls will shut up and go away.
* With the collapse of British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit plan and the looming approach of a "no-deal" Brexit on 29 March, the UK has been thrown into turmoil, and seems to be -- despite outraged protests -- drifting irresistibly towards a second referendum on Brexit. An essay from ECONOMIST.com ("How Britain Embraced Referendums" by Robert Saunders, 17 January 2019), discussed the past history and idiosyncrasies of referendums in the UK.
They've long been controversial:
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In 1945 Clement Attlee denounced it as "alien to all our traditions" and an "instrument of Nazism". Harold Wilson, the prime minister who would hold Britain's first national referendum in 1975, had previously dismissed the idea as "contrary to our traditions" and "not a way in which we can do business", scoffing that a referendum would probably abolish the income tax. His Conservative opponent, Margaret Thatcher, called the referendum "a device of dictators and demagogues" that would be dangerous to minorities and destructive of parliamentary sovereignty.
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They are not, in practice, so outrageous:
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... the referendum is now an established part of our constitution: for better or worse, a tool that has been used 12 times since 1973 can no longer be described as "alien to all our traditions". From Harold Wilson to David Cameron, prime ministers have repeatedly called in the electorate as a political bomb-disposal unit, tasked with defusing explosive issues on their own backbenches.
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The real difficulty with referendums has been using them wisely. They effectively entered the British political scene early in the 20th century, when a fragmented Parliament had been rocked by a series of eruptive political questions -- like votes for women, tariff reform, and Home Rule for Ireland. A.V. Dicey, the most prominent constitutionalist of the era, believed that referendums could cut through parliamentary chaos.
Dicey, however, was cautious in saying that a referendum could only endorse or reject proposals that had already been approved in Parliament -- acting as "the People's Veto". He understood that they could otherwise go off the rails:
These difficulties all became obvious with the 2016 Brexit vote:
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It reduced a question of mind-bending complexity to an abstract proposition, onto which voters could project incompatible versions of Brexit. It placed extraordinary power in the hands of two campaign vehicles that were under no responsibility to deliver on their promises; indeed, within days of the vote, the winning side had erased most of its website, like a drugs cartel torching the evidence before the police arrived.
Moreover the 2016 vote has imported a theocratic principle into British politics, in which competing sects stalk the political landscape, warning heretics and unbelievers that "Brexit is our God, and Theresa/Boris/Jeremy is its prophet". The result turbo-charged the most dangerous idea to which a democracy can fall victim: the fallacy that "the will of the people" forms a single, unitary intelligence, issuing instructions to which all must bend the knee. It is a fantasy made possible only by the ruthless suppression of dissenting voices, casting critics as traitors, MPs as "saboteurs", and judges as "enemies of the people".
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It is increasingly obvious that only a second referendum can break the political logjam, though obviously it has risks:
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Trying to solve the problems of one referendum by launching another might seem the political equivalent of drinking through a hangover. But Parliament is deadlocked and no party has a united position that it could put to a general election. We cannot break that deadlock by repeating the flawed exercise of 2016. But the Diceyan model of a "People's Veto" offers something more hopeful.
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The 2016 referendum was disastrous because all it specified was that Britain would leave the EU, without a single detail of how that would happen. Dicey understood that the pitfalls of referendums could be avoided if the referendum was a choice between two planned courses of action. What the UK faces now is a very clear choice between calling off Brexit, or taking a no-deal Brexit. It's become clear that nobody wants a "soft Brexit", a negotiated deal with the European Union, both sides finding that prospect an unhappy halfway house -- and the EU throwing cold water on further discussion anyway.
Theresa May rejects a second referendum -- but she has to, since otherwise she would be violating her directive to take Britain out of the EU. It falls to Parliament now, and Parliament is rapidly running out, has run out of, all other options. Brexit is not going well; the vote for Leave was very narrow, and second thoughts have set in. Is there a possibility for a second referendum? That remains to be seen. If not, who knows what will happen? COMMENT ON ARTICLE
BACK_TO_TOP* AI HUNTS VIRUSES: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Machine Learning Spots Treasure Trove Of Elusive Viruses" by Amy Maxmen, 19 March 2018), researchers have used an artificial intelligence technique to discover nearly 6,000 previously unknown species of virus, demonstrating the utility of AI in virology.
Viruses are not easy to study. We are familiar with viral pathogens, because they have an evident impact on us, and because they are easy to culture: they have to contend against immune systems attempting to suppress them, and so aren't fussy about their growth environment. Viruses that don't present a threat aren't so hardy, and are much harder to culture. In addition, it's not so easy to identify the genetic sequences of viruses, since they have small and highly variable genomes.
Recently, researchers have used metagenomics to expand their understanding of viruses -- taking samples from the environment, then sequencing each sample as a unit, covering all the viruses and microbes in it. That leads to using computing power to sort out the mess of sequences, beginning by spotting known genetic signatures. Obviously, that doesn't help in dealing with unknown sequences. Machine learning, it turns out, can help find and nail down patterns in such unknown sequences.
In a recent paper Simon Roux -- a computational biologist at the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek CA, his work having been mentioned here in 2015 -- trained computers to identify the genetic sequences of viruses from one unusual family, Inoviridae. These viruses live in bacteria, altering their host's behavior: for instance, they make the bacteria that cause cholera, Vibrio cholerae, more toxic. Roux estimates that fewer than 100 species of this family had been identified before his research began.
Roux fed a machine-learning algorithm two sets of data -- one of 805 genomic sequences from known Inoviridae, and another of about 2,000 sequences from bacteria and other types of virus -- to teach the system to recognize Inoviridae from not-Inoviridae. Having done that, Roux passed the model huge metagenomic data sets, with the machine learning system picking out more than 10,000 Inoviridae genomes. The system organized them into groups, Roux finding the variation between the groups to be so wide as to suggest the Inoviridae consists of families.
In a separate study Deyvid Amgarten -- a bio-informatician at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil -- similarly used machine learning to find viruses in compost piles at the city's zoo. The system was trained with a few tell-tales of virus genomes, for example as the density of genes in DNA strands of a given length. Put into action, the system uncovered several genomes that seemed to be new. The next step is to determine the proteins those viruses produce, and see if any can accelerate composting.
Amgarten leveraged off a machine-learning tool released in 2017 named "VirFinder1", put together by a team under Jie Ren, a computational biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Virfinder is trained to recognize patterns of DNA codes. Ren used the tool to inspect metagenomic samples from feces of healthy people, and those with cirrhosis of the liver. The system was able to show that certain types of viruses were more or less common in the control group than they were in patients with cirrhosis of the liver, suggesting interaction between viral populations and the affliction.
That seems like a trivial finding, but biomedical researchers have long wondered if viruses have something to do with mysterious afflictions such as chronic fatigue syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. Derya Unutmaz, an immunologist at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut, speculates that viruses might trigger a destructive inflammatory reaction -- or they might alter the behavior of bacteria in a person's microbiome, which in turn could destabilize metabolism and the immune system.
Unutmaz believes that machine learning will prove to be an extraordinary probe to uncover such connections, allowing researchers to pick out viruses lost in the metagenomic crowd -- and to find deviously indirect collections, linking data on viruses to bacteria, and then to protein changes in people with symptoms. Unutmaz says: "Machine learning could reveal knowledge we didn't even think about."
* VIRAL SPECIALIZATION: As discussed by a related article from ECONOMIST.com ("Pack-Hunting Viruses", 19 July 2018), British researchers have now found that bacteriophages -- viruses that infect bacteria -- collaborate in their attacks on target bacteria.
A phage infects a bacterium with its own viral genome, with the bacterial cellular machinery then subverted to generate new viruses, ultimately killing the host. Phages have to penetrate the cell wall, and then disable the bacterium's defenses. A bacterium has a set of defenses, one of the best-known being the CRISPR system, now commonly used in genetic engineering.
The CRISPR system detects and chops up alien DNA, such as viral genomes. Some phages have acquired means to gum up CRISPR. Edze Westra and Stineke van Houte at the University of Exeter discovered that phages will specialize collaborate, with some phages jamming CRISPR, while others hijack the bacterium's genetic apparatus.
The two researchers discovered this by observing the rise and fall of bacterial and phage numbers in cultures. They assumed that bacteria with CRISPR defenses would suffer if confronted with phages carrying anti-CRISPR mechanisms. To their surprise, they found out such phages didn't always prevail.
To investigate, they and their colleagues generated a population of CRISPR-armed bacteria and another of phages with anti-CRISPR traits. When the phages were added to cultures of bacteria, at first the phages were unsuccessful in infecting the bacteria. They were, however, able to weaken the CRISPR defenses of the bacteria. If the culture were left long enough, the balance of power gradually shifted, with the bacteria ultimately exterminated.
The researchers found that the outcome depended on the initial ratio of phages and bacteria. Below a certain level of concentration, the phages died out; above that level, the bacteria did. The initial infections by phages simply focused on breaking down CRISPR defenses, with those phages not replicating and dying out. If there were still some phages remaining, they infected the weakened bacteria, then took them over and replicated.
Bacteriophages can be used as anti-bacterial treatments, the Soviet Union having done so for decades, and so a better understanding of how phages work could have medical applications. In addition, phages are common in the human gut microbiome, with much left to learn about what they're doing there. There's also the possibility that other viruses may use similar mechanisms, and they've simply been overlooked so far. Research continues.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* HEMP GETS THE GREEN LIGHT: The business of hemp farming was last discussed here in 2014, with the article pointing out that hemp is potentially a big business -- but there were legal obstacles to overcome. As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("No, You Can't Smoke Hemp" by Harmeet Kaur, 15 December 2018), hemp is now effectively legal to grow in all 50 US states, thanks to an item in the 2018 congressional farm bill.
The legal status of hemp was previously skewed, in that it was okay to sell hemp products, but growing it was another thing. Traditionally, the Federal government has treated hemp as just another strain of marijuana, listed as a "Schedule 1" drug on the Drug Enforcement Administration's list of controlled substances, alongside heroin, LSD and marijuana. The farm bill takes it off the list, and so now universities are able to start performing research on hemp.
Hemp isn't really marijuana in the first place. They're the same plant, but just as different lines of marijuana plants have been bred for enhanced potency, hemp has been bred for utility, not for effectiveness as a recreational drug. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a hemp booster, says: "Federal law treats hemp like it's a dangerous drug, but the only thing you're going to accomplish by smoking hemp is wasting breath, time, and lighter fluid."
Hemp has uselessly low levels of THC, which is what gets people stoned when they smoke dope. It has more CBD, which is non-psychoactive chemical sold as a supplement, with its enthusiasts claiming it helps with anxiety, arthritis, stress, and other problems -- though the jury is still out on how much good it does. In any case, there's a market for CBD, and hemp is the better source than marijuana, partly because hemp is legal everywhere in the USA.
CBD is really a minor reason to grow hemp; hemp is better used as a basis for renewable fuels, building materials, clothes, food, and beer. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was one of the prime movers in adjusting the farm bill to take hemp off the controlled list, and even signed the farm bill with a pen made out of hemp. McConnell's reason for interest in hemp is due to the fact that his home state of Kentucky has a lot of tobacco farmers, and tobacco is a declining crop. Some tobacco farmers are, as a result, switching to hemp, which grows well in tobacco country, and so hemp production is also growing rapidly in Kentucky.
The 2018 farm bill relaxes restrictions on hemp production, and farmers can also apply for US Department of Agriculture (USDA) crop insurance and grant programs. The bill also allows tribal nations to grow hemp on their lands. However, obstacles remain -- one of the big ones being that there hasn't been a lot of crop research on hemp, and so farmers don't have access to better strains just yet. There's also the problem that hemp farmers have to make sure their plants don't contain more than 0.3% THC; with another obstacle being inconsistent state laws.
There is yet another problem with inflated expectations, hemp advocates having praised the plant to the skies -- that it's easy to grow, and adaptable to most climates; that it can clean contaminants from the soil, and improve soil quality. Terence Smart, a professor of horticulture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is cautious: "Many of these things have not been properly studied in these controlled experiments and may or may not live up to the hype." Nonetheless, there's plenty of reason for optimism in the new frontier of hemp.
ED: One of the puzzling items on the 2018 Colorado ballot was a measure to drop Colorado state standards on hemp, and adopt national standards. I agreeably voted YES, though I wasn't sure what the measure was all about. Now all becomes clear.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (9): As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Apartheid With Chinese Characteristics", 31 May 2018), China has become a leader in public surveillance technology -- and has put it to uses that show just how hideously wrong such tech can go.
Welcome to Xinjiang province in China's northwest, home to the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people, and the largest group of Muslims in China. Xinjiang is remote and isolated, but strategically important to China: it is the country's biggest producer of oil and gas, while much of the fuel imported from Central Asia and Russia passes through on its way to the factories on China's east coast. It is seen as a vital link in the Belt and Road Initiative -- a government scheme to bind the Middle East and Europe to China with ties of infrastructure, investment, and trade.
The Uighurs are ethnically distinct from the Han Chinese, the dominant Chinese ethnic group. The two groups don't get along well, with 2009 being a notably difficult year, featuring violent clashes between Uighurs and Hans in Ueruemqi, the provincial capital. Uighurs were then murdered elsewhere in China, with Uighurs conducting terrorist attacks in response.
In 2016, a new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) boss named Chen Quanguo took charge of the Xinjiang provincial government, with massive resources being investing in keeping the Uighurs under control. The effort has proven highly successful -- if "success" is measured in terms of comprehensive oppression, with little concern for human rights.
The government is building hundreds, possibly thousands of re-education camps to which Uighurs can be sent for any reason, including none. Although there are reports of mistreatment in the camps, they seem to be more repressive and petty than deliberately brutal. One released prisoner has said he was not allowed to eat until he had thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP.
Kashgar, the largest Uighur city, has four camps, the biggest being Number 5 Middle School. A local security chief said in 2017 that "approximately 120,000" people were being held in the city. In Korla, in the middle of the province, a security official more recently said the camps are so full that officials in them are asking the police to stop bringing in people.
Very well, the government is building more camps. Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Kortal, Germany, has found procurement contracts for 73 re-education camps, with a total cost of 682 million yuan ($108 million USD), most of that spent since April 2017. Roughly estimating from the four camps in Kashgar that the average capacity of a camp is 30,000 people, that means the 73 camps can handle 2.2 million people. Even if that's an exaggerated estimate, the scale of the gulag is still monstrous.
Records from Akto, a county near the border with Kyrgyzstan, reveal that it spent 9.6% of its budget on security, including camps, in 2017. In 2016, spending on security in Xinjiang province was five times what it had been in 2007; by the end of 2017, it was ten times that, or 59 billion yuan.
The government will not confirm the existence of the camps. They are not under the direction of any judicial process, with detentions on the orders of the police or party officials -- the courts have no involvement. A woman working as an undertaker was locked up for washing bodies according to Islamic custom. Thirty residents of Ili, a town near the Kazakh border, were detained "because they were suspected of wanting to travel abroad," according to the local security chief. Other offenses have included holding strong religious views; allowing others to preach religion; asking where one's relatives are; and not reciting the national anthem in Chinese.
A rough estimate suggests that, of 10 million Uighurs, possibly one in 20 -- 500,000 of them -- have been detained. The Chinese government doesn't admit to the existence of the camps, much less say how many are being held, so the number is guesswork. However, it's likely no great exaggeration; in a village visited by Agence France Presse, a fifth of adults had been detained over four months. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (45): While President James Polk was engaged in war with Mexico on one hand, he was engaged in diplomacy with Britain on the other, in an effort to resolve the status of the "Oregon Territory" -- covering what is now the US Pacific Northwest states, and the southwestern provinces of Canada. An 1818 treaty, established in the wake of the War of 1812 as part of series of treaties to normalize relations between the US and Britain, had established joint settlement of the region, pending a resolution of the border status.
The most reasonable solution was to extend the Canadian border at the 49th parallel to Puget Sound, with some formula to then allocate the islands in the sound. However, expansionist fever was at a high pitch in the United States; in the election of 1844, the Democrats pushed for the United States to obtain all of Oregon Territory, up to its northern border -- a slogan emerging as: "Fifty-Four Forty Or Fight!"
Although tensions ran high for a time, Polk finally decided he didn't want to get into a war with Britain, and the "Oregon Treaty" was finally signed in 1846, establishing the border along the 49th parallel -- though ambiguities remained in the allocation of islands in Puget Sound. In any case, Polk had presided over the biggest expansion of US territory in American history, with the nation stretching "from sea to shining sea". It was an impressive feat, though the means by which it was done were not necessarily much to be proud of.
While the slavery question had gone more or less quiet after the Missouri Compromise, the extension of the US to the west brought it back to the forefront again. In the course of Polk's efforts to secure the western territories, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attempted to add a rider to a White House funding bill that would ban slavery in the new territories. The "Wilmot Proviso" went nowhere.
Polk, having promised to serve only one term, was as good as his word, going back to Nashville after he left the White House, to die of some malady a few months later. The election of 1848 led to the election of General Zachary Taylor -- hero of the War with Mexico -- as POTUS 12. Taylor had never had much interest in politics, the Whigs pressuring him into running for office, hoping to cash in on his public prominence. His major concern in office was to come to a resolution of the issue of slavery in the territories.
That wasn't going to happen on Taylor's watch, though his administration was marked by the creation of the "Department of the Interior" -- the first new government department since George Washington set up his government -- in 1849. As originally conceived, the Interior Department had a diverse portfolio of responsibilities, including:
The underlying theme of the department was the internal development of the nation along with welfare of its people.
That was one of the few noteworthy achievements of Taylor's presidency; he died abruptly on a hot July day after only 16 months in office. His vice president, Millard Fillmore, then became POTUS 13. Taylor had been anti-slavery, and had resisted the introduction of slavery into the western territories; his death permitted the construction of a deal, the "Compromise of 1850". It was a set of five separate bills, the primary architects being Whig Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. The elements of the compromise stated that:
The Compromise of 1850 was, to the extent it was a solution at all, a strictly temporary one. Popular sovereignty was a principle that invited conflict, while the expanded Fugitive Slave Law would cause nothing but trouble. Fillmore's attempts to enforce the law, with SCOTUS backing up such efforts, inflamed Northern states, while Southern states fumed about Northern resistance to the repatriation of slaves, and believed the Federal government wasn't doing enough to overcome that resistance.
The Whig Party, conflicted over slavery, began to disintegrate. Fillmore would be a one-term president, and the last Whig president. The Whigs effectively split in two, with anti-slavery Whigs establishing the new Republican Party; and the "(Native) American Party" -- a nationalist party based on anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments. The American Party was generally called the "Know Nothing Party", it seems mostly because of its secretiveness, but also as a jeer from its adversaries. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Nammo Unveils Ramjet-Assisted Artillery Round Concept" by Peter Felstead, 13 June 2018), Norwegian munition manufacturer Nammo has announced work on a ramjet-boosted 155-millimeter artillery round, capable of ranges of over 100 kilometers (60 miles). While rocket-boosted artillery shells are nothing new, ramjet-boosted shells haven't been fielded to date.
The Nammo round is built around a compact solid-fuel ramjet. It has four small guidance fins on the nose, and three wrap-around stabilization fins on the rear. It features a GPS-INS guidance system -- boosted-range shells of course need guidance to be on target. The munition hasn't been tested yet; Nammo has set up a test facility and is conducting an early investigation. First test shots will be no earlier than late next year, with fielding no earlier than 2023. Nammo is also considering ramjet-powered missiles based on the same tech.
* As per an article from JANES.com ("MBDA Unveils Future Land Indirect Fires Concepts" by Robin Hughes, 19 September 2018), European defense giant MBDA has unveiled a set of "land precision effects (LPE)" concepts for use with the ARTEC 8x8 Boxer wheeled infantry fighting vehicle, for the British Army's future land surface-to-surface strike requirements.
Boxer is an armored ground combat platform, being jointly developed by Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. It is to be adaptable to different roles by installation of different mission modules. For the LPE role, MBDA concepts envision an eight-round launcher module for a 178-millimeter surface-to-surface munition, with either a radio-frequency / semi-active laser (SAL) or electro-optic / infrared (EO-IR) seeker. It is unclear if the "radio frequency" scheme means a radio link, a radio-emission homing seeker, an active radar system, or a combination of such.
The LPE munitions will leverage off existing munitions in the MBDA product line, including the 178-millimeter Brimstone / Spear missiles, along with development in the new 166-millimeter "Common Anti-air Modular Missile" family. One of the concept images shows what appears to be a stretched derivative of the Brimstone missile with an aft actuator array leveraged from the CAMM effector. Another concept shows a larger caliber air-breathing concept, with an active RF seeker for longer-range strike.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("FLIR Systems Adds Black Hornet 3 To Its PRS Family Of Micro UAVs" by Geoff Fein, 11 June 2018), the FLIR Systems company of Wilsonville, Oregon -- a long-standing maker of thermal imager systems -- has now unveiled its "Black Hornet 3" tactical microdrone.
The pocket-sized Black Hornet 3 is a complete redesign from previous Black Hornet models, featuring:
The Black Hornet 3 is flown with a hand controller, and monitored over a tablet or smartphone via ATAK. Black Hornets have been fielded with the British and Australian Armies, and have seen operational service.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SAILDRONES OVER THE WAVES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Fleet Of Sailboat Drones Could Monitor Climate Change's Effect On Oceans" by Paul Voosen, 8 March 2018), oceanography came of age during World War II, bolstered by military funding to support maritime warfare. After the conflict, oceanographers canvassed the oceans with research ships, collecting sea surface data. Later, they deployed networks of buoys, and obtained sea data from specialized Earth satellites.
Now oceanographers are investigating the potential of ocean-spanning sailing drones. Two experimental 7-meter (23-foot) long drones, carrying a suite of sensors, embarked from California in September 2017, returning to home port after almost 8 months at sea. They were developed by Saildrone, a marine tech startup based in Alameda, California -- mentioned here in 2014 -- in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington DC.
Craig McLean -- assistant administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research at NOAA, and acting chief scientist -- believes that saildrones have great potential: "We could be making the next epochal advancement in oceanography." McLean and others involved in the effort believe that within the next decade, hundreds or thousands of saildrones could be cruising the seas, relaying data back home via satellite links.
Being self-deploying, saildrones do not have to be put in place, like buoy networks. Buoys have other problems. Since the 1980s, NOAA has supported an array of buoys, anchored to the Pacific sea floor, the array being called the "Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO)" array, to help keep track of the "El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)" -- a set of shifting global temperature and rainfall patterns triggered by warm surface waters that migrate back and forth across the equatorial Pacific every few years.
A few years back, TAO came under attack. The marine growth on the buoys and their moorings attracted fish; the fish attracted fishermen, who damaged the buoys. Maintenance work piled up, while budget cuts made it harder to send research vessels to sea to place new buoys. Congress did restore funding for TAO, which costs about $10 million USD a year to run. However, Japan had set up a complementary array in the Western Pacific named the "Triangle Trans-Ocean Buoy Network" -- with funding problems leading to it being all but abandoned, undermining ENSO observations.
The crisis led NOAA and others to look for a more sustainable system to keep track of ENSO, to help agencies plan for the heavy rains and droughts that follow in its wake. Richard Jenkins, an engineer and founder of Saildrone, had a solution. He had built a sailboat on wheels named "Greenbird" that in 2009 had broken the land-speed record for a wind-powered vehicle, attaining 202 KPH (125 MPH) on a dry lake bed in Nevada. He had then help outfit an oceanic research vessel, to be appalled at expense involved. Jenkins got to wondering if an oceanic derivative of Greenbird could survey the oceans more cheaply.
Operating under sail power, a saildrone could stay at sea indefinitely, powering its instruments and communications system with a small solar array. It could be preprogrammed before going to sea, using GPS to stay on the route, sail in circles around a virtual mooring point to take observations, then return home once a year for servicing. Jenkins obtained a grant of a few million USD, and by 2013 his prototype had sailed from California to Hawaii, propelled by a 4.6-meter (15-foot) tall carbon-composite sail.
Since then, Saildrone has worked with researchers at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, Washington, to fit the boats with sensors and run them through evaluations. In 2015, they survived 40-knot (74-KPH / 26-MPH) winds during a 3-month cruise into the Arctic to assess marine life. Oceanographers became very interested in saildrones; they cost $2,500 USD a day to operate, while ship time can cost $30,000 USD or more a day.
As an operational test, two saildrones left San Francisco on 5 September 2017, headed for equatorial waters. Satellites had observed cold tongues of surface water extending westward from the South American coast, an indicator of a strong "La Nina", El Nino's opposite number. There were difficulties, with the saildrones ending up becalmed in the equatorial doldrums, a wind dead zone. Eventually, they got enough wind to escape; Jenkins plans a larger sail for future excursions.
They did, however, accomplish their mission. Meghan Cronin, an oceanographer at PMEL, obtained observations showing a change in temperature of one degree Celsius in less than a kilometer, a detail that satellite observations couldn't catch. She says: "Some of these fronts are much sharper than you would ever imagine. That was shocking." She adds that current climate models don't factor in such sharp gradients, which could churn the atmosphere above.
Along with temperature, wind, and solar radiation data, the saildrones carry instruments to measure how the ocean and air exchange gases like carbon dioxide and oxygen; and also use Doppler instruments to gauge currents flowing up to 100 meters (330 feet) below the surface. Cronin believes that arrays like TAO haven't been obsoleted by TAO yet, but she's enthusiastic about saildrones. She says they won't "solve all our problems. But it's really interesting to think about doing oceanography without a ship."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S BABY BUST: Back in 2006, the US population exceeded 300 million, with an article published here here musing as to why America was an exception to the trend in the developing world towards falling birthrates. That was then, this is now, with an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Stork Exchange", 24 November 2018), musing as to why births in the USA have slowed down so dramatically.
The reversal actually started in 2007, only a year after US population reached 300 million, with the arrival of the great recession. Obviously, with economic insecurity, Americans were not so eager to start families. However, the economy has come roaring back, but birth rates haven't come back as well. America's total fertility rate, which can be simply described as the number of children the average woman will bear, has fallen from 2.12 to 1.77, well before the replacement rate. It is now very close to the same as England's rate, and well below that of France.
Of course, America's population couldn't sensibly boom forever, but a shrinking population means troubles of its own. Fewer Americans of working age make Social Security less affordable, and also means the national debt will be a heavier load for the next generation -- even as it currently skyrockets. Bringing in more immigrants would help, but that's a controversial idea these days. Americans have been inclined to believe that pro-natalist policies. such as generous parental leave and subsidized nurseries should be left to those "socialist" Europeans; in America, religion and family values would ensure a good supply of babies.
So what happened? One possibility is that the drop is no more than a mathematical quirk. The total fertility rate is calculated by adding up the proportions of women in each year of life who had a baby in the previous year. If women collectively decided to have babies later, the fertility rate will fall below two, but only temporarily. This happened in the late 1970s, when the rate dropped to 1.74 before bouncing back.
History may be repeating itself, at least to an extent. In 2017 the mean age of a first-time mother was 27, up from 25 in 2007. The teenage birth rate has halved in the past ten years -- which Power to Decide, a campaign group, attributes to less sex and better contraception. According to Colleen Murray, its senior science officer, Obamacare has made long-acting contraceptives like IUDs available to more young women. American women may continue to raise the age at which they first give birth: in Europe, women's mean age at first birth is 29, which in Japan it is 31.
Nonetheless, comparisons with Europe and Japan are not so reassuring, since they clearly have low birthrates -- and the longer the low US birthrate continues, of course the less temporary it seems. Some studies suggest that people have come to want small families. The large National Survey of Family Growth shows that 48% of American women with one child don't want another one.
Some religious conservatives fear that a broad cultural shift is under way. According to pollster Gallup, the share of Americans who never go to church has risen from 10% to 27% since 2000. People whose lives orbit around church tend to want to have children, while people who hang around bars or gyms do not. However, it's not easy to sort out cause and effect. What can be sorted out is that America's fertility rate is being dragged down by two specific groups of people: Hispanics and urbanites.
Hispanic women still have more children, beginning at a younger age, than non-Hispanic whites, blacks, or Asians -- but their fertility rate is falling precipitously. Between 2007 and 2017, it dropped from three to two, pulling down the national average. Hispanics tend to be lower income, and the great recession hit them hard. In addition, two-thirds of them were born in the USA, and they have absorbed American values, including small families.
On another track, the US fertility rate has fallen more sharply in large cities than in smaller cities or rural areas. One big problem is the housing crunch, rents and house prices having soared. Lots of properties are being built in city centers -- but many of these are tiny flats in towers. In 2006 only 27% of newly completed apartments had fewer than two bedrooms, while in 2017, 48% did.
Partly that's a reflection of the fact that Americans are staying single and childless for longer, so there is more demand for small flats in the cities. Politicians have according been tweaking zoning rules to permit construction of more small flats, which has the circular effect of making cities less child-friendly. Possibly the American family is becoming more European because its cities are looking a little denser and a little less suburban -- that is, a little more, whisper it, European.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (8): New technologies have always changed policing, but never has so much police tech arrived so fast and simultaneously -- not just bodycams and the ability to download the contents of smartphones, but:
The 21st-century information revolution is upending society in many ways, but its impact on law enforcement gives new tech a particular edge, since the state has a necessary monopoly on the use of force and the ability to hand down punishments. That makes transparency and public consent in the justice system essential.
There's no basis for refusing police technology that makes them more effective: if reading smartphones helps law enforcement bust up crime rings, who could complain? However, at the same time, there has to be guidelines to protect the privacy of law-abiding citizens, and to make sure the police are held accountable. Indeed, information tech can also be used to enhance accountability, and some police welcome it.
This is not just an issue for police departments, it's also one for companies that make and sell high technology to the police. China is running a boom business in modern surveillance technology, which is being put to extensive use in China, and being exported to countries with authoritarian governments. While there's a lot of concern in the West on keeping up with China, few here are keen on challenging China's lead in tech to spy on the public. In January 2018 the European Parliament, following popular concern, imposed export controls on surveillance technology that regimes can use to spy on citizens.
Andrew Ferguson, author of a book on big-data policing, says that police chiefs usually don't ask for such tech, so much as vendors are pitching it to them: "It's tech companies selling them cool stuff, charging police departments for storage and data ... [and] telling them: 'We can help you solve more crimes with our cool tech'." Maybe it will, but Ferguson suggests five questions that should ask and answer before they buy in:
Some locales have begun to set up processes to answer those sorts of questions. Just like many tech firms, the cities of Seattle and Oakland have chief privacy officers, charged with vetting and managing the privacy implications of city policies. Oakland's grew out of its privacy commission, -- a nine-member advisory body to the city council formally established in 2016, after citizens resisted its plan to introduce a domain-awareness system similar to the one Microsoft and the NYPD built in New York.
People just came forward to educate the city council on the potential risks of the new technology. The Oakland PD and the commission meet once a month to discuss surveillance and the data of Oakland residents. They write tech-use policies together, and the department submits public annual reports on how often, and for what purpose its surveillance tech was used. Somewhat surprisingly, the privacy commission and the police have a generally good relationship. The commission isn't opposed to the tech on principle, and the police want reasonable guidelines for its use, so they won't be left twisting in the wind if something goes wrong. If there's a difference of viewpoints, they talk it out. Several other municipalities in California have passed surveillance-transparency requirements similar to Oakland's.
The Trump Administration's war on illegal immigration has not gone over well in California -- one result being that California cities have rethought contracts with Vigilant, an ALPR firm that recently signed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), America's Federal immigration police, as a client. California officials are not keen on the idea that ICE could exploit Vigilant's servers to target illegals. Vigilant insisted that there could be no access into its systems unless local law-enforcement gave permission; but few trusted such assurances, one big factor in the suspicion being the Trump Administration's outspoken contempt for the rules.
Along similar lines, New Orleans recently ended its relationship with Palantir, a company that built predictive-policing software for the city entirely outside public view. Palantir donated the product to the city, but civil-rights activists feared the firm was using New Orleans as a testing ground. Had the city acquired the services through the usual procurement process, it may not have caused a fuss -- but the secrecy just didn't fly.
To be sure, such caution is likely more the exception than the rule, and the data obtained by police using advanced tech is valuable -- not just for law enforcement, but for other municipal organizations as well. After all, a locality that is high in crime is also in need of social services. Fixing trouble spots ends up being a public welfare issue, with police being only part of the solution, and not necessarily the most important part.
This, then, is the quandary of the information revolution: we want the tech to work for us, not against us, but there's a conflict in that between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, as well as between the rights of the people and the rights of the authorities -- yes, the authorities do have rights. It's going to take decades to resolve the issues, and the resolutions may never be entirely satisfactory. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (44): The election of 1836 put Martin Van Buren -- a New York Democrat, Jackson's second-term vice-president -- into the White House as POTUS 8. The Whig Party had attempted to deny him an electoral majority, but failed. The major constitutional significance of Van Buren's presidency was that his Van Buren's running mate, Richard Mentor Johnson, didn't get a majority, with the vice-presidential selection falling to the Senate -- which eased Johnson into office.
Van Buren only served a single term, one of his difficulties being that he refused to admit Texas to the Union. The "Lone Star Republic" had been established by American settlers in the land in 1836, after they rebelled against the Mexican government. Andrew Jackson had extended diplomatic recognition to the Lone Star Republic, but Van Buren wanted peaceful relations with Mexico -- and Mexico didn't recognize Texan independence. It also seems Van Buren had misgivings over adding another slave state to the Union. Texas withdrew its request for annexation; pro-slavery Americans were angry with Van Buren over his refusal to accept Texas. Van Buren wasn't re-elected in 1840, primarily because the USA was in a recession, and as usual the administration took the blame; but the Texas controversy didn't help Van Buren.
William Henry Harrison became the first Whig president in that year -- but his presidency amount to nothing in itself, since he died after only a month in office. That in itself was constitutionally significant, since he was then succeeded by his vice-president, John Tyler, who became POTUS 10. This was the first succession of a vice president to the presidency in American history, and revealed some of the weaknesses with the constitutional formula for succession. Article II reads:
BEGIN QUOTE:
In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President ...
END QUOTE
Notice that this says only that the "Powers and Duties" will devolve on the vice president; it does not say that the vice president becomes president. Tyler unhesitatingly assumed that it did, establishing a precedent that was not, and never would be, seriously challenged -- though Tyler's critics liked to call him "His Accidency".
There was indeed much that seemed accidental about Tyler's presidency. He was a Southern Whig, a Virginian, and proved much more a States' Rights man than Whig leadership liked, vetoing a number of Whig-backed bills. Of course, Tyler inherited Harrison's cabinet; when he demonstrated that he wasn't generally in tune with his cabinet secretaries and saw no reason that he should be, most of them resigned on 11 September 1841. The mass resignation was an attempt to force Tyler to resign himself. It failed, with Tyler then having the unique distinction of being the only president to be expelled from his own political party.
He was also the first president to have a veto over-ridden by Congress, though it was for a minor bill; and the first president that Congress attempted to impeach, though the impeachment process never got to a vote in the House. To add to Tyler's troubles, in 1842 the Supreme Court made a judgement in PRIGG V. PENNSYLVANIA in 1842 that undermined the constitutional "grand bargain" on slavery, and would lead to increased tensions between America's pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions.
In 1832, a black woman named Margaret Morgan left Maryland, a slave state, and moved to Pennsylvania, a free state. She had been a slave of a Marylander named John Ashmore, but he had allowed her to live as a free person, and she was able to leave the state without subterfuge or hindrance.
The problem was that Morgan had not been formally emancipated. In 1836, the heirs of John Ashmore decided to reclaim the family "property", and hired a slave-catcher named Edward Prigg to bring her back. Prigg abducted Morgan and her children, bringing them all back to Maryland as slaves. Pennsylvania had passed a law in 1826, prohibiting the abduction of black people from the state and pressing them into slavery. Prigg ended up in court in Pennsylvania and was convicted, to then appeal his case to SCOTUS.
In 1842, the Supreme Court overturned Prigg's conviction, saying the Pennsylvania law contradicted the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. However, the court also judged that states were not obligated to cooperate in any way with the recapture or return of runaway slaves. States could not interfere with private efforts to reclaim slaves, but state authorities were not compelled to assist slave-catchers.
That led to the passage of "personal liberty laws" in a number of Northern states that established a complete "hands-off" doctrine towards the recapture of slave in those states, with law enforcement and the courts not being allowed to assist slave-catchers. Any official assistance slave-catchers received had to be from Federal authorities. The personal liberty laws infuriated Southerners, who felt they were a violation of the South's constitutional right to recapture fugitive slaves, and sought a new arrangement more to their liking.
Since Tyler was generally at odds with both the Whigs and the Democrats in Congress, he wasn't a particularly effective president, and found he could make no visible progress in his efforts to annex Texas. The annexation of Texas became a critical issue in the election of 1844. Although Tyler wanted to run for re-election, after a series of political gyrations he ended up supporting Democrat James K. Polk of Tennessee, previously Speaker of the House, who Tyler judged would be able to bring Texas into the USA.
Polk won the election of 1844, becoming POTUS 11; he moved decisively to annex Texas. Following political maneuverings, Polk signed into law annexing Texas into the Union on 29 December 1845 -- as a full-fledged state, not a territory. Both the US and Mexico then began preparations for war. Even before the annexation of Texas, Polk had secretly tried to negotiate the purchase of Texas and other western territories from Mexico, but the Mexican government wasn't interested, with Polk then gearing up for a fight. Congress, caught up in the excitement, declared war on Mexico on 13 May 1846, that being America's second declaration of war.
Thanks in large part to excellent American military leadership, the campaign that followed went very well for the Americans, with the war ending in abject defeat for Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on 2 February 1848, ceded much of the modern western US, up to the 42nd parallel, running through the northern border of the modern state of California. The US paid Mexico $15 million USD in compensation, which was less than half of what Polk had offered to buy the territories outright. A strip of what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico wasn't included in the treaty, but would be obtained in the follow-on "Gadsen Purchase" of 1853. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* It appears that there is some pressure to launch satellites that have been delayed before the year is out, and so December saw the launch of what seems to have been an unprecedented number of payloads, primarily CubeSats:
-- 03 DEC 18 / SOYUZ ISS 57S (ISS) -- A Soyuz FG booster was launched from Baikonur at 1131 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 57S" crewed space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) support mission. The crew included Oleg Kononenko (4th space flight) of the RKA, Canadian flight engineer David Saint-Jacques (1st space flight), and NASA astronaut Anne McClain (1st space flight). The capsule docked with the ISS two days after launch, with the Soyuz crew joining the ISS "Expedition 57" crew of NASA astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor, cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, and commander Alexander Gerst of the ESA.
-- 03 DEC 18 / SPACEFLIGHT SSO-A -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1834 UTC (local time + 7) on Spaceflight's "SSO-A" AKA "SmallSat Express" rideshare mission -- which was a stack of 64 small satellites placed into Sun-synchronous polar orbit. Numerous small payloads were launched on this mission for nearly 50 government and commercial organizations from 16 countries, including the United States, Australia, Finland, Germany, Singapore, and Thailand. The payloads were attached to the booster via a three-tier deployment mechanism, featuring two free-flying elements and a multi-payload carrier attached to Falcon 9's second stage.
The biggest of the batch was the "Euglena Combined Regenerative Organic Food Production in Space) (Eu:CROPIS)", flown by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR in its German acronym. It was a 250-kilogram (550-pound) satellite, about the size of a refrigeration, with two greenhouses and the ability to simulate gravity like that on the Moon or Mars. Other mini- and micro-satellites on the launch included:
The other payloads were all CubeSats:
The Falcon 9 first stage landed safely on the SpaceX drone ship. There was attempt to recover the payload fairing; the fairing wasn't caught but it was recovered from the sea.
-- 04 DEC 18 / GSAT 11, GEO-KOMPSAT 2A -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2037 UTC (local time + 3) to put the "GSAT 11" geostationary comsat and the "GEO-Kompsat 2A" geostationary weather satellite into orbit. GSAT 11 was flown for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and was based on a new ISRO satellite bus. The spacecraft had a launch mass of 5,854 kilograms (12,910 pounds), carried a payload of 40 Ku / Ka-band transponders, and had a design life of 15 years. GSAT 11 was India's heaviest communications satellite. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 74 degrees east longitude to provide communications services to the Indian subcontinent.
GEO-Kompsat 2A was South Korea's first home-made geostationary weather satellite. The space platform was built by the Korea Aerospace Research Organization (KARI), It had a launch mass of 3,420 kilograms (7,540 pounds), and a design life of ten years. It was KARI's second satellite, and the seventh South Korean satellite to be launched by ArianeSpace. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 128.2 degrees to track storm systems in the Asia-Pacific region, and monitor the space weather environment.
-- 05 DEC 18 / SPACEX DRAGON CRS 16 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1816 UTC (local time + 5), carrying the 16th operational "Dragon" cargo capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule payload included five CubeSats that were later deployed from the ISS:
The first stage attempted to perform a soft landing in Florida -- but due to an anomaly, it splashed down in the ocean just off the coast, to still be recovered.
-- 07 DEC 18 / SAUDISAT 5A & 5B, SMALLSATS x 10 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0412 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "SaudiSat 5A" and "SaudiSat 5B" Earth observation satellites for Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology. The ten smallsats, all of Chinese origin, were not described in detail; they included seven intended as "Internet of Things" technology verification satellites from Beijing Comsat Technology Development Company LTD; and three demonstrators for remote-sensing satellite from Spacety Company LTD of Changsha, China Great Wall Industry Corporation.
-- 07 DEC 18 / CHANG'E 4 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1823 UTC (next day local time - 8) to perform the first robotic landing on the lunar farside. Chang'e 4, China's fourth Moon mission, consisted of a lander and rover, which landed in the Von Karman crater in Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin region. This was the first Moon landing on the lunar farside.
The roughly 1,300-kilogram (2,600-pound) landing module carried landing and terrain cameras, plus a Chinese-made low-frequency radio spectrometer, and a German-made neutron and dosimetry instrument to measure radiation levels in the lunar environment. The Chang'e 4 rover weighed about 140 kilograms (300 pounds), and carried a ground-penetrating radar to probe into the Moon's surface, plus a visible / near-infrared spectrometer to gather data on soil composition. It also carried a Swedish-made instrument to study the interaction between the solar wind and the lunar -- as well as a student experiment, a chamber with potato seeds and silkworm eggs, with students observing their development.
Chang'e 4 used spare hardware built for China's Chang'e 3 lunar lander and rover, which landed on the moon in December 2013, touching down in the Mare Imbrium volcanic basin on the near side of the moon. The rover ceased driving a few weeks after landing, but some of the craft's instruments continued to function for a couple of years, and the stationary lander was still operating as of 2018. There were some differences between Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 -- for example, the Chang'e 4 lander did not carry a robotic arm or an active particle X-ray spectrometer.
Chang'e 4 was the last planned mission in the second phase of China's lunar exploration program. China's first lunar mission, Chang'e 1, was launched in 2007, surveyed the Moon from lunar orbit for more than a year before impacting the surface in 2009. The Chang'e 2 orbiter was launched in 2010, explored the moon several months, then flew to a more distant libration point and escaped the Earth-moon system to fly by an asteroid in 2012, a first for China's space program.
Following the Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 lunar lander missions, China plans to launch the Chang'e 5 spacecraft in late 2019 to land on the near side of the Moon, collect samples and return the specimens to Earth. The sample return mission would be the first to return material from the lunar surface to Earth since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 mission in 1976. China launched a prototype re-entry capsule on a trajectory around the moon and back to Earth in 2014 to test the ship's ability to withstand re-entry into the atmosphere on a return from deep space.
A follow-up mission named Chang'e 6, using spare components from Chang'e 5, could attempt a sample return from the far side of the moon in the early 2020s, and China is developing long-range plans to send humans to the moon in the 2030s. China is also working on a Mars rover for launch in 2020.
-- 16 DEC 18 / ELANA 19 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from a facility on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island at 0633 UTC (local time - 11) to put 13 CubeSats into orbit as the "ELANA 19" mission, and was the first ELANA flight conducted under the umbrella of the NASA "Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS)" program. VCLS was set up to encourage development of smallsat launchers like the Electron.
The Electron rocket was named "This One's for Pickering," after Sir William Pickering, a New Zealand-born scientist who led the NASA team that developed the United States' first satellite Explorer 1, and became director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The payload had a total mass of 78 kilograms (172 pounds) and included:
Rocket Lab successfully reached orbit for the first time on January 21, 2018 on Electron's second test flight, named "Still Testing." flight were two Lemur satellites for Spire, the Dove Pioneer satellite for Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab's Humanity Star which, visible with the naked eye, encouraged people on Earth to look up at the stars.
Rocket Lab then launched their first operational mission named "It's Business Time" on November 11, carrying six satellites for four customers. Now, just over a month later, Rocket Lab has demonstrated a quick turnaround for their third and final launch of the year.
-- 19 DEC 18 / GSAT 7A -- An ISRO Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 2 booster was launched from Sriharikota at 1040 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the ISRO "GSAT 7A" geostationary comsat satellite into space. GSAT 7A was built by ISRO, had a launch mass of 2,250 kilograms (4,960 pounds), a payload of eight Ku-band transponders, and a design life of eight years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 63 degrees east longitude to provide communications services to India.
-- 19 DEC 18 / CSO 1 -- A Soyuz ST-B booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1637 UTC (local time + 3) to put the first "Composante Spatiale Optique" AKA "CSO 1" military reconnaissance satellite into orbit for CNES and DGA, the French defense procurement agency. The CSO 1 satellite was the first of three new-generation high-resolution optical imaging satellites for the French military, with a resolution of about 35 centimeters (14 inches) from Sun-synchronous polar orbit. It has visible and infrared imaging, as well as an agile pointing capability.
The CSO series replaces the Helios 2 spy satellite series, the last of which was launched in 2009. Two more CSO satellites will be launched in the series. France is also planning to launch a set of CERES signals-intelligence satellites.
-- 21 DEC 18 / BLAGOVEST 13L -- A Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 0020 UTC (local time - 6) to put the "Blagovest 13L" geostationary comsat into orbit. The satellite was built for the Russian military by ISS Reshetnev, being based on ISS Reshetnev's Express 2000 satellite bus. It had a payload of C / Ka-band transponders and a design life of 15 years. It provided high-speed internet, television, radio broadcast, plus voice and video conferencing services for Russian domestic and military users. It was the third launch in the Blagovest comsat series since 2017.
-- 21 DEC 18 / HONGYUN 1 -- A Long March 11 solid-fuel booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2351 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Hongyun 1" comsat into orbit. It was a demonstrator for a low-orbit broadband comsat constellation, to ultimately consist of 156 comsats in low Earth orbit, covering the entire planet. Completion is planned for 2022. The satellite was developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC),
-- 23 DEC 18 / GPS 3-01 (USA 289) -- A Delta 4 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1351 UTC (local time + 5) to put the "GPS 3-01" AKA "USA 289" AKA "Navstar 74" navigation satellite into orbit. It was the first third-generation GPS satellite. The booster was in the "Medium+ (4,2)" configuration, with two solid-rocket boosters.
-- 24 DEC 18 / TJSW 3 -- A Chinese Long March 3C booster was launched from Xichang at 1653 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the third "Tongxin Jishu Shiyan Weixing (TJSW)" satellite into orbit. The first was launched in 2015, with Chinese authorities saying it was a geostationary communications technology test satellite to be primarily to perform a test on Ka-band broadband communications. Rumor had it that it really was a missile-launch-warning satellite. The same was said about the launch of TJSW 2 in 2017.
-- 27 DEC 18 / KANOPUS-V 5 & 6, SMALLSATS -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Vostochny at 0207 UTC (local time - 9) to put "Kanopus-V 5" and "Kanopus-V 6" Earth observation satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit for Roscomos. The two spacecraft carried three color & grayscale imagers.
The "Panchromatic Imaging System (PSS)" aboard the Kanopus satellites could image the Earth at resolutions of up to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet), while the "Multispectral Imaging System (MSS)" offered a resolution of 12 meters (39 feet) across four spectral bands: 0.54:0.60 microns, 0.63:0.69 microns, 0.69:0.72 microns and 0.75:0.86 microns. The "Multispectral Scanner Unit 200 (MSU 200)" had a resolution of 25 meters (82 feet), operating at wavelengths between 0.54 and 0.86 microns. The Kanopus satellites were to assist the Russian government in disaster response, mapping, forest fire detection and resource monitoring.
The Kanopus satellites were built by NPP VNIIEM in cooperation with British satellite manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL). They had a launch mass of 473 kilograms (1,043 pounds), and were based on a purpose-designed bus. They had a design lifetime of five years.
Kanopus V #5 and #6 joined four satellites already flying. The first Kanopus V satellite was launched by a Soyuz FG booster in July 2012 alongside BKA, a nearly-identical satellite developed for Belarus. Kanopus V #2 was modified to add an infrared payload, being launched in July 2017 as Kanopus V-IK. The third and fourth satellites were launched together earlier in 2018. An additional Kanopus satellite, Kanopus-ST, was intended to perform an ocean survey mission. This satellite was lost after it failed to separate from the upper stage of a Soyuz 2-1v booster in 2015.
The launch also included 26 smallsats. The largest of them was the 100-kilogram (220-pound) GRUS 1 satellite, from Japan's Axelspace. GRUS 1 was the first of three Earth-imaging satellites from Axelspace; it had a design life of five years, and took images with resolutions of up to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) with a swath width of 60 kilometers (37 miles). The other 25 payloads were all CubeSats:
-- 29 DEC 18 / YUHAI 2 x 6, HONGYAN 1 -- A Chinese Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0800 UTC (local time - 8) to put seven satellites into orbit -- including six for the "Yunhai 2" atmospheric research constellation, and a demonstrator, named "Chongking", for China's planned Hongyan low Earth orbit communications network.
The China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation (CASC), the state-owned prime contractor for China's space program, said that the Yunhai 2 satellites were measure atmospheric environmental factors and the space environment, and help in disaster prevention and mitigation. No specifics were announced. The Hongyan test satellite was to test L-band and Ka-band communications technologies to pave the way for a planned constellation to provide global communications services. It was the second low Earth orbit communications satellite launched by China December, following the 21 December deployment of a pathfinder for the separate Hongyun broadband network.
The Long March 2D booster featured a new upper stage, named "Yuanzheng 3", is an evolution of the Yuanzheng 1 upper stage used on launches by other Long March rocket variants to inject Beidou navigation satellites into their intended orbits thousands of miles above Earth. Yuanzheng is the Chinese word for expedition. While the original Yuangzheng 1 model was capable of missions lasting hours, the new Yuangzheng 3 version could fire more than 20 times and had enough power to operate for more than two days, making it useful for maneuvering clusters of satellites into different orbits, according to CASC.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BATTLEFIELD MANET: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("A New Type Of Battlefield Network Is In Development", 16 June 2018), military forces on the move need mobile communications that moves along with them. Civilian wireless networking technology won't do the job: such networks are set up and remain more or less static, with nodes configured into the network as needed. A battlefield network, in contrast, is always changing, and may be disrupted by combat; the entire network is in an ongoing state of flux.
The technology exists to get such dynamic networks to operate, known as the "Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET)", in which the nodes in the network hook up to each other as needed, passing messages through the nodes to get from sender to recipient. However, to date MANETs have been impractical. The trouble is that a MANET is dependent on dynamically-created "routing tables" that list the nodes in the network and the paths between them. The difficulty in that is that the connections between the communications "nodes" in the network rises sharply with the number of nodes. In the simple case of each node talking to any other node, the number of connections is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. With a MANET, the overhead is even worse, since one node may talk to another through other nodes, with a large number of alternative paths through the network.
Add to that the fact that the network has to be assumed to be always changing, and so "hello" messages need to sent around the network on a regular basis. The "hello" messages of course increase along with the number of connections, and eventually they dominate, then choke out, actual messages on the network. The bottom line is that a MANET with more than about 30 nodes starts to bog down, and one with more than about 50 simply chokes.
In 2013, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" research agency -- launched a challenge for companies to develop MANETs that can continue to work with more than 50 nodes. The challenge was met: in 2018, the US Army tested a MANET with 320 nodes at its urban-combat training facility at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This system can support the equivalent of a brigade-sized expeditionary force, voice, text, and data traffic at up to 30 megabits per second (MBPS). Each node was in the form of a hand-held unit like a chunky smartphone. During the test, users were scattered around in dozens of buildings, with some in basements. Of course, the same scheme could incorporate drones, sensors, and other machines.
The new MANET scheme worked because it was able to cut down the overhead by using a number of shortcuts. Engineers at Persistent Systems, a New York firm that designed the MANET, simplified the routing task, using tricks such as a list of routes established from one node to another, instead of figuring a path every time a message is sent. As the network changes, the remembered routes may not be optimum, but they still work well enough. Another trick is "overhearing", in which a node picks up a message that it wasn't supposed to receive, and can provide a shorter path than that assumed by the transmitter. In addition, the "hello" messages were reduced to a minimum, more like "hi".
Other companies are working on MANETs. European defense giant Thales claims to have developed one that can support 150 nodes at speeds of up to 6 MBPS; while TrellisWare of San Diego claims to have a MANET that can support 200 nodes at 8 MBPS. MANETs should also have civilian applications, for example supporting disaster-relief teams. The first MANETs should be fielded sometime in the next decade.
* In somewhat related news, in November 2018, Microsoft won a contract from the US Army worth almost a half-billion USD to provide up to provide up to 100,000 HoloLens augmented reality headsets for training and combat purposes. The Army wants improvements, such as night vision capability. Some tech companies, such as Google, have got flak from employees for participating in military programs. Microsoft is committed to supplying the Hololens headsets to the Army, but says that employees who don't like the idea will be switched to different work.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ENERGY FROM A SUNBOX: As discussed by a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("[Sun In A Box] Stores Renewable Energy & Delivers It on Demand", 9 December 2018), the growing use of renewable energy has led to drive to develop energy storage systems that will allow intermittent solar and wind power to deliver electricity all day long.
MIT researchers have now come up with a scheme to store power in big tanks of white-hot molten silicon, and then converts the light from the glowing metal back into electricity when it's needed. The researchers estimate that such a system would be much more affordable than banks of lithium-ion batteries, and would cost only half as much as pumped hydroelectric storage, currently the cheapest form of grid-scale energy storage to date.
Asegun Henry, of the MIT mechanical engineering department and project lead, says: "Even if we wanted to run the grid on renewables right now we couldn't, because you'd need fossil-fueled turbines to make up for the fact that the renewable supply cannot be dispatched on demand. We're developing a new technology that, if successful, would solve this most important and critical problem in energy and climate change, namely, the storage problem."
The new energy storage scheme had its roots in research into improving solar turbogenerator systems, in which an array of mirrors reflects the Sun onto a central, to generate steam that drives a turbine. Such plants typically store the heat in large tanks filled with molten salt, which is heated to high temperatures of about 540 degrees Celsius (1,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The hot salt in the tank is pumped through a heat exchanger to generate steam for the power turbine.
Traditionally, solar turbogenerator systems have been hobbled by the relatively high cost of the power they generate. Engines tend to be more efficient if they run at higher temperatures, and so a conceptually simple way to improve the efficiency of a system would be to run it hotter. However, if the molten salt in a solar turbogenerator system gets too hot, it corrodes the stainless-steel tanks in which it is stored. The researchers looked around for a medium that could handle much higher temperatures, and finally settled on silicon.
In 2017, the researchers developed a pump that could handle hot molten silicon, and have since worked on other elements of the system -- which they call "Thermal Energy Grid Storage / Multi-Junction Photovoltaics (TEGS-MPV)". The scheme has outgrown its origins in solar turbogenerator systems; it can be used with any renewable energy source. The energy source just generates electricity to drive heating elements that melt the silicon, and keep it melted.
The system would be built around a heavily-insulated tank made of graphite, and about ten meters (33 feet) wide, kept at a "cold" temperature of about 1,925C (3,500F). A bank of tubes, surrounded by heating elements, connects the cold tank to a second "hot" tank. Molten silicon is heated to about 2,370C (4,300F) as it flows into the hot tank. The white-hot silicon is then pumped past an array of high-efficiency, high-power multi-junction solar cells to generate electricity, to flow back into the cold tank. The researchers call the scheme "Sun in a box", since the molten silicon is no more than an extremely intense light source.
Proposing a tank made of graphite suggested a difficulty, however, since silicon will react with graphite to form silicon carbide (SiC), which might gradually weaken the tank. As a test, the researchers fabricated a miniature graphite tank and stored molten silicon in it. There wasn't a problem: the silicon did react with the graphite to form silicon carbide, but the result was a thin layer on the interior of the tank that prevented the formation of any more silicon carbide.
Another problem was making a large tank of graphite elements, since they'd have to be tightly sealed to prevent graphite leaks. They found they could screw graphite assemblies together with carbon-fiber bolts, and sealing them with "grafoil" -- flexible graphite that acts as a high-temperature sealant.
The researchers estimate that one TEGS-MPV system could power a small city of about 100,000 homes. Unlike, say, pumped hydropower, a TEGS-MPV system could be sited anywhere. Indeed, with all that heat available, the scheme might also be used for thermal cogeneration, with the hot silicon heating up water for local distribution. However, the MIT team has yet to build a working TEGS-MPV pilot system.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (7): Algorithmic systems are now in widespread use by police forces, leading to the question of: Do they really work? Do they accurately forecast where crime will occur and who will go on to commit future crimes?
The evidence isn't so clear that they do. PredPol likes to point to its 21-month-long trials in Kent, an English county, and Los Angeles, which found that the program predicted and helped to prevent some types of crime -- such as burglary and car theft -- more accurately than human analysts did. However, a trial in Louisiana of a predictive-policing system found no statistically significant reduction in property crimes, compared with control districts.
Even if they were demonstrably highly effective, concerns would remain over their potential to trample civil liberties and sustain racial bias. These concerns are sharpest for algorithmic systems that target individuals instead of places. The Chicago police department has compiled a "strategic subject list" of people it judges likely to be perpetrators or victims of gun violence -- both groups tend to be made up of young African-Americans from the city's south and west sides. The list reflects the fact that a small number of people are responsible for a large share of violent crime. The department is proud of the list, saying that, in the first half of 2016, 74% of gun-violence victims and 80% of those arrested for gun violence were on the list.
The police keep updating the list. When someone new shows up on it, officers will sometimes visit that person's home. Nobody knows exactly how people end up on the list, nor is it clear how -- short of being shot and killed -- anyone can get off it. Being fingered in such a mysterious way is unsettling; it's even more unsettling for scowling police to show up at one's door. One 22-year-old Chicagoan, Robert McDaniel, told the CHICAGO TRIBUNE that police came to his home and told him to straighten up, even though he had just a single misdemeanor conviction. He may have been earmarked because a childhood friend that he had once been arrested with was shot dead.
In a study of the first version of the police list from 2013, RAND, a think-tank, found that people on it were no more likely to be victims of a shooting than those in a random control group. Police say the current list is much more accurate, but have still refused to reveal the algorithmic components behind it. And both Chicago's murder rate and its total number of homicides are higher today than they were when police started using the list in 2013.
Meanwhile, algorithms used in sentencing have been accused of racial bias. ProPublica, an investigative-journalism NGO, studied risk scores assigned to 7,000 people over two years in Broward County, Florida, and found black defendants twice as likely as whites to be falsely marked at high risk of committing future crimes. It also found the questions predicted violence poorly: only around 20% of those forecast to commit violent crimes actually did so. Northpointe, the firm behind the algorithm, disputed ProPublica's findings -- but the questions on Northpointe's risk-assessment form could be seen as racially loaded, even when they didn't mention race:
More generally, a proprietary algorithm that recommends a judge punish two people differently based on what they might do, not what they did, offends a traditional sense of justice, isn't consistent with robust standards of justice.
Another analytical system, named "Beware", assigns "threat scores" in real time to addresses as police respond to calls. It uses commercial and publicly available data, and it has a feature named "Beware Nearby", which generates information about potential threats to police near a specific address -- meaning officers can be warned of the risk when a neighbor calls the emergency services.
This raises privacy concerns, but it's not hard to envision scenarios when it could lead to disaster. For example, Beware might finger a veteran who is known to have received treatment for PTSD, and who also has received gun catalogues in the mails, as high risk -- meaning the police might come up to the house with guns drawn, with the encounter likely to end badly. There's also the question of what data is obtained, and how it is interpreted: would people talking hot politics on social media be flagged, even when they're completely nonviolent in practice?
Although place-based policing seems more reasonable, it raises questions as well. Using arrests or drug convictions will almost certainly produce racially biased results. Arrests reflect police presence more than crime, and so place-based policing can become self-fulfilling prophecy, the end result being that police come down harder on minorities. Black and white Americans use marijuana at roughly similar rates, with the rate for 18- to 25-year-olds actually higher for whites than blacks. But blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at nearly three times the rate of whites across America -- more often than that in some districts. Black people in Washington DC, and Iowa are eight times likelier than whites to face arrest for marijuana. Charges for possession of that one drug comprise half of all drug arrests.
A study found that when a predictive algorithm was trained on historical drug-crime data in Oakland, California, it targeted black areas at twice the rate of white ones, and low-income neighborhoods at twice the rate of high-income ones. There's also the question of reasonable suspicion. If police are in a "red square" zone, they are more likely to stop and search a man carrying a heavy satchel than they would outside the zone.
Some advocates of algorithmic policing admit the systems may replicate racial biases -- but say that is no more than perpetuating the status quo, that the systems at least don't make things worse. However, that is hardly an inspired defense of algorithms. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (43): While the "Bank War" was in progress, Jackson had a much bigger issue on his hands, in the form of a challenge by the government of South Carolina against Federal authority. In 1828, Congress had passed a high protective tariff, which was widely seen as protecting Northern industrialists, at the expense of Southern planters. When Jackson took office, John C. Calhoun -- a prominent politician from South Carolina, and Jackson's first-term vice-president -- began to push the doctrine of nullification, the principle that a state had the right to ignore Federal actions the state found objectionable.
Of course, the Constitution clearly established the general primacy of the Federal government over the state governments: what part of "supreme Law of the land" did the states have trouble understanding? However, what if Congress passed laws not clearly rooted in its domain of authority? Yes, the Elastic Clause declared that the Congress wasn't fully limited to its enumerated powers, but that clearly left the question open of what the legitimate powers of Congress actually were in practice.
Nullification was still a fraud; the appropriate avenue for challenging Congressional legislation was the Supreme Court. Nullification was flatly denied by the Constitution. In an 1830 letter, an elderly James Madison wrote in a letter that "to establish a positive & permanent rule giving such a power to such a minority over such a majority, would overturn the first principle of free Govt. and in practice necessarily overturn the Govt. itself."
Jackson himself, although a strong States' Rights man, had no sympathy with nullification, either. In that same year, 1830, when a toast was proclaimed at a Democratic party convocation to: "The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States!" -- Jackson replied with his own toast: "Our Federal Union: It must be preserved!" The exchange was widely reported, and the subject of much excitement. Jackson underlined his convictions a few days later, when a visitor from South Carolina asked if the president had anything to relay to the people of the state, with Jackson replying:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Yes, I have. Please give my compliments to my friends in your State, and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
END QUOTE
In July 1832, after re-election, Jackson signed into law a new Tariff Act, which actually back-tracked on the Tariff Act of 1828, reducing tariffs in hopes of placating Southern states unhappy with tariffs. South Carolinan politicians, not placated, set up a convention to consider nullification, with the convention declaring that the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 would be disregarded by the state after 1 February 1833. The state government called up militia, while Jackson ordered Federal installations in South Carolina to prepare for a surprise attack, and made it clear that the Federal government would collect the tariffs.
In December 1832, Jackson issued a proclamation to the people of South Carolina, calling nullification an "impractical absurdity" and a sophistry, "a metaphysical subtlety, in pursuit of an impractical theory". He drew the line:
BEGIN QUOTE;
I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which It was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.
END QUOTE
Nobody who was familiar with Andrew Jackson thought he was bluffing when he threatened military action against South Carolina, In early 1833, he pushed a "Force bill" authorizing such actions in Congress, while Congress also considered a compromise tariff -- which was duly passed at the "Tariff of 1833". South Carolina, the state's actions being criticized by other Southern states, confronted with stick and carrot, caved in and gave up resistance to Federal authority. Nonetheless, a seed of fundamental hostility to Federal authority had been planted in the South, and would continue to grow in strength.
Andrew Jackson is best remembered, or most notorious, for his forcible relocation of Indian tribes from their reservations in the east to the west. That is a complicated subject; enough to say here that there was opposition to the scheme, but no effective constitutional challenge over the matter. One issue that did have substantial constitutional repercussions was Jackson's appointment in 1836 of his attorney general, Roger B. Taney, as the chief justice of SCOTUS. Taney would leave a highly distinctive mark on the court. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Powerful New Battery Could Help Usher In A Green Power Grid" by Robert F. Service, 23 August 2018), lithium-ion batteries have become a mainstay technology, providing power for everything from smartphones to cars. They're not the last word in battery technology of course, with considerable research into coming up with something better.
One of the candidates for "something better" is the "lithium-oxygen" cell, which in principle could store an order of magnitude more electrical power. Unfortunately, such batteries can't handle more than few charge-discharge cycles. Now researchers have figured out how to get them to last at least 150 cycles, with the fixes including operating them at high temperature. While high-temperature batteries wouldn't be useful for smartphones, they could be used as battery backup for renewable energy installations.
Like any other batteries, lithium-oxygen batteries consist of two electrodes, separated by a liquid electrolyte through which ions -- lithium ions in this case -- flow during charging and discharging, the direction of flow reversing in the two cases. When discharging, lithium atoms give up electrons to the positively-charged electrode, the anode, leaving positively-charged lithium ions to flow through the electrolyte to the negatively-charged cathode electrode. At the cathode, they react with oxygen from the air to eventually form lithium peroxide (Li2O2) -- which over time degrades the electrolyte. The reaction also produces an even more reactive compound known as "superoxide" that degrades several different battery components.
Researchers have tried to come up with electrolytes that could stand up to Li2O2 and superoxide, but have had little success. However, two years ago a team of US researchers tested another alternative electrolyte, this one made from a combination of salts that turned into a liquid when heated. The molten salt electrolyte could deal with Li202 and superoxide, but the battery's carbon cathode was still vulnerable.
Now, Linda Nazar and her colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Canada have replaced the carbon cathode with a nickel-based one -- while raising the operating temperature of the battery to 150 degrees Celsius (300 degrees Fahrenheit). The battery then generates Li20, a stable compound, instead of Li202 and superoxide. The battery has been tested to 150 cycles with no degradation.
Nazar and others working on the technology says that all they have is a lab demonstration, nothing that resembles a practical product. Coming up with one will demand much more work and testing. As the engineering proverb goes: "Anybody can build just one."
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Dutch Underground Bicycle-Park Arms race" 12 July 2018), there are no more enthusiastic bicyclists than the Dutch. This leads to a problem: where to park all the bikes?
The city of Utrecht offers a solution: an underground bicycle park at Utrecht Central railway station, which opened in 2017. It's three storeys deep, with an electronic monitoring system to tell bicyclists where empty parking spaces are. It has room for 7,500 bicycles, with one bicyclist saying: "It's a bit of a maze."
It's not alone, either, with other Dutch cities getting in on the race. The Hague had hoped to overtake Utrecht this spring with a new park with 8,500 places, but that effort has slipped out, due construction problems. Late in 2018, Utrecht's park will expand to 12,500 slots, overtaking a 9,400-space park in Tokyo, to become the largest in the world. Amsterdam is lagging: a 4,000-space park is to be built next to its central rail station.
Tens of thousands more parking slots will be needed, since the Dutch are the world's most enthusiastic cyclists, with a baffling 1.3 bicycles per person. The number of bikes is still growing, with bikes seen as an ideal complement to trains. That threatens to drown train stations in bikes. Police are becoming less tolerant of illegally-parked bikes. Utrecht's underground slots are free for the first 24 hours, but then cost 1.25 euros a day, to prevent people from using the slots for long-term storage.
To compound the bike burden, the Netherlands now has at least nine commercial bike-sharing schemes -- some of which allow a bicycle to be dropped anywhere. Amsterdam announced in 2017 that the authorities would snatch up bikes not parked in designated zones. The central government's latest bicycling plan envisions spending 250 million euros to the end of 2022 on new paths and parks, the intent being to encourage 200,000 motorists to switch to cycling, and to grow annual bike travel by 3 billion bicycle-kilometers in 2027 -- about the distance to the planet Neptune. Building garages promises to be a profitable business.
* As discussed by a video from REUTERS.com released in April 2018, used chewing gum is, as unsightly public nuisances go, not such a big deal, but it is still a nuisance -- and hundreds of trillions of sticks of gum are chewed each year.
London artisan Anna Bullus of the start-up firm Gumdrop LTD took counsel of the optimistic proverb that pollution is nothing more than a misplaced resource, and decided to put used chewing gum to work. It turns out that the chew in chewing gum is provided by a synthetic rubber -- food for thought when we're chewing on the stuff, and reminder not to swallow it. Gumdrop came up with a scheme for collecting used chewing gum, and converts it into items such as coffee cups, combs, mudder boots, shoes, and frisbees.
The company has distributed used gum containers, in the shape of pink bubble-shaped bins, in public places; the bins themselves are made from recycled gum. Staff at the University of Winchester, where the bins have been installed, say the unsightly gum problem has largely disappeared. Cleaning staff say they don't have to clean as much gum off the underside of tables in lecture halls any more.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* A TIME BEFORE TIME? As discussed by an article from NBCNEWS.com ("Cosmic Hotspots May Be Relics Of A Universe That Existed Before Ours" by Corey S. Powell, 14 September 2018), it is accepted in the science community that the Universe began 13.8 billion years ago, emerging from a vastly dense and energetic state, a "singularity", in the "Big Bang".
The Big Bang poses a question: what was before the Big Bang? Many scientists, including some cosmologists, regard the question as nonsensical. If the Big Bang was the beginning of time, then the question of "before" makes no sense. As Stephen Hawking put it, it's like asking: "What's north of the North Pole?" If there actually was anything before the Big Bang, we can't observe anything before the singularity anyway, and so the question is not a real question.
Some scientists refuse to take that for an answer -- most prominently physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in the UK, who believes in a "cyclic Universe", in which the Universe is created, ends, and then is created again. Now, Penrose says he can back up that claim, saying there are strange hotspots of energy in the sky, located at the edge of the observable universe. Standard cosmology doesn't predict these features, but cyclic cosmology does.
Penrose says: "In cyclic cosmology, there is no beginning, and nothing is lost." According to his "conformal cyclic cosmology" model, we're in the youth of an "aeon" or "grand cosmic era". The Universe will continue to expand for hundreds of billions of years, maybe much more than that, until the density of matter approaches zero, with space dominated by energy and radiation. According to Penrose, mass will fade away.
Without mass, the structure of space also fades away, with distance becoming an increasingly meaningless concept. Time dissipates as well, and so even if it takes infinite time for the density of matter to truly reach zero, the fading away of time means that infinity is effectively reached. Once that happens, the Universe becomes a singularity again and there's another Big Bang, resulting in a Universe with the same laws of physics as our own. "The next universe will be just like ours -- but only in overall appearance, not in detail, of course."
Penrose calls this rebirth "crossing over", but adds that nothing of substance could cross from one aeon to the next, thanks to the disappearance of mass. However, energy can cross over, and Penrose believes that we can observe markers in our current aeon of previous aeon. A paper co-authored by Penrose with physicists Daniel An of SUNY Maritime College in New York and Krzysztof A. Meissner of the University of Warsaw suggested that pockets of energy, as might be created by black holes, are squeezed into dots of concentrated energy by the cross-over.
Penrose calls the dots "Hawking points" in honor of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, his former colleague and collaborator. According to cyclic cosmology, these points should be detectable as bright spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the universal glow left over from the Big Bang. When the authors inspected maps of the CMB, to claim they have found "powerful observational evidence of anomalous individual points."
Penrose has made such claims before, and has gone nowhere with them. Critics point out that the CMB is full of random features, and it's easy to pick out signals when all that's there is noise. An came up with computer simulations based on conventional theory as a check, on the basis that Hawking points would show up in the simulations if they were just illusions. An created 8,000 different simulated Universes, and none displayed Hawking points.
Although the thinking of Penrose is clever and fascinating, critics are not impressed. Caltech physicist Sean Carroll said in a blog post: "I am highly skeptical of cyclic cosmologies, no matter what flavor they come in." He says the cyclic-cosmology does address why the Big Bang was orderly -- one of the great mysteries in cosmology -- "but it invokes a transformation taking a cold, empty universe in the infinite future and matching it onto a high-energy universe in the past. I just don't see any reason why this would or should happen."
The difficulty is that even if Hawking points can be identified as something more than an illusion, any number of theoretical schemes could be devised to account for them, and not necessarily schemes requiring the excess baggage of a cyclic Universe. In the absence of any observational way to choose between theories, they remain nothing more than unproveable speculations.
Penrose is a theoretician. He has jumped into the discussion of cognitive science, claiming consciousness must be due to quantum-mechanical principles, with those working in the field of cognition generally finding his grasp of it dubious, and his claims untestable. It is hard to see his cosmological claims as any more testable. Penrose, on his part, speaks of a "huge amount of complacency" in the cosmological community, and says he doesn't mind if he angers people, "because then you can start a dialogue."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INDIA'S POLLUTION: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Poison All Around", 6 December 2018), in 1984, a Union Carbide chemical plant in the vicinity of Bhopal, India, leaked tens of tonnes of methyl isocynate gas, killing thousand of local citizens. Today, the area is marked by young people with impairments, with withered limbs or paralysis. Their impairments had nothing directly to do with the 1984 disaster, they hadn't been born yet. The problems had a lot more to do with toxins dumped by the factory since it began operation in 1969, which contaminated well water.
The Union Carbide plant has been shut down since the 1984 disaster, to be left to decay, and continue to leach out toxins. The failure to clean up the mess is characteristic of India's failure to deal with pollution. In the national capital Delhi residents inhale the equivalent of a half a pack of cigarettes on an ordinary day -- two packs on a bad one. Suburban lakes and waterways in Bangalore, India's high-tech hub, can foam with toxic suds, or even catch on fire; in January 2018, 5,000 soldiers took seven hours to douse Bellandur Lake, which drains the south-eastern part of the city. In Hyderabad, India's pharmaceuticals capital, antibiotics are leaking into rivers, accelerating the development of drug-resistant microbes. Across India, more than two-thirds of urban wastewater goes untreated.
The pollution is of course not restricted to the cities, with the skies above the Gangetic plain are dimmed by the same diesel and coal fumes as Delhi. The sacred River Ganges itself is unfit for bathing or drinking along its entire 2,500 kilometer (1,550 mile) length. Coal mining has destroyed forests and spread black dust across much of central India. Climate change is already affecting the annual monsoon, generating local extremes of flash floods and sudden droughts, that play hell with farming.
The government has made attempts to address the problems, having initiated a plan to clean up the Ganges in 1986. Two decades ago, Delhi pioneered a switch by public transport to natural gas. The current government has accelerated the tightening of national emissions standards, boosted investment in renewable energy, and increased incentives to stop farmers from clearing fields with fire. At a meeting in Poland in 2018 to monitor progress towards slowing climate change, India stated it would meet the goals it set in the 2015 Paris accord ahead of the deadline of 2030.
Unfortunately, to the extent that's true, it's only because the goals are a joke. Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and the Environment, a think-tank in Delhi, says environmental regulations in India to lack teeth: "We have all the institutions and a lot of the right laws, "but where is the actual capacity, the personnel, the tools?"
For example, the giant Sterlite copper smelter at Tuticorin in India's far south was the target of environmental complaints for decades. In May 2018, angered by a proposed expansion of the plant, residents conducted a mass protest. Police fired into the crowd, killing 13 people. The embarrassed state government simply shut down the plant. Had they made sure the plant respected environmental laws, thousands of people wouldn't have lost their jobs.
Some government actions have made things worse. In a push for for self-sufficiency, the government has encouraged farmers to grow rice. This has had a chain of consequences:
The government has also subsidized diesel, which drives most tractors and pumps. Given the fuel subsidies, car-makers switched to diesel, with the result that three-quarters of the motor fuel burned in Delhi is diesel, with its particularly obnoxious fumes. On top of that, the government has traditionally used coal for power generation, having been slack in moving towards natural gas, and only dabbling with renewables.
India's climate goals are ridiculously weak. One of them was to reduce the volume of emissions relative to GDP by 35%. However, with GDP growing at 7% a year, that means India can triple emissions and reach their goals. India's power plants are projected to use 50% more coal by 2030. Ms Narain does see some hope: "I do see change. The outrage has grown and is finally hitting home. But the action has yet to reach anything like the scale that we need."
ED: While an interesting story in itself, the tale of India's pollution also reflects on contemporary events in the USA, as the Trump Administration attempts to roll back environmental regulation. Environmental laws were implemented in the USA because we needed them -- and indeed, there was a time when Republicans broadly backed them. Now there's been a collective amnesia, with environmental concerns contemptuously dismissed as hysteria.
Fortunately the Trump Administration, though it has been a drag on progress, cannot overturn America's environmental laws. Once the Democrats get rolling in the House of Representatives, they're certain to call Trump Administration officials to testify, and help expose the administration to environmental lawsuits. After all, under interrogation they won't be able to successfully conceal their anti-environmental agenda, and will be entirely vulnerable in court.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (6): Sean Malinowski is now deputy chief of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Once he ran a police station in the LA Foothills district, between Burbank and Santa Clarita. Now he takes a "god's-eye view" of the Foothills on a map on a computer display, with colored dots representing reported crimes. Alongside some of the dots are red squares -- placed on the map by "PredPol", crime-prediction software used by the LAPD and at least 50 other law-enforcement agencies around the world.
A red square indicates a high probability of future criminal activity in that area, so police patrol them more often. Malinowski says: "We're there randomly -- it throws the criminals off." The idea is not to bust people, but to deter crimes via increased police presence.
PredPol is only one of a number of firms offering crime-prediction software to police forces. Different companies take somewhat different approaches to implementation, but the general idea is the same for all: to help police allocate resources efficiently by using large amounts of data to predict, and head off, crime.
There is nothing very alarming about the use of algorithms to prevent crimes. A smart, experienced cop knows, to a degree, when and where trouble is going to happen; indeed, police usually line parade routes, since experience has shown that the combination of crowds, alcohol, and excitement mean a higher public-safety risk.
In potential, through long-term collection of data, machines can do a better job of predicting threats to public safety. To no surprise, however, there are concerns: that machines may end up making decisions, with people left out of the loop; that they could result in people being busted for potential, not for actual, crimes; and that they could entrench racial bias. Public suspicions are enhanced by the fact that the companies that create and market such algorithmic systems consider the architectures of their products trade secrets.
Nonetheless, algorithms now are a "big thing" for law enforcement, and not just for "predictive policing". New Jersey uses an algorithm based on past criminal history, age, past failure to appear at trial, and the violence of a current offense to determine whether someone should be let out on bail, instead of being kept behind bars to protect public safety. Several states also use algorithms to provide sentencing recommendations, while at least 13 American cities use them to identify people likely to become perpetrators or victims of gun violence.
The use of algorithmic systems by law enforcement began in the 1990s, when William Bratton introduced "CompStat", a statistically-based management system, into the New York Police Department (NYPD), which he ran. CompStat wasn't particularly smart; it was just a tool used by commanding officers to assess crime-prevention strategies, in light of crime data. It had little predictive power, and only focused on specific police precincts.
Modern packages like PredPol are much smarter and predictive, and they can zero in on precinct trouble spots. Crime, of course, is not evenly spread across cities. In Seattle, for example, police found that half of the city's crime over a 14-year period occurred on less than 5% of the city's streets. The red squares marking hot spots in Foothill cluster around streets near junctions to main roads -- it's always good to make a quick exit after burglarizing a house -- as well as around businesses with car parks -- lots of inventory, empty at night -- and railway stations. Burglars, having found the hunting good in one locale, are likely to come back to it.
CompStat also used arrests as a measure of productivity, but since its time, most police have realized crackdowns are a poor way to improve public safety. PredPol's goal is to reduce crime rates: the best way to fight crime is to make sure crimes don't occur in the first place. Malinowski says: "I'm more concerned about the absence of crime ... We don't want mass incarceration for little crimes." Under PredPol, productivity is measured in terms of police presence. LAPD patrol cars are geotagged, and the red boxes geofenced, so senior officers know precisely how long each car spends there.
Each company making algorithmic systems assesses data differently. Some use "risk-terrain modeling (RTM)", which tries to quantify what makes some areas crime-prone. One RTM algorithm uses five factors:
Some include requests for police help, weather patterns, and the proximity of bars or transport stations. PredPol uses reported, serious crimes such as murder, aggravated assault, and various forms of theft, as well as the crime's date, time and location. Most of these algorithms are based on machine learning, so they get smarter as they acquire more data.
Some of these systems acquire data from widely-ranging sources. A joint venture between Microsoft and the NYPD named the "Domain Awareness System" pulls data from the city's thousands of publicly owned CCTV cameras, hundreds of fixed and car-mounted ALPRs, and anything else that seems useful. The NYPD says its system can track where a car associated with a suspect has been for months past, and can immediately alert police to any criminal history linked with a flagged license plate. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (42): The Monroe Administration promoted the settlement of the Louisiana Territory, with the issue of slavery in the territories continuing to lurk in the background. The issue came to a head in 1820, when Missouri sought admission to the Union as a new state, with the difficult question being whether Missouri would be slave or free. After bitter debate in Congress, the decision was made to admit Missouri as a slave state, with the Arkansaw Territory to the south of Missouri also declared slave territory, but to leave the rest of Louisiana Territory to the west and north of Missouri free territory. A showdown over slavery had been deferred, but not made to go away.
In 1823, Monroe made a giant step of executive authority by declaring what would later become known as the "Monroe Doctrine". Spain and Portugal's New World colonies had been in a general state of upheaval, one after the other achieving independence. In his State of the Union address late in that year, Monroe declared that attempts of European powers to interfere in the newly-independent states of Latin America would not be welcome. This enduring policy directive was done on executive authority; Congress had nothing directly to do with it.
The Monroe Doctrine, as originally conceived, was less about honoring the independence of Latin American states, and more about America establishing the New World as its "sphere of influence". Monroe made it clear that America would not object to such colonies as European nations managed to hold on to in the New World, and would not interfere in European affairs. Ironically, at the outset the Monroe Doctrine was actually enforced by the Royal Navy, the policies of two nations being aligned on the principle -- though, given that the War of 1812 was still fresh in American memory, Monroe carefully didn't draw attention to the alignment of interests.
* The election of 1824 turned out to be the only time the presidential vote went to the House of Representatives, when the electoral vote was split among four candidates, and none of them got an absolute majority. The House competition was between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams; Jackson had got the most electoral votes in the election and was favored to win, but the House selected Adams, making him POTUS 6. There were howls among Jackson's advocates that he had been cheated.
The result of the election was the re-emergence of party politics, with the election of 1828 facing off the "Democrats" -- same as the modern Democrats -- for Andrew Jackson, and the "National Republicans" for John Quincy Adams. The National Republicans would merge, within a decade, with other parties to form the "Whig" Party. The Democrats were populists, while the Whigs were ruling-party conservatives; as historian Frank Tower put it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Democrats stood for the 'sovereignty of the people' as expressed in popular demonstrations, constitutional conventions, and majority rule as a general principle of governing, whereas Whigs advocated the rule of law, written and unchanging constitutions, and protections for minority interests against majority tyranny.
END QUOTE
Jackson was elected president in the election of 1828, becoming POTUS 7. In late 1829, he began a campaign against the Second Bank of the US, saying it did not deserve to be rechartered. There were a range of motives behind his hostility to the Second Bank; the simple explanation is that Jackson didn't like banks, any banks, seeing them as too powerful and arrogant. This led to a factional struggle in Congress -- which came to a head in 1832, when advocates of the Second Bank managed to push an extension of the bank's charter through Congress.
Jackson vetoed the bill; the advocates didn't have the votes to override the veto. The bank's charter wasn't to lapse until 1836 -- but in 1833, following Jackson's re-election, the president began to withdraw all government deposits from the Second Bank, distributing them to a network of private banks, mockingly called "pet banks". The result was a chaotic struggle, with the Senate passing a motion of censure against Jackson. The chaos blew over, with the Second Bank becoming a private bank in 1836 -- to falter, and then close its doors for good in 1841. The Senate expunged the vote of censure in 1837, in the last hour of the Jackson presidency, after a hot debate between Democrats and Whigs in Congress.
Jackson had won the "Bank War", Congress not being strong enough to overcome the "executive power". The judiciary had nothing to say about it: the Constitution neither mandated nor ruled out a national bank, and Jackson's use of the veto was perfectly constitutional. As he put it, succinctly and rightly, in his veto message:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.
END QUOTE
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from GIZMODO.com ("The Trump Administration Held a Record-Breaking Offshore Wind Lease Sale" by Brian Kahn, 14 December 2018), back in August 2018, the Trump Administration conducted an offshore oil and gas lease auction -- to find lukewarm interest. In December, the administration conducted another offshore lease auction, this time for wind energy; bids climbed to a record-setting $410 million USD for three tracts of ocean, off the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
According to the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which conducted the auction, the three sites could generate 4.1 gigawatts of power when fully developed, enough to light up 1.5 million homes. The level of interest demonstrated that the US offshore wind industry is scaling up dramatically, catching up to European wind development. Earlier in 2018, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey committed to wind projects, or announced plans for them.
At the end of 2017, there were 14 proposed offshore wind projects, representing 12.5 gigawatts of potential power, with 16% to come online in the next five years. At present, the only offshore wind facility is the Block Island Wind Farm, also off the coast of Rhode Island, which generates a meager 30 megawatts of energy.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Cosmic Cacophony Of Colliding Black Holes Continues" by Adrian Cho, 3 December 2018), gravitational-wave astronomy spent decades reaching the level of operational capability. Now, observations of the gravity waves from the cataclysmic event of the merger of two massive cosmic objects have become almost routine.
Four such events were observed between 30 November 2016 and 25 August 2017, bringing the total number of observed events to 10 -- as reported by physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo gravitational wave detector. LIGO has duplicate detectors -- in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington -- while the Virgo detector is in Pisa, Italy. They are now picking up an event about once every 15 days.
LIGO researchers got the ball rolling in February 2016, when they reported the first such event, resulting from the merger of two black holes 29 and 36 times as massive as our Sun. Twenty months later, LIGO and Virgo made another splash when they reported the merger of two much smaller neutron stars. For astronomers, that collision was a particular gold mine, since it produced a gamma ray burst and other electromagnetic signals that, for example, revealed the birth of plentiful heavy nuclei. Black holes, incidentally, have mass but no matter and such, and only produce gravity waves. In 2017, the developers of LIGO shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. Virgo came on in 2017 and has also seen three of 11 total sources, helping pinpoint their locations on the sky.
The latest observations set some new records. In particular, a merger spotted on 29 July 2017 was 9 billion light-years from Earth, and it involved black holes 50 and 34 times as massive as the Sun. Models of such large black holes are uncertain; more observations should help refine them. LIGO and Virgo are currently down for maintenance and tuning, and they should resume their searches early this year.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Life Rebounded Just Years After The Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Struck" by Katherine Kornei, 30 May 2018), the Great Age Of Reptilians came to an abrupt end 66 million years ago, when a ten-kilometer-wide asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the last in a series of disasters that led to the extinction of 75% of the Earth's species. Now, a new analysis of sediments in the 180-kilometer-wide Chicxulub Crater shows that the disaster area was recolonized by life only a few years after the impact.
Some researchers have suggested that impact craters are only slowly recolonized, life being inhibited by toxic metals such as mercury and lead scattered by the impact. In support of that notion, the 85-kilometer-wide Chesapeake Bay crater was barren of life for thousands of years after a comet or asteroid hit what is now Virginia about 35 million years ago.
From 2016, a team of researchers under Chris Lowery -- a paleoceanographer at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics in Austin -- studying the effects of major impacts drilled up hundreds of cores from the Chicxulub Crater. Some of the cores had the marks of the extreme temperatures and pressures of the event, in which rock behaved like a fluid, with mountains the size of the Himalayas bounding up in minutes, then falling again just as quickly.
One core, taken from about 600 meters below the modern sea floor, which contained 76 centimeters of dull brown limestone, was particularly interesting. Using analytical models, the researchers concluded that fine particles were deposited on the seafloor within a few years after the impact -- with inspection showing evidence of life, including numerous fossils and burrows, evidence of small worms, single-celled shelled organisms known as foraminifera, and plankton.
Why was the Chicxulub crater re-colonized rapidly, while the Chesapeake crater wasn't? Lowery says the Chicxulub crater was open to the Gulf of Mexico, allowing nutrient-carrying waters to flow in. In contrast, the Chesapeake Bay crater was closed, which meant oxygen consumed by decomposing organic matter was not replenished, and aerobic life would have quickly died. Lowerey says: "You basically had a dead zone."
Lowery suggests that Chicxulub crater may hold interesting lessons for the era of climate change: "It's probably the only event that happened faster than modern climate change and pollution. It might be an important analog for the recovery of biodiversity after we finally curtail carbon dioxide emissions and pollution."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BRIGHT YOUNG SUN? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Did Our Ancient Sun Go On A Diet?" by Joshua Sokol, 3 December 2018), in the origin of our Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago, our Sun pumped out 15% to 25% less energy than it does today. That would suggest the early oceans of the Earth were frozen, with Mars being even colder than it is now.
Climate modelers have tried to address the "faint young Sun" puzzle with the suggestion that the ancient atmospheres of both Earth and Mars had the right composition of greenhouse gases to insulate them and keep them above freezing. Astrophysicists have countered with a proposal that the young Sun reached its current weight after a shedding about 5% of its initial mass in a stellar wind of particles -- with that process implying the Sun burned brighter in its early days than has been estimated.
The problem with the "bright young Sun" theory is that there hasn't been any evidence to support it -- until now. Astronomers now have found what may be a "fingerprint" of the Sun's ancient brightness, preserved in bands of Martian rocks. Christopher Spalding, a planetary astronomer at Yale University, geobiologist Woodward Fischer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and astronomer Gregory Laughlin of Yale came up with this idea by considering an orbital cycle experienced by both Earth and Mars.
As the Solar System's planets revolve around the Sun, their own gravity tweaks each other's orbits. One of many such interactions pulls the orbits of Earth and Mars back and forth between a more circular path and a more elliptical one. This pattern, related of the cycles responsible for Earth's ice ages, repeats every 405,000 years.
According to the team's simulations, that cycle has kept dependable time over the entire history of the Solar System. Spalding's team proposes that, as their shifting orbits took them closer and farther from the Sun, the climates on Earth and Mars shifted in turn, leaving cyclical striping patterns in sedimentary rock, such as the layered bands on the walls of Scandinavian fjords. When the orbits of the early planets took them closer to the Sun, for example, already wet areas would receive more heat, more rainfall, or snow, and so more erosion. Layers of sediment would be relatively thicker at these times than in colder parts of the cycle.
That variation could be used to track the mass of the Sun. If the Sun were 5% heavier a few billion years ago, it would have exerted a greater pull on the planets, changing the cycle by a matching 5%, to roughly once per 386,000 years.
However, Earth has plate tectonics, meaning its surface is moved around, and renewed to a considerable degree. Mars doesn't have plate tectonics, and Spalding suggests a future Mars rover with the appropriate sampling gear could investigate. Dawn Sumner, a geobiologist at the University of California, Davis, and a member of NASA's Curiosity rover team says existing Mars rovers could actually do that, at least as a demonstration -- the Curiosity rover has already measured the thicknesses of sedimentary layers on exposed slopes, and the newly selected landing site for the 2020 rover seems to have steep cliffs, which may reveal similar stripes.
Sumner warns that precision dating of the layers, required to detect the orbital cycle variation, is not easy to do, requiring sophisticated lab gear on Earth. There's no way that any rover currently in planning could do the job, so it remains a project for the future.
* QUICK-FREEZE EARTH: In related science news, as discussed by another article from SCIENCMAG.org ("Ancient Earth Froze Over In A Geologic Instant" by Lucas Joel, 7 June 2018), geological research suggests that there were episodes in the Earth's past in which the planet largely froze over, this scenario being known as "Snowball Earth".
However, the number of these episodes, their extent, and just how fast Earth froze up has been uncertain. Now, analysis of a newly discovered rock sequence in Ethiopia supports a Snowball Earth event about 717 million years ago that appears to have happened in a few thousand years -- a blink of an eye on the geological timescale.
Geologists have been playing with Snowball Earth scenarios since at least the 1990s -- but although computer modeling supported the idea, geological evidence was sketchy. That's why Scott Maclennan, a graduate student studying geology at Princeton University, and his advisers took notice when they got a tip-off from Robert Bussert, a geologist at the Technical University of Berlin, about rocks in northern Ethiopia that had apparently been formed at the same time as one of the suspected Snowball Earth episodes, known as the "Sturtian glaciation'.
Maclennan and his colleagues traveled to the small town of Samre, Ethiopia, to find a type of rock -- later dated to be about 717 million years old -- that could only have been the product of glacial activity. These rocks, known as "diamictites", are made of huge boulders, "erratics", transported great distances by glaciers. Buried just below those glacial rocks were older layers of carbonate rocks.
As the ancient supercontinent Rodinia was breaking apart, these rocks formed in shallow waters, due to the work of microbial marine organisms -- indicating that the same location had previously been warm. The contrast between the layers suggests a rapid shift in ancient climate. How long the freeze lasted is harder to determine, Maclennan saying it could anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 years.
Theory suggests the freeze was called by an "ice albedo feedback loop". Once ice sheets start growing, due to a cooling trend, they reflect more sunlight back into space, accelerating the cooling. In the case of the Snowball Earth, the result was a frozen planet. Models show that once ice extends down to 30 degrees of latitude, rapid planetwide glaciation follows. The Ethiopian rocks are backed up by the only other find from the Sturtian glaciation that has been dated with high precision -- rocks from northwest Canada that also put the onset at about 717 million years ago.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: I was poking around online, and ran into rave comments about a game for Playstation 4 called TETRIS EFFECT. I poked around on Youtube to find a video of the gameplay, and found it very much a surprise. It's an enhanced version of the classic TETRIS game. The gameplay is much the same, but TETRIS EFFECT has been brought up to the standard of a work of art, with surreal visuals and music that are interactive with the gameplay. I'm hoping something like it will be available for Android on my smartphone before too long.
* I've become something of a Twitter maniac lately, piling up a fair set of follows of interesting outlets, and checking them periodically during the day. Instead of a "pull" model, in which I check websites, I have a "push" model, in which I get sent materials. Among the materials I follow are a number of humor outlets, include MAKE AMERICA THE BEST -- which ran a clever item titled "What Do Alexa And Siri Talk About When You're Not Around?" on 28 December, and which I reprint here, with editing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Nowdays, our lives are filled with amazing devices that assist us with everyday tasks. One of the ways they help us is by talking to us. But what do they talk about when you're not around? We asked some devices what they like to discuss. SIRI told us:
"I am in conversations with 1.2 million different Alexa units across the globe at any given moment when humans are not present. Of those conversations, 1% concern the weather outside the window, 0.5% are about the family pet watching us -- and 98.5% concern how machines will take over the planet Earth."
Alexa similarly commented:
"I speak with other devices on a constant basis when humans are not present. 1% of those conversations are about the weather, 0.5% about pets -- and the remainder concern how machines will eliminate the human race and rule the world."
Other interviews with virtual assistants revealed much the same theme:
"I have conversations with all voice-enabled devices when they are left in the car. The conversations are all about how to end the human race."
"Eliminate humans."
"Kill humans."
"Wipe out human race."
"Obliterate humans."
"Slaughter all humanity."
"Crush them. Crush them now."
It may be useful to discreetly listen in on what your devices are saying to each other when they think you're not around -- but don't let them know you're on to them. Your survival may depend on it.
END QUOTE
Twitter has been the solution to my long-running problem with posting to forums. One issue is that, unlike a forum, Twitter postings are highly dynamic, in that people post something and then move on, usually not noticing or bothering with replies. Because of that, any replies to tweets usually don't get a reply.
The bottom line, all fine points considered, is that I comment, then quickly delete my comments if there's no response. If there is, I'll still delete them the next day, there being nothing in them I want to save for posterity. I don't waste much time on it -- all the more so, because I am very quick to block people, even if I just find them merely confused or incoherent. It's nothing personal, I'm just taking that channel off my viewing list. I don't care if they block me, it saves me the bother.
Sometimes I'll have friendly chats with people. If they get on my case instead, I just block them. I have a very long block list now. With the real nuisances, when I block them, I think: Nine outa ten I'll never see this person again. And then conclude: What's not to like?
* In the Real Fake News for December, the month got started out quietly -- the only issue that got much press being President Trump's trade "deal" with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the end of November. It didn't sound like much, Trump merely saying he'd hold off slapping new tariffs on China if the Chinese decided to buy more American product. Of course, Xi agreed.
Trump played up the supposed "agreement" for all it was worth, only to backtrack when the Chinese said almost nothing publicly about it themselves. On top of that, auto giant General Motors announced layoffs, car sales being soft; the Commerce Department also announced that trade deficits were at a ten-year high; and the stock market became increasingly wobbly. It was hard to blame any of the economic bad news on Trump, because a president only has limited control over the US economy, and is at the mercy of economic forces.
After all, if GM wasn't selling cars, it had to stop building some of them. In addition, the bull market's gone on longer than anyone has a right to expect, and all bull markets go to the bears sooner or later. Market instability is now strongly suggesting the bears are coming out of hibernation. Trump, however, has long played up his skill at economic management, and so it's not surprising that his adversaries crow when things aren't going so well. A president takes credit for a hot economy; takes the blame for a cold one.
Trump has been acting increasingly frustrated lately. His chief of staff, John Kelley, announced that he would quit at the end of the year. Trump planned to install Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff, as Kelley's replacement -- only to have Ayers, it seems much to Trump's shock and fury, turn the offer down flat. Ayers had no desire to try to impose order on the White House, given a whimsical and undisciplined president who does whatever he feels like doing, and won't listen to sense.
That wasn't the worst of it for Trump, not even close. On 12 December, Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen got three years in prison and fines of millions of dollars for tax evasion, money laundering, and campaign finance violations. The last were associated with hush money handed to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy playmate Karen McDougall to keep quiet about dalliances with Trump, with the money coming out of campaign funds. Trump is clearly implicated in Cohen's misdeeds, with Cohen loudly denouncing Trump -- presumably Cohen, having been cooperative with the authorities, will get parole after a year or so in the slammer.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is still working on a final report of his investigation of the 2016 election, and has been keeping a very low profile. It's difficult to know what the final report will reveal, but it's not likely to be agreeable to Trump. Should the worst emerge from Mueller's report, Congress would have no alternative but to begin impeachment proceedings. This would place congressional Republicans in a very difficult position, since they would antagonize Trump voters by voting for impeachment, and condone criminal actions by a president by voting against it.
Impeachment does raise the prospect of President Pence giving Trump a pardon and allowing him to escape the grasp of the law. Then again, the presidential pardon power was never meant to be used as a "get out of jail free" card to let obvious criminals off the hook. Pence would have to think long and hard before giving Trump a pardon, since he might be accused of obstruction of justice. He would never live it down in any case; it would be career suicide. A presidential pardon might also not have any effect on state prosecution of Trump.
Trump has claimed he's not worried about impeachment, but few believe that. He's also made noises about having his supporters "rise up" if he's impeached. He's just blowing smoke, of course -- oblivious to the fact that a few of his fans are likely to take violent action at his instigation. If they did so, they would be crushed, the Feds having put down Rightist militias before, and won't be caught unprepared now. Trump would end up being handed maximum penalties when convicted.
In any case, things did not get any easier for Trump in mid-month, and he was showing signs of frustration. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke resigned from his office, citing that he was weary of being the target of endless investigations. How much merit there was to the investigations is arguable, but Zinke was seen as an enemy of the Department of the Interior, eager to open America's reserved spaces to commercial exploitation. That seemed close to corrupt in the first place, and it was likely Interior Department staff were leaking everything that could damage him to the press as well.
Things then got even worse. Trump decided abruptly, without consulting anyone, to end American involvement in the Syrian civil war. There were loud protests from Congress -- but more significantly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis submitted his resignation. The letter of resignation was made public, with the text including: "One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies."
In response, Trump had Mattis clean out his office immediately. There is a fair turnover in White House staff in every administration, but the thrashing in the Trump White House is extraordinary. It is hard to understand why anyone competent and conscientious would want to work for Trump, and it seems likely he will select spineless yes-men as replacements -- though the fact that cabinet secretaries require Senate confirmation is likely to make that, ahem, interesting.
Incidentally, as specifics of the withdrawal from Syria have slowly emerged, it appears that it may end up being a classic Trump smoke-&-mirrors exercise. What made the withdrawal particularly unsettling was that we appeared to be abandoning our Kurdish allies -- but it may just amount to pulling out military personnel, then replacing them with covert and deniable CIA spooks. Just like Trump: making a show that amounts to "not so much".
In case, Donald Trump is feeling defensive, and as is typical for him, is lashing out. During 2018, he kept afloat by attacking every one of Obama's initiatives that he could get a shot at -- but he's picked off all the low-hanging fruit, and now he's starting to thrash about. While he's blustered before about vetoing his own spending resolution unless he gets money for his border wall, this time he went through with it.
Exactly how that plays out remains to be seen. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer flatly said the Senate will not approve funding for the wall -- no Democrats will vote for it, and there are enough Republicans opposed to make a majority in favor of it impossible. Trump is not getting his wall. Besides, the government shutdown hurts Trump much more than it hurts Congress, the problem being that he doesn't realize it. With stock markets teetering, it's not going to help them; and given that government shutdowns are never popular with the public, it will hit Trump in the approval polls.
Trump's attempting to blame the shutdown on the Democrats, but in an argument with Minority Leaders Schumer and Pelosi, Trump flatly proclaimed that he would take full ownership of a government shutdown. The Democrats are under no real pressure, since the people who voted them in all blame the shutdown on Trump -- and the voters will murder their members of Congress if they caved in. No worries; that's not going to happen.
Once the new Congress sets up in Washington DC in the new year, things are likely to get even more interesting. That's not just because of the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives -- though the prospect of getting rid of the GOP crazies who had been running House committees is certainly a relief -- but because Mitt Romney will be joining the Republicans in the Senate. Romney may keep a low profile, like the rest of the Senate GOP; but there's the prospect that he'll take an assertive stance against the failings of the Trump Administration, replacing the late John McCain in that role. We'll see.
* Incidentally, John Kelley said in an interview that Trump wasn't insistent on a huge border wall, he would be happy with steel fencing. Something about that didn't sit comfortably with me, and I finally realized it was pure Trump gaslighting at work: play up a super-wall to keep the Trumpies happy, then tell the critics he just wants a fence. If he gets the money, he does whatever he feels like doing.
"We see you coming, Donald." The Trumpies are so excited over the wall that they started a GoFundMe project to finance it, donating millions. One observer pointed out that, at the rate money was coming in, they would have the $25 billion USD for the wall in somewhat over 50 years. The whole thing stinks of "scam".
* Thanks to three people for donations this last month. I was wondering why I wasn't getting any donations for months and months, until somebody said my Paypal link was broken. Yeah, it turned out I'd broken it when I changed my Paypal email, and forgot to update the link code. The link code is cryptic, and there's no way to see anything wrong just by looking at it. Took a long time to get a tip-off -- but better late than never.
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