* 22 entries including: US Constitution (series), AI at war (series), global supply chains (series), DARPA agenda, Solar Orbiter Sun probe, failed solar turbogenerator plant & India solar power, eyes of deep-sea creatures & armor-plating of such, and Lockheed Martin SST.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR MARCH 2020: The overwhelming news for March was the global spread of the "novel coronavirus" COVID-19, with tens of thousands being infected all over the world, thousands being killed. The proportion of those who die is actually small; four out of five infected will not be severely or even noticeably ill, and it mostly kills the elderly and those in otherwise marginal health. It's still ghastly; it's compared to influenza A, but it's more contagious and hits harder. Dr. Anthony Fauci, boss of the US National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease -- who has become America's hero of the pandemic, providing calm and credible public counsel -- says it is close to a "worst case" for a pandemic,
There has been some light in the darkness. There have been scenes from hard-hit Italy and Spain demonstrating public spirit, for example a video of Spaniards in Grenada standing at the windows and balconies of their apartments, applauding and cheering public-health workers like they'd just won the World Cup. Another viral video involved Hollywood stars collaborating in singing John Lennon's IMAGINE, which is becoming an anthem for the pandemic. Aquariums and zoos generated videos of animals let out of their enclosures to explore their habitat buildings; one video of two little big-eared fennec foxes playing hide-&-seek through the hallways of their home at the Chattanooga Zoo was particularly endearing.
There have also been some flashes of humor, if of a dark sort. Inspector Rajesh Babu -- a traffic cop in Chennai, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu -- had a local artist fashion a "corona helmet", covered with ghastly protrusions. It looks like something out of a cheap old sci-fi horror flic, but Babu says it's effective: "Especially, the children react strongly after seeing this and want to be taken home." In some places in India and Pakistan, the police cane curfew-breakers, or have them do push-ups or take humiliating punitive positions.
* There's a certain need to see humor in things, to keep from dragged down by the ugly reality that the pandemic is continuing to build up steam. The Trump Administration quickly came under fire for tardy and slapdash response to the crisis. Administration officials complained that the pandemic was being weaponized against the president -- which seems true, but given the slipshod nature of Trump's presidency, both inevitable and hardly unfair. Trump persistently made of statements to downplay the crisis; he wasn't convincing, nor did he give the impression that the White House took the pandemic as seriously as it deserved to be.
Trump delivered an address to the nation on 10 March. The pre-announcement of the address suggested the Trump Administration was finally taking COVID-19 seriously; instead, Trump blamed the pandemic on foreigners, and said he was cutting off all flights from Europe. The EU howled; US government officials quickly clarified that the travel ban wasn't as peremptory as Trump made it out to be, but the damage had been done. The address was a disaster. Journalist Eric Black wrote:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... at the risk of being petty, I ... suggest ... that this was the worst performance by a professional politician, reading from a teleprompter, of a major address to the nation that you have ever seen. Trump appears to be reading words he has never seen before. Perhaps that is unfair, but judge for yourself.
This is certainly very different from Rally Trump, where he riffs, lies with abandon, and draws strength from the roar of his approvers. Here, the mistakes he makes seem not to be demagoguery, but pure incompetence, including by whoever wrote the speech. You've seen Trump read from a teleprompter or a prepared text before, as at State of Union addresses. But I don't think you've ever seen him look this bad or this insincere. It looks something like a hostage video.
END QUOTE
One Rod Dreher, writing for THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE website, was even more scathing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Watching him, I realized the cost of a president having pissed away his authority these past three years, with his daily juvenile tweets and schoolyard rhetoric. The country needs a president now who can inspire, galvanize, and lead. Tonight I saw a president who looked tired, afraid, and completely unconvincing. He ended by calling for an end to partisanship, and the nation coming together to fight this threat. That's what any president should do in his position, in a moment of great national crisis. It is difficult to imagine a president with less credibility to make that request.
END QUOTE
To be sure, Trump obviously is worried about the pandemic, since it's driving the world into a recession; the stock markets have dramatically. Trump's only real ace in the hole for re-election is the healthy economy, and once he loses that, he's got little to fall back on. He's had an uptick in approval in the face of the pandemic, but it's clearly just due to the tendency of presidential approval to rise in the face of a crisis. Pollster wonks attributed the raised approval level to non-voters, who don't follow the news and aren't paying real attention to what's going on. It won't last. Trump's approval ratings are effectively invariant: about 45% approval, 55% approval, if the indifferent few are ignored.
An emergency economic bill was quickly passed; there was a dispute over what it would include, but it appears the Democrats generally got their way. It was followed by a much more comprehensive, $2 trillion USD bill, passed with bipartisan support late in the month, leading to a sharp rally in the stock market. Alas, more bad news sent the markets back down again.
The nation's focus ended up on Dr. Fauci, some calling him a "comfort blanket" for the USA. It is a peculiar sort of comfort, since though he's been perfectly level-headed, he doesn't hesitate to hand out bad news when it seems due, saying that we could easily lose 100,000 to 200,000 Americans -- and always corrects Trump when he says silly things. New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo has been another public hero, as he struggled to cope with the pandemic running out of control in his state. [ED: Cuomo would not look so shiny a year later.]
Trump would occasionally make sensible statements, then follow them with absurdities. On 26 March, Trump called into the show of Fox News talking head Sean Hannity. It was more of the same rubbish, with Trump in particular complaining about governors who were screaming for help from the Federal government -- flatly calling Andrew Cuomo's call for 30,000 ventilator systems "unbelievable".
He also defended calling the COVID-19 the "Chinese virus", saying that "everyone's picked up on the term." The reality that it's only the Trump Administration, and Trump supporters, who play the China card, in an attempt to deflect blame onto China. The pandemic is clearly going to have a big effect on the election in November. The fact that we don't know what kind of an effect is worrisome, but it's hard to believe the changed landscape will be to Trump's advantage. He ends up doing what Dr. Fauci tells him to do -- Fauci tactfully praises him for it -- but keeps on shooting off his mouth.
* It did look as the first three Democratic primaries unfolded that Trump was getting a boost, in that radical Bernie Sanders was taking the lead. Trump has long tried to pretend that radicals have taken over the Democratic Party; if Sanders got the nomination, Trump would be proven right. That would inevitably mean Trump's re-election, since Sanders would lose the pivotal swing states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Radicalism does not fly well in such places.
Joe Biden, who had been favorited early on, was badly lagging in all respects -- being seen as lacking in energy and muddled. Biden was trounced in Nevada on 22 February; on 29 February, however, he turned the tables on Sanders, crushing him in South Carolina -- and on 3 March, Super Tuesday, he fought him out in 14 states, getting a clear edge. The result was that the other candidates -- Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar -- all dropped out.
The dropouts were generally bad news for Sanders, since Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar quickly endorsed Joe Biden, implying that he would get their delegates, and increasing their edge. Worse for Sanders, Biden got Bloomberg's financial backing, who pledged his support. Bloomberg had spent vast sums for his own campaign, but only amounting to 1% of his net asset value; there's obviously much more where that came from. One suspects Bloomberg will get a seat in a Biden Administration -- commerce secretary might be a good fit. [ED: He didn't.]
Six states had their primaries on the 10th, with Sanders faring badly again. Biden then politely asked Sanders to join forces with him to fight Trump; Sanders predictably said he would continue his campaign. Biden likely expected that, knowing that Sanders would then be in the position of continuing his insurgency against the Democratic Party, instead of taking on Trump. Biden couldn't lose that exchange.
Biden's turnaround was remarkable. The South Carolina win clearly revitalized him; he became confident, and stayed on message. However, another big factor was that he called in favors, getting endorsements from many prominent Democratic political figures. Biden's spent decades in Congress, being both liked and respected, giving him a deep source of support. Sanders has spent as much time in Congress, but he is inclined to regard his colleagues as agents of the "corrupt political system", and so he is neither much liked nor respected.
Another big boost to Joe Biden was Sanders' Nevada win, which made a Sanders nomination seem frighteningly possible -- frightening because nobody with sense could believe he could beat Trump. That was a big drive behind the political endorsements, with members of Congress from swing states worrying, with good reason, that Sanders would drag down their own prospects for re-election were he to be nominated, allowing Republicans to re-take their seats.
Joe Biden hasn't got the nomination in the bag yet, and the pandemic has thrown the primary campaign into limbo. Biden is holed up in his basement, working through social media; states that have yet to perform primaries have been delaying them, with a push towards setting up the primaries for exclusively voting by mail. Nonetheless, there seems little reason to doubt Biden will get the nomination. In a debate with Sanders on 15 March -- in which Biden was clearly ascendant, while Sanders continued to sink -- Biden committed to picking a woman as a running mate. He later said that he had a list of about a dozen candidates, but couldn't say anything in specific.
Sanders has refused to give up his campaign, challenging Biden to another debate, which Biden shrugged off. It would be just a rehash of the 15 March debate, and would amount to no more than Sanders trying to pump up his flagging campaign. There's nothing in it for Joe Biden; he's best off simply ignoring Sanders. In any case, the Democratic primary has become a sideshow for the moment, overshadowed by the world crisis. It won't remain a sideshow indefinitely.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (15): While the intrusion of big e-commerce players like Alibaba and Amazon into international logistics will certainly help ramp up global shipments of goods, not all are likely to benefit. Rob Wolleswinkel of BCG, a consultancy, suspects that Amazon's logistics division will indeed seek to "cherry-pick" profitable undertakings, such as managing the system, leaving only low-margin activities, such as basic transport services, to players like Maersk and DHL. He observes that the upstarts have two things on their side that previous would-be disrupters didn't:
Some of the incumbents are realizing their vulnerability. Soren Skou, chief executive of Maersk, believes it was a mistake for his firm to spend the past decade focusing so much on no-frills container freight between China and Europe. Such specialization now seems short-sighted, Skou believing that Maersk must become more integrated to compete against Amazon; he wants to make the company "the DHL of the sea," offering worldwide door-to-door delivery. Skou plans to replace paper bills of lading with digital ones, secured using blockchain technology. The firm is already rolling out a digital "Maersk Line Operating System" to put shipping data into a common format. Smaller competitors are watching closely, an executive at one admitting: "We just watch what Maersk does, and copy it."
As traditionally implemented, the container shipping scheme is too clumsy for the e-commerce world. It will be transformative if Maersk, or anyone else, makes container shipping truly responsive and flexible. It might seem ridiculous to think of shipments on giant container ships like the MUNICH MAERSK being as flexible as the vans rolling around suburbs can be -- but smart data management and good data analytics might go a long way to that goal. Given the ability to predict where products need to be even before anyone buys them, then there's no need to wait for orders before shipping them; when an order is placed, the product will be assigned its delivery address while in transit. The ship takes on part of the job of a fulfillment center. Alibaba and Amazon are already pursuing this approach.
Even now, Alibaba and Amazon are able to cut sales prices through their logistics smarts, placing pressure on competitors. The more they control and optimize their logistics, the more they will be able to cut prices; that equates to good deals for consumers, but even more pressure on competitors. There are estimates that as many as 7.5 million retail jobs will be lost in the USA over the next decade. Not everyone is so pessimistic, however.
Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute -- a think-tank in Washington DC -- has pointed out that, in the USA, jobs in logistics are increasing faster than retail employment is falling. Those new workers, though, are unlikely to be employed by old firms. The container shipping revolution overturned the existing networks of shippers; the e-commerce revolution is likely to be as or more disruptive. Whether big traditional players like Maersk survive remains to be seen. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (96): There was a public perception that President Eisenhower was a genial, likeable old duffer who enjoyed playing golf, and shouldn't be taken very seriously. That was, to an extent, deliberate misdirection, Eisenhower being later called the "hidden-hand president". He was politically astute and all business.
Eisenhower also supported the French war in Indochina, though he didn't think much of European nations clinging to their colonial possessions. When the French effort collapsed in 1954, he refused to bail them out, knowing that Indochina would prove a sink for US manpower and military resources. A negotiated settlement broke Indochina into four nations: Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. The Americans backed South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam, refusing to honor a stipulation in the settlement in which a plebiscite would be held to determine if South and North Vietnam would join together. He also began to send military advisors to South Vietnam.
In parallel, Eisenhower continued to recognize the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China, backing Taiwan in periodic clashes with Mao's Communist regime, leading to the signing of the "Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty" with the Nationalist government in December 1954. A month later, answering a request from the president, Congress enacted the "Free China Resolution", which gave him a free hand in his China policy. When the mainland Chinese grew too belligerent, Eisenhower made general public statements about the possibility of using the nuclear option -- but rebuffed suggestions from the military brass that the Bomb actually be used against China.
The Cold War competition between East and West took place against a background of the collapse of Western colonial order, which Eisenhower regarded as doomed. In November 1956, after Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel joined together to invade Egypt and seize the canal. Eisenhower was furious, informing the British that he would impose financial sanctions on them unless they withdrew; the French had no choice but to leave as well. Eisenhower denounced the action at the United Nations; fence-mending would repair the breach with Britain, indeed leave Britain very subservient to the USA.
The French, angry with the British and Americans, chose to work with Germany towards a tighter European Community. Eisenhower, inclined to the far-sighted view, knew European integration was actually in America's interests as well, since it was easier for the USA to deal with them collectively than individually -- and mutual assistance among each other meant less need for assistance from the United States. If that meant a Europe that stood up to the USA at times, that was the price to be paid.
As another consequence of the Suez Crisis, unstable states in the Middle East, confronted by radical Arab regimes in such states as Egypt and Syria, were reinforced through the "Eisenhower Doctrine", which was actually more a creation of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The US would provide economic and military aid to America's friends in the region, and apply military force when necessary. Eisenhower showered aid on vulnerable Jordan and, in 1958, ordered Operational BLUE BAT, in which 15,000 US troops were sent to Jordan to shore up the pro-Western government. BLUE BAT was also a demonstration that the US had the ability and will to intervene in the region. It enraged Mao Zedong, leading to more frictions between Mainland China and Taiwan. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Brazil Set To Finalise MTC-300 Cruise Missile Development" by Victor Barreira & Robin Hughes, 2 October 2019), Avibras Industria Aeroespacial of Brazil is now on track to wrap up development of the "M?ssil Tatico de Cruzeiro (MTC) 300" surface-launched tactical long-range cruise missile for the Brazilian Army in late 2020. A production batch will be obtained in 2021.
The "Matador", as the missile is named, will be carried and launched by the Brazilian Army's ASTROS II Mk3M and Mk6 self-propelled multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), which are mounted on the Avibras 6*6 AV-LMU truck. The AV-LMU vehicle can haul two missile containers, each with one MTC-300 missile.
Precise specifications of the MTC-300 have not been released, but inspection of imagery and other indirect data suggests the missile weighs about 1,100 kilograms (2,425 pounds), has a diameter of 45 centimeters (17.7 inches), a length of 5.43 meters (17.8 feet), a cruise speed of 1,045 KPH (650 MPH / 565 KT), a range in excess of 300 kilometers (185 miles / 160 NMI), and a circular error probability of 30 meters (100 feet).
The MTC-300 is powered by an Avibras-developed jet engine and uses a solid-rocket booster for launch. It features a GPS-INS guidance system and has a warhead weight of 200 kilograms (440 pounds), with the warhead being either of unitary high-explosive configuration, or a load of anti-personnel/anti-armor submunitions. As originally revealed, the missile had four short fixed cruciform wings, with cruciform tail fins providing control. It has now evolved to twin pop-out wings.
* According to an article from JANES.com ("Japan To Develop Long-Range Air-To-Surface Cruise Missiles" by Takahashi Kosuke, 20 March 2019), while Japan has long been reluctant to develop offensive weapons, the country is now developing a long-range air-to-surface cruise missile to reinforce the defense of the country's remote southwestern islands.
The new cruise missile will be based on doubling the range of the ASM-3 Mach 3 anti-ship missile, to more than 400 kilometers (250 miles). The ASM-3 is a Japanese design, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, working with the Japan Ministry of Defense (MOD). The ASM-3 hasn't yet been fielded, but will be carried by Japanese F-2 fighters -- the F-2 being a derivative of the US F-16 -- and a new fighter, to be obtained by Japan. The push towards a long-range cruise missile is clearly being driven by China's naval assertiveness in the East China Sea, with the focal point of confrontation being the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands in Okinawa Prefecture. The islands are controlled by Japan, but also claimed by China.
* There's been a lot of buzz in the last few years over electric vertical take-off & landing (EVTOL) aircraft for urban air taxi service, with ridesharing company Uber having a strong interest in the concept -- having outlined an "Uber Elevate" program towards that end in 2016.
As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("Hyundai Will Make Flying Cars For Uber's Air Taxi Service" by Andrew J. Hawkins, 6 January 2020), South Korean car-maker Hyundai is now working on an EVTOL for Uber's air service.
Hyundai's Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) design features twin tilt-rotors on the tail and 10 other rotors distributed around the egg-shaped cabin. The machine will have five seats, a cruise speed of 290 KPH (180 MPH), and a cruise altitude of 300 to 600 meters (1,000 to 2,000 feet). It can be recharged in five to seven minutes, and have a range of 100 kilometers (60 miles) on a charge.
Hyundai is taking a systems approach to the PAV design effort, also having unveiled concepts for a landing hub and an eco-friendly "Purpose Built Vehicle" (PBV) for ground transportation to and from the station. The PBV is basically an electric shuttle bus, but could be configured as a mobile coffee shop or medical clinic. It will be self-driving, determining optimum routes and platooning to save energy.
There's no hardware for any of it yet. Uber has been talking to other companies about EVTOL, including Joby, Jaunt, Embraer, Pipistrel, Karem Aircraft, Aurora Flight Sciences, and Bell. Uber wants to start conducting test flights soonest, and is talking about an air taxi service in 2023, starting in Dallas, Texas, and Los Angeles, California. There are both technical and regulatory obstacles to be overcome, so we'll see what actually happens.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI AT WAR (3): "Expert system" platforms designed to help warfighters, such as Northern Arrow and America's similar CADET software, can work much faster than humans: two minutes for CADET compared with 16 person-hours for humans, as per one test. However, expert systems predate machine learning; they are programmed with elaborate sets of rules, and perform inferences on them. They are deterministic and predictable.
The real world, particularly of the battlefield, is not so predictable, so many modern expert systems combine rule-following with added randomness to perform more sophisticated planning. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" technology office -- has worked on the "Real-time Adversarial Intelligence & Decision-making (RAID)" system, which is intended to predict the goals, movements, and even the mindsets of enemy forces five hours into the future. The system relies on a type of game theory that breaks down problems into smaller games, reducing the computational power required to solve them.
In early tests between 2004 and 2008, RAID performed with greater accuracy and speed than human planners. In simulated two-hour battles in Baghdad, human teams were pitted against either RAID or other humans; they could tell them apart less than half the time. RAID is now being improved for operational fielding.
Researchers working on military applications of AI have been particularly interested in "AlphaGo" -- discussed here in 2018 -- the AI system developed by Alphabet's Deepmind. Not long after AlphaGo went public, beating expert human Go players, China's Academy of Military Science held a workshop on the game. Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese miltech, says: "For Chinese military strategists, among the lessons learned from AlphaGo's victories was the fact that an AI could create tactics and stratagems superior to those of a human player in a game that can be compared to a wargame."
As discussed here in 2019, Deepmind went on to develop "AlphaStar", which is an expert player in the StarCraft II online RPG. StarCraft II's sci-fi battles feel authentic, and they're not so far from real-world battles. Warfighters could obtain insights from an AI battle-strategy system. Michael Brown -- director of the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon office tasked with exploiting commercial technology -- says that AI-enabled "strategic reasoning" is one of his organization's priorities.
Of course, there's a lot more to fighting a battle than just strategy; political, social, and ethical considerations factor in as well. There's no reason an AI system can't incorporate all aspects of a battle -- but all the system will be able to do is recommend. Wing Commander Keith Dear, an RAF intelligence officer, asks: "What do we do when AI is applied to military strategy and has calculated the probabilistic inferences of multiple interactions many moves beyond that which we can consider, and recommends a course of action that we don't understand?"
An AI system might suggest completely baffling courses of action, and nobody's going to follow it without clarification. Dear suggests that the system will have to be able to justify its decisions by demonstrating their effect in a "massive near-real-time simulation".
That's not as sci-fi an idea as it sounds. Sir Richard Barrons, a retired British Army general, says that Britain's defense ministry is already purchasing a technology demonstrator for a cloud-based virtual replication of a complex military operating environment, known as a "single synthetic environment". It is built by Improbable -- a gaming company -- and CAE -- known for its flight simulators -- using open standards, so everything from secret intelligence to real-time weather data can be plugged in. Given enough data, networking, and cloud computing power, Sir Richard says "it will revolutionize how command and control is done", that it will provide a "single synthetic command tool from the national security council down to the tactical commander".
It is usually claimed insistence that humans will stay "in the loop" with battle-management system, maintaining control over the fight. However, it may become increasingly ambiguous as to who is really in control. Even many Western military officers are not convinced. Although nobody will build a battle-management system that doesn't have specified bounds or never asks for authorization from human commanders, Elsa Kania says Chinese commentaries envision that combat will speed up "beyond the capabilities of human cognition" At the outset of a war, interconnected AI systems would pick out targets, from missile launchers to aircraft-carriers, and choreograph rapid and precise strikes to destroy them in the most efficient order.
Such a fast-paced combat environment would make authorization problematic, since commanders would have to make decisions very quickly, and would have an inclination to "rubber-stamp" the machine's decisions. There are also worries that AI battle management would make a first strike quicker and easier; but it would also enhance defensive capabilities. There is the difficulty that nobody's got any such systems in operation, and can't really know how well they work until they go to war.
There is an AI arms race in progress, but at the moment, the US seems at a disadvantage. The Pentagon's spending on AI is a fraction of the $20 to $30 billion USD spent by US big tech firms on AI in 2016 -- and some of the big tech firms, like Google, have come under fire from their own employees for taking on Pentagon work. The Chinese are pumping as much money as they can in military AI, seeing it as giving them an edge, and they have little concern about protests from the Chinese people. General Jack Shanahan, boss of JAIC, is worried: "What I don't want to see is a future where our potential adversaries have a fully AI-enabled force, and we do not." [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DARPA AGENDA: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("DARPA Eyes New Weapon Concepts In 2021 Program Plans" by Graham Warwick, 17 February 2020), the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "Blue Sky" research office -- has now released its list of efforts for fiscal year 2021.
One of the more imaginative schemes is "LongShot", an investigation for which DARPA is asking $22 million USD. LongShot is a missile carrier vehicle, to be launched from fighter or bombers, and haul air-to-air missiles over long distance to destroy adversary aircraft. LongShot appears to be a follow-on to the "Flying Missile Rail" concept unveiled by DARPA in 2017 -- a vehicle to carry two AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, giving a fighter aircraft the ability to engage adversaries at extended range. Other requests include:
Other new projects on the list include: "Dynamic Airspace Control" ($13.7 million USD), to develop ways to monitor and manage local airspace without using high-power radar; "Non-Kinetic Effects" ($7.5 million USD), to develop new electronic-warfare systems to sense, attack, and also protect signals; and "Port Defense" ($7.4 million USD), to use expendable drone undersea vehicles for mine countermeasures.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (14): Information-driven logistics not only makes the system more efficient, it also makes it easier for one company to set up an integrated network. In 2017, Amazon spent $25 billion USD on logistics, the company having moved from a focus on the "last mile" to embracing "all the miles". It has created its own logistics division, and acts as its own freight forwarder. Its cargo airline, Amazon Air, is still puny compared with FedEx, Amazon having only 33 aircraft in its fleet -- but the company is spending $1.5 billion USD on a new cargo hub in Cincinnati that will accommodate 100 air freighters. Amazon has also been granted a license to act as a maritime freight forwarder.
Few in the business currently regard Amazon as a threat. E-commerce is booming at a rate that allows DHL, FedEx, and UPS to tell shareholders that they've got a growth market. They do: demand for parcel delivery is growing by more than 7% a year, according to Frank Appel, the boss of Deutsche Post DHL. He adds that automation is likely to mean that, in the not-so-distant future, a third fewer people will be needed to deliver a given volume of goods -- but the increase in demand will still make the industry a net job creator. He has no fear of Amazon; indeed, DHL can get good ideas from Amazon, and the two firms can collaborate when it makes business sense to do so.
Besides, at present, Amazon is only building up a logistics network to serve its own business. The problem for traditional logistics firms is that can change at any time: once Amazon has a big enough network, there's nothing to stop the company from handling freight for other businesses. After all, Amazon developed cloud computing technology for its own use, then went on to become the biggest player in the commercial cloud-computing market. Amazon doesn't have to own all the ships and rolling stock; the company can get what it wants by providing the digital intelligence to keep the network going at a dizzying pace, with the rest of the industry compelled to go along. It's either be riding the steamroller, or becoming part of the road.
Alibaba may be farther down this road than Amazon. Alibaba was never a retailer, instead administering a marketplace where vendors could peddle their products. Amazon, incidentally, has partly adopted this model by supporting tens of thousands of partner businesses -- which has proven profitable for the company, and also deflected criticisms that it is crushing small businesses. In any case, Alibaba's business model meant the company had to have a good handle on a sprawling logistics network from the start. Alibaba says that in 2018, it was the middleman in $550 billion USD of transactions within China, serving over 500 million customers. Through its logistics platform, Cainiao, it delivers 70% of all e-commerce parcels in China.
Alibaba has now expanded its vision to international e-commerce. A 2016 study produced by Alibaba's research arm and Accenture, a consultancy, in predicted that cross-border e-commerce shipments worldwide could grow from $400 billion USD in that year to nearly a trillion by 2020. Until recently, such international shipments tended to be limited to fairly high-value goods -- but Alibaba now ships cheap, bulky things like diapers and milk powder from manufacturers in the USA to consumers in China. The company is now investing billions of dollars into strengthening Cainiao's cross-border capabilities. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (95): General Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 election, becoming POTUS 34. After five terms of Democrats in the White House, Republicans were ecstatic about retaking the presidency, all the more so because of Eisenhower's great prestige with the American public. At the outset, Eisenhower's agenda was to end the war in Korea; balance the budget; end price and wage controls; reduce defense costs by relying on the nuclear option; and expand America's international ties, with a commitment to the UN and to foreign trade.
Eisenhower proved a resolute Cold Warrior, though he sought means of reducing the tensions. He brought the war in Korea to an end, with an armistice signed in July 1953. It wasn't a peace treaty, it just a cease-fire, and it wasn't such an accomplishment, since all the combatants had tired of the war. The death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 also meant a new leadership in the Kremlin. In the end, an agreement was hammered out to handle the repatriation of prisoners; none were sent back home if they didn't want to go.
Eisenhower, with an eye to the new Soviet leadership, attempted to promote a new order, in particular trying to bring about an end to the arms race. In April 1953, in his "Chance For Peace" speech, he proposed that the USA and USSR should agree to end their arms race, since it was an unproductive drain on both societies. Two years later, as the Soviets accelerated their nuclear weapons development, Eisenhower suggested that the two countries cooperate on constructive uses of nuclear power, the concept coming to be labeled "Atoms For Peace" -- and he also suggested "Open Skies", in which each country would be able to freely perform aerial surveillance of the other.
The Soviets perceived that Eisenhower simply wanted to maintain American nuclear superiority; they were solidly against Open Skies, since the Americans would learn just how weak the USSR really was. They rejected the proposals. Indeed, Eisenhower wanted to base American strategy on the nuclear option so he could cut conventional forces, a policy that became known as "New Look". He not only accelerated the production of nuclear weapons, he also drove the development of what would emerge as America's "strategic triad": long-range bombers, ground-based intercontinental ballistics missiles (ICBM), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).
To Americans, Communism appeared to be a new totalitarian doctrine that threatened to impose authoritarian governments on the world. Eisenhower publicly stated that America should not be satisfied with merely "containing" Communism, that it should be rolled back whenever possible. He articulated a "domino principle", in which the fall of one government to the Reds would lead to another.
There was a degree of paranoia in this mindset that was not all that compatible with peace. The CIA became a Cold War force, working against Leftist governments in the developing world, or at least governments that were perceived as Leftist. In 1953, at the outset of his presidency, Eisenhower backed a coup in Iran, with the CIA scheming to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restore the Shah of Iran to power.
The Cold War meant an expansion of executive authority; there was nothing entirely new about the White House engaging in covert actions, but now their use expanded dramatically. The Constitution granted a president that power, while leaving few controls on a president for using it. Congress needed to be kept informed, but the White House could choose to tell Congress what the White House felt Congress needed to know. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for February included:
-- 06 FEB 20 / ONEWEB 2 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 2142 UTC (next day local time - 6) to put 34 "OneWeb" low-orbit comsats into space. OneWeb plans to put a constellation of 648 comsats into near-polar low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles). Each satellite had a launch mass of 147 kilograms (325 pounds) and carried a Ku-band payload for communicating with ground terminals.
-- 09 FEB 20 / IGS OPTICAL 7 -- An H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0134 UTC (local time - 9) to put an "Information Gathering Satellite (IGS) Optical 7" military surveillance satellite into orbit. IGS Optical 7 was the 16th IGS satellite, from initial launch in 2003:
With the launch of IGS Optical 7, the constellation consisted of Optical 4, 5, 6, & 7, plus Radar 2, 3, 4, & 5. All the IGS satellites were built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
-- 09 FEB 20 / ZAFAR 1 (FAILURE) -- An Iranian Simorgh rocket was launched at 1545 UTC (local + 4) to put the "Zafar 1" communications / remote sensing satellite into space, but it didn't make orbit. This was the third consecutive launch failure of the Simorgh, since its first launch in 2017. No Iranian satellite has reached orbit since Fajr, which launched in February 2015.
Sunday's launch comes a few days after the eleventh anniversary of Iran's first successful orbital launch, of the Omid satellite by a Safir booster on 2 February 2009. Iran's satellite launches take place from the Imam Khomeini Spaceport, located in Iran's Semnan Province.
The Safir rocket that Iran used for its earliest satellite launches was based on the Shahab 3 missile -- itself derived the North Korean Hwasong 7 missile, which traces its design back to the Soviet Union's R-17 Elbrus, commonly known in the west as the Scud. The larger and more powerful Simorgh AKA "Safir 2A" is also understood to have been developed with North Korean assistance. It is visibly similar to the Unha 3 booster, which launched North Korea's first satellite in December 2012.
The name "Simorgh" means "Phoenix" in Farsi. At 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in diameter, Simorgh's first stage is wider than Safir and is powered by four liquid-fueled engines to Safir's one -- the individual engines are thought to be the same or similar for the two vehicles. At the top of the first stage, the rocket tapers to a narrower second stage, with a third stage and payload fairing mounted above that. Simorgh's first stage burns hypergolic liquid propellant -- likely unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine fuel and dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. The second stage is believed to have used a similar propellant combination. It is not known if the third stage is solid- or liquid-fueled.
The Simorgh vehicle can put a 350-kilogram (771-pound) satellite into low Earth orbit. The Zafar satellite had four cameras, with a best resolution of 22.5 meter (74 feet) -- good enough for remote sensing, not so good for military reconnaissance. It carried a store-dump communications payload, presumably for encrypted military communications.
Iran often schedules its launches for early February to mark the anniversary of 1979's Islamic Revolution. With Sunday's launch, Iran showed an unprecedented level of transparency with its space program. Details of the launch were circulated ahead of time, including reports that previous launch attempts had been delayed, and then on Sunday afternoon that liftoff was imminent. Iran's state media announced the failure less than an hour after it happened, acknowledging that while the rocket had "successfully" reached space, but had not been able to enter orbit.
-- 10 FEB 20 / SOLAR ORBITER -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0403 UTC (previous day local time + 5) to put the "Solar Orbiter (SOLO)" probe into space for NASA and the European Space Agency. Built by Airbus Defense and Space and with a launch mass of 1,750 kilograms (3,860 pounds), SOLO is to travel inside the orbit of Mercury to study how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles blown by the solar wind into the interstellar medium. The Atlas 5 booster flew in the "411" configuration -- with a four-meter fairing, one solid rocket booster and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.
-- 15 FEB 20 / CYGNUS 13 (NG 13) -- An Orbital Sciences Antares booster was launched from Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia at 2021 UTC (local time + 5) to put the 13th operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 13", into space on an International Space Station support mission. The payload included an innovative portable electron microscope, as well as three smallsats:
The smallsats were later deployed from the ISS. The booster was in the Antares 230 configuration, with two RD-181 first stage engines and a Castor 30XL second stage.
-- 17 FEB 20 / STARLINK 4 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1505 UTC (local time + 5) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the fifth Starlink batch launch. The Falcon missed its landing on the SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic. It had flown three times before. The payload fairing was not recovered.
-- 18 FEB 20 / JCSAT 17 & GEO-KOMPSAT 2B -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2218 UTC (local time + 3) to put the Japanese "JCSAT 17" geostationary communications satellite and the South Korean "GEO-Kompsat 2Bk" geostationary observation satellite into space.
The JCSAT 17 spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin for Sky Perfect JSAT Corporation of Tokyo. It was based on the LM 2100 satellite bus, with a launch mass of 5,855 kilograms (12,910 pounds), a payload of S / C / Ku-band transponders, and a design life of 15 years. JCSAT 17 featured solar arrays designed to roll out like a window shade, and not folded in an accordion fashion. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 136 degrees east longitude to provide data and broadcast services over Japan and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. The S-band and C-band payloads on JCSAT 17 were used by NTT Docomo, a Japanese mobile phone company, to provide mobile connectivity across Japan and surrounding regions.
GEO-Kompsat 2B was designed to provide ocean and environmental monitoring services for weather forecasters and researchers. The satellite had a launch mass of 3,380 kilograms (7,450 pounds) and a design life of ten years. It was built and owned by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). It carried two instruments: an ocean color imager made by Airbus in Europe, and a spectrometer from Ball Aerospace in Colorado. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 128 degrees east longitude.
-- 19 FEB 20 / XJS C,D,E,F -- A Long March 3D booster was launched from Xichang at 2107 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put four demonstrator satellites into orbit, designated "XJS C" through "XJS F". They were described as "Earth observation satellites". Two of the four satellites were developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, a division of the government-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. The other two spacecraft were developed by the Harbin Institute of Technology and the DFH Satellite Company LTD.
-- 20 FEB 20 / MERIDIAN M9 -- A Soyuz 2.1a booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0824 UTC (local time - 4) to put the "Meridian M9" military comsat into Molniya elliptical orbit.
BACK_TO_TOP* AI AT WAR (2): Of course, although shooting things up is an essential military function, it's not what a military force spends most of its time doing. To get to the second category of military AI applications, another significant element of military operations is intelligence-gathering -- which has been transformed by platforms such as spy satellites and drones, performing observations with cameras, radar, and signals intelligence gear. The result is an overwhelming flood of data. In 2011, the most recent year for which there are data, America's roughly 11,000-or-so drones sent back over 327,000 hours of footage, amounting to a total of 37 years. It would take an army of analysts to inspect it all, and it would be tedious, as well as error-prone, to do so.
That's where AI comes in. According to a Stanford University study, in lab-based tests, algorithms surpassed human performance in image classification by 2015; from 2015 to 2018, they almost doubled their performance in the tougher task of "object segmentation", which involves picking out multiple objects from single images. Computer vision is still easily tricked, but in early 2017, a Pentagon report concluded that deep-learning algorithms "can perform at near-human levels".
In consequence, the Department of Defense set up the "Algorithmic Warfare" team to work on "Project Maven" which uses deep learning and other techniques to identify objects and suspicious actions, initially in footage from the war against Islamic State and now more widely. The aim is to produce "actionable" intelligence for warfighters. An insider in the program says the benefits to analysts -- in terms of time savings and new insights -- is marginal, with false positives being a problem. However, he adds that these systems are "highly iterative", or in other words, they learn from experience. As a result, progress is rapid.
Project Maven is just the tip of the iceberg. Earth-i, a British company, can apply machine-learning algorithms from a range of satellites to identify different variants of military aircraft across dozens of bases with over 98% accuracy -- according to Sean Corbett, a retired air vice-marshal in the Royal Air Force (RAF) who now works for the firm. He says: "The clever bit is then developing methods to automatically identify what is normal and what is not normal." By watching bases over time, the software can distinguish routine deployments from irregular movements, alerting analysts to significant changes.
Of course, AI can be used to sort through other sorts of data as well. Sir Alex Younger -- the head of MI6, Britain's spy agency -- recently commented: "Bulk data combined with modern analytics make the modern world transparent." We are entering the era of the surveillance society, and of course the military wants to leverage off of it.
In 2012, leaked documents from the National Security Agency -- America's signals-intelligence agency -- described a program, not so reassuringly named "Skynet", which applied machine learning to Pakistani mobile-phone data in order to spot individuals who might be couriers for terrorist groups. For example, who had traveled from Lahore to the border town of Peshawar in the past month, and turned off or swapped their handset more often than usual? Intelligence is now being found in the digital cloud.
Less dramatically, AI can be used to keep military hardware working effectively. JAIC's first project was not a weapon as such, nor a spy tool, but a collaboration with special forces to predict engine failures in their Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters. The first version was delivered in the spring of 2019. Air force tests on command-&-control aircraft and transports showed that such predictive maintenance can reduce unscheduled work by almost a third. Given the tens of billions the Pentagon spends on maintenance, that implies big cost reductions.
The third area of military application of AI -- acting on it -- promises to be revolutionary at all levels of the military hierarchy. Northern Arrow, a tool built by UNIQAI, an Israeli AI firm, is one of many products on the market that helps warfighters plan missions by crunching large volumes of data on variables such as enemy positions, weapon ranges, terrain, and weather. That sort of planning used to mean a lot of laborious and time-consuming staffwork. UNIQAI is fed data from manuals, books, and intelligence sources; it then lists options for warfighters, along with explanations of why they were chosen. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral on 10 February 2020 to put the "Solar Orbiter (SOLO)" probe into space for NASA and the European Space Agency. Built by Airbus Defense and Space, SOLO was to travel inside the orbit of Mercury to study how the sun creates and controls the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles blown by the solar wind into the interstellar medium.
Solar Orbiter was the 7th space platform built by the European Space Agency to study the Sun, following the Ulysses, SOHO, and the four-satellite Cluster missions. SOLO will be the first probe to obtain photographs and video of the Sun's poles.
Solar Orbiter is the first medium-class mission of the European Space Agency's "Cosmic Vision 2015-2025" program, which seeks to answer questions about the cosmic origins. In combination with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, the ESA Solar Orbiter is to obtain new data on how the solar wind is generated, the heliospheric magnetic field generated by the Sun, solar energetic particles, and transient interplanetary disturbances in the solar wind and heliosphere in the inner Solar System.
Solar Orbiter will use multiple gravity assist flybys of Venus and Earth to change its orbital inclination relative to the Sun's equatorial plane, with the result that it will be inclined to the solar equator by 24 degrees by the end of its primary mission, and up to 33 degrees by the end of its extended mission.
The probe's orbit will be highly elliptical, coming to within just 0.28 astronomical units (AU, the distance of Earth from the Sun) at perihelion and swinging outward to 1.2 AU at aphelion. It will take the spacecraft two years to reach its operational orbit, which will then be followed by 5 years of a primary scientific mission. Solar Orbiter carries enough onboard propellant that its mission can be extended to at least 10 years total.
For its primary science mission, SOLO will have just 10 days of active science gathering operations during each orbit, corresponding to each 0.28 AU perihelion pass of the Sun. During these 10-day periods, doors on the front of the spacecraft's heat shield will open to expose instruments, including:
The instruments are linked together, allowing one to cue others to matters of interest. After each 10-day science perihelion pass of the Sun, the doors will close, with the magnetometer and a second suite of instruments continuing to perform observations:
Researchers are particularly interested in the formation of "coronal mass ejections (CME)", solar eruptions that can disrupt communications and damage electronic systems on Earth. A better understanding of CMEs may help predict their occurrence.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (13): In the digital world of the 21st century, the paper-based processes of international shipping seem staggeringly archaic. Airlines don't work that way; systems based on e-tickets that say who is entitled to go where, and how, have been mandatory in air-passenger transport for a decade. Unfortunately, half of air cargo still travels with paper "bills of lading", not e-tickets. The world of container shipping is even more backwards: freight forwarders deal with shipping firms, airlines, and hauliers mainly by fax. The cargo on each voyage of the MUNICH MAERSK corresponds to a library of paper documents -- many of which then need to be sent to the ship's destination by some other means. That introduces more troubles, with vessels and aircraft often delayed in port because the paperwork has not caught up with the goods that they carry.
Obviously, this inefficiency implies a heavy cost burden. Removing administrative obstacles and outdated practices would, by some estimates, do more to boost international trade than getting rid of tariffs. A United Nations study suggests that putting all the Asia-Pacific region's trade-related paperwork online could cut the time it takes to export goods by up to 44%, similarly reduce the cost of doing so by up to 31%, and boost exports by as much as $257 billion USD a year.
The existing system is painful and frustrating for businesses. Two-thirds of the American importers who responded to a survey taken by Freightos said that over a quarter of their deliveries from abroad arrive late; about 42% said they spend more than two hours on paperwork to arrange a shipment, while 83% said they struggle to track items as they move across the world. Freightos' Schreiber says, in exasperation: "Amazon Prime can deliver to your house from its warehouse at a set time. Why can't you do the same with air and sea freight?"
One problem is regulation. For example, in 2008 a UN convention put electronic documents in international shipping on a proper legal footing -- but for these "Rotterdam rules" to come into force, the agreement must be ratified by 20 countries. Few have paid attention, with only four signatories at last notice: Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Spain, and Togo.
Communications used to be a problem, but it shouldn't be any more. Inmarsat, a company originally set up by the International Maritime Organization to provide satellite services for ships at sea, today offers data rates for ships that are over 100 times faster than they were 20 years ago. A number of companies are rushing to provide new mobile-broadband services that will improve things further. Not just ships and planes, but the individual packages and containers within them, can increasingly be tracked in real time.
These streams of data can go a long way to eliminating uncertainty -- for example, knowing exactly when to send trucks to pick up a shipment of product, and knowing it will be there. They also create the possibility of redirecting items along quicker or cheaper routes as they become available. That implies those who want to ship product should be able to enter a query into a system to request an appropriate service, with the system responding with a list of options, and the service obtained by simply selecting it.
This would improve the bottom line for both those who need the service, and those who provide it, particularly by locating and exploiting spare shipping capacity on the fly. There are signs of this new era in haulage. America's trucks travel empty more than a quarter of the time: the wasted capacity is equivalent to 200,000 of them traveling 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) every day. That's because it's hard to schedule return cargoes using phone and fax. Now apps have appeared to match loads to drivers, with firms such as Uber Freight, Cargomatic, and Trucker Path exploiting the new smart way of doing things.
The same approach could of course be applied to other means of transport, resulting in an integrated global network of ships, planes, trains, and trucks to move products. In the past, attempting to build such a network would have strained the capabilities of even the biggest companies; but now, sophisticated software, plus smartphones and sensors, can do the job, dynamically assigning assets from different companies for each leg of the journey. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (94): With the war in Korea as a background, the 22nd Amendment, the "Two-Term Amendment", was ratified in 1951. It read:
BEGIN QUOTE:
TWENTY-SECOND AMENDMENT: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
This Article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the Congress.
END QUOTE
Put simply, no president could serve more than two terms. If a vice-president became president on the death of the previous president, with less than two years left in the term, the new president could potentially serve for two more full terms, meaning no more than ten years. Truman could potentially run in 1952, because the amendment wasn't retroactive.
Obviously, the 22nd Amendment was a reaction to FDR's four elections, and just as obviously, the Republicans were its biggest backers. That being said, since the 22nd Amendment was ratified by three-quarters of the states, it had broad backing -- no constitutional amendment is passed without it. While FDR's leadership had been outstanding, leaving him ranked as one of America's greatest presidents, few liked the idea that the US government would be dependent on a "supreme leader".
One of the unintended consequences of the 22nd Amendment was that it weakened the authority of a second-term president. Even though nobody except FDR had been elected to a third term, the possibility that a president could do so remained. As long as that possibility was there, people dealt with presidents as if they might be in charge in a third term. Without the third-term threat, crossing a second-term president would not have longer-term consequences. On the other hand, it boosted the authority and influence of the vice-president, who could become a successor to a popular president. Before the 22nd Amendment, it was unusual for vice-presidents to become presidents; after it, it would become unremarkable.
The unpopularity of the Truman Administration helped drive through the 22nd Amendment. His inability to bring the stalemated war to an end grated on the American public. The big problem in negotiations with the Chinese and the North Koreans was that they insisted on the repatriation of all their prisoners of war, whether the prisoners wanted to be repatriated or not. The Western Allies had repatriated Soviet prisoners held by the Germans at the end of World War II; the Soviet government regarded them as traitors for having been taken prisoner, and they were treated harshly, with those who had collaborated in any way with the Germans often executed. Truman, as a matter of principle, was unyielding in rejecting involuntary repatriation.
After the triumph of World War II, American citizens could not accept grinding little wars that couldn't be brought to a conclusion. By early 1952, Truman's approval ratings in the Gallup polls stood at 22%, and they didn't get much better, either. Truman was also persistently dogged by ongoing investigations into government corruption. Some corruption was uncovered, with a number of Internal Revenue Bureau (IRB, the ancestor of the modern Internal Revenue Service) personnel dismissed for taking bribes. It didn't end there, with a special prosecutor investigating high government officials. In early 1952, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath fired the special prosecutor for being too aggressive; Truman, in response, fired McGrath, and then submitted a plan to Congress to reform the IRB. It didn't make the controversy go away.
Worse for Truman, in April 1952, in the face of a strike that shut down America's steel production, Truman ordered that the government seize control of a number of steel mills. He cited his authority as Commander in Chief, saying that steel production was essential for keeping the war effort going. However, in a landmark case, YOUNGSTOWN SHEET & TUBE CO. V. SAWYER -- Charles Sawyer, Truman's commerce secretary, had directed the seizures -- the Supreme Court judged 6:3 that the action exceeded presidential powers, that Truman's assertion of authority was too vague and was not derived in any legislative action by Congress.
It was great humiliation to Truman, in particular because all the justices in SCOTUS at the time had been appointed by him or FDR. Even though he could have run for re-election in 1952, his prospects were dismal, so he decided he'd had enough. Truman went off into retirement under something of a shadow, and in difficult financial straits. The publication of his memoirs helped him to stay afloat. Truman's financial difficulties led to the Former Presidents Act of 1958, which granted a pension to ex-presidents, though it wasn't retroactive to Truman.
With the passage of time, Truman would be rehabilitated -- the reality being that his performance in office was competent and forthright, his problems being largely due to the hysterical Red Scare, and the frustrating limited war in Korea. Limited wars would become much more familiar from that time on. Nuclear weapons and the post-colonial world order meant that world wars were a thing of the past. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Google has now introduced an extension to Android Assistant, called "Action Blocks", to permit people with cognitive impairments to make use of a smartphone or tablet. It's a straightforward idea, being a menu interface for the Assistant, where the menu entries are identified by easily-recognized images.
An Action Block icon -- for example, an image of a cab -- links to an Assistant command, like ordering a rideshare. Action Blocks can be configured to do anything Assistant can do, with the actions activated by a tap: call family, share location, watch a show, control the lights, and so on. It's still in testing for the moment, but that's clearly focused on making sure Action Blocks are usable, there being nothing elaborate to the technology.
* As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("UPS Has Been Quietly Delivering Cargo Using Self-Driving Trucks" By Sean O'Kane, 15 August 2019), there's been a lot of hype about robot vehicles in the past few years, with the general perception now that the concept has been oversold. So goes the "hype cycle": initial hype, then disappointment ... with low-key refinement continuing, ultimately leading to establishment and acceptance.
As an example of the low-key refinement of robot vehicles, United Parcel Service has had autonomous trucking startup TuSimple hauling cargo for UPS between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, since May 2019. UPS has announced a partnership with TuSimple and has taken a minority stake in the robotruck firm. This exercise follows an earlier hookup between the US Postal Service and TuSimple, with TuSimple trucks hauling mail from Phoenix to Dallas, Texas. That experiment has ended, but the USPS and TuSimple are in talks about future collaborations.
TuSimple, which was founded in 2015, uses Navistar trucks kitted up with the startup's self-driving tech. Each truck has nine cameras and two lidar sensors, the focus being on a vision-based autonomous driving system -- similar to that which Tesla uses in its cars. TuSimple is backed by Nvidia and Chinese technology company Sina, with headquarters both in San Diego, California, and in Beijing.
TuSimple has educated UPS on the "requirements for Level 4 Autonomous trucking in its network" -- the "Level 4" referring to the Society of Automotive Engineers' scale for self-driving vehicles, meaning full autonomy that's locked into a designated geographic location. As a pilot program, the trucks still must have a safety driver and an engineer on board.
TuSimple is only one of a number of startups and established companies working robotrucks, including Kodiak, Einride, Waymo, and Daimler. Uber gave up, after one of its self-driving SUVs killed a pedestrian. TuSimple, however, is one of the few hauling actual commercial cargo, in a limited capacity on just a few routes.
The partnership with TuSimple represents UPS's determination to future-proof its business, which has a challenge from Amazon, which is determined to build its own delivery infrastructure. To keep up with Amazon, UPS is working on a drone delivery service, and it has electric trucks in the works. Rival FedEx recently announced that it didn't renew its contract with Amazon, though UPS is still working with the tech conglomerate for now.
* As reported by an article from THEVERGE.com ("The Litho Controller Is Sci-Fi Jewelry For Your iPhone's AR Apps" by Adi Roberts, 18 February 2019), a team of three tech designers in the UK has developed the "Litho" motion controller for augmented-reality applications.
The Litho is a bar, shaped like an "H" on its side, that fits between the index and middle fingers (either hand), with a trackpad on the bottom side of the "H". The Litho permits motion tracking and haptic feedback, being used with a combination of pointing, swiping, and tapping. It was designed with AR glasses like Microsoft's Hololens in mind, but for the time being it's based on the ARKit, Apple's mobile AR platform kit.
The Litho is only being sold to developers right now, with plans to introduce it for commercial sales in 2020, the expected price point being $100 USD. The past history of motion-control gadgets is not encouraging -- they are introduced with a bit of a splash, then disappear -- but Litho's designers think they have the right combination of functionality and low cost. First, however, they have to convince developers to use it, and then the developers have to put it to good use.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI AT WAR (1): As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Battle Algorithm", 7 September 2019), in the early 1970s, in the course of the war in Southeast Asia, the US tried to use high technology to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, used by the North Vietnamese to supply insurgents and their troops in South Vietnam.
As discussed here in 2005, under the IGLOO WHITE program, aircraft dropped seismic or microphone sensors that buried themselves in the ground, with a camouflaged radio antenna allowing the sensors to radio their observations to a central control center. A computer system collated the inputs from the sensors, with strike aircraft dispatched to hit targets once identified.
IGLOO WHITE was a failure. It cost about a billion contemporary dollars a year -- over seven times that in current dollars -- meaning about $100,000 contemporary dollars per truck destroyed. It did not cut the Ho Chi Minh trail. However, in hindsight, IGLOO WHITE made good sense, it was just too far ahead of its time. The military did not give up the idea of automating the battlefield.
Now, artificial intelligence (AI) promises battlefield automation that actually works, making IGLOO WHITE seem toylike. The Pentagon set up a "Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC)" in the Pentagon in summer of 2018, released a pioneering AI strategy document early in 2019, with a National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence meeting for the first time a few months later. The Pentagon's budget for 2020 has allocated almost a billion USD on AI, and over four times as much on uncrewed and autonomous capabilities that rely on it. The Chinese are also investing heavily in AI across the board, with an ambition to "lead the world" in AI by 2030.
AI is not a very specific term, covering a wide range of technologies. Early AI focused on "rule-based systems", involving intermeshed sets of explicit rules, while the current rage is "machine learning systems", based on "deep learning" -- involving many layers of brain-inspired neural networks. It has applications as diverse as language translation, object recognition, and game playing. Michael Horowitz of the University of Pennsylvania sees it as a general enabling technology, like the internal combustion engine or electric power distribution.
Horowitz sees the military applications of AI as sorted into three categories:
A battlefield places extreme burdens on machine autonomy. First, war machines must deal with adversaries working hard to destroy them; second, war machines may apply lethal force, and have to do so without performing war crimes. That means a battlefield AI features a hierarchy of capabilities: the basic mechanics of getting around and operating at the bottom, the tactical abilities to perform useful battlefield tasks in the middle, and the controlling ability to perform a mission while obeying the rules at the top. These three levels correspond to increasing difficulty.
AI systems have been devised that can beat an experienced fighter pilot in simulated air combat, while trials have been performed with "swarms" of drones that can collaborate to perform a mission without direct human supervision. These are impressive feats, but they are both specialized applications, not easily adapted to missions for which they were not designed. Existing autonomous weapon systems are focused on particular tasks -- for example, loitering missiles that circle until a radar is turned on, and then dive into it; or quick-firing guns to defend ships and bases. For now, the military's trust in autonomous weapons is limited. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SOLAR BUST: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("A $1 Billion Solar Plant Was Obsolete Before It Ever Went Online" by Chris Martin & Nic Querolo, 6 January 2020), in the Nevada desert between Las Vegas and Reno is the Crescent Dunes solar plant. It's easy to spot, being a tower surrounded by a spiral of 10,000 mirrors about 3 kilometers (2 miles) wide. The mirrors were designed to focus sunlight on the tower, with the heat producing steam to spin a turbogenerator. A molten salt system was to keep the plant going after sundown.
In 2011, the $1 billion USD project was to be the biggest turbogenerator solar power (TGSP) plant. There were high expectations for it, with Citigroup and other financiers investing $140 million with the developer, SolarReserve INC. Steven Chu, the US Department of Energy (DOE) secretary at the time, offered the company government loan guarantees, and Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader and senior senator from Nevada, allowed the company to build on public lands.
Today, SolarReserve is bogged down in litigation and accusations of mismanagement at Crescent Dunes, where taxpayers remain stuck $737 million USD in loan guarantees. It had one customer, NV Energy INC, and lost it, because the plant couldn't deliver consistent power. The plant was shut down in April 2019, with the DOE taking control of the facility in August 2019. What went wrong?
The core problem was that TGSP was a dead end. Ten years ago, it seemed a competitive proposition against photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, with its ability to keep running after the sun set being a distinct plus. However, PV panels have since dramatically fallen in price, and TGSP couldn't keep up -- since it requires an expensive turbogenerator system, the molten-salt energy storage being a particular challenge. PV panel arrays can pump out power at a fraction of the cost, with not much more maintenance than an occasional washing-down.
The politicians, regulators, financiers, and executives associated with Crescent Dunes don't like to talk about it. It does look like a great talking point for the Trump Administration, which is inclined to lowball renewable energy. Chris Edwards, the director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points to Crescent Dunes to highlight the folly of the government investing in alternative energy: "There's a long and growing list of failed government projects." He also points to Solyndra LLC, a solar company backed by $535 million USD in loan guarantees that went bankrupt in 2011.
It is strange that Libertarians, who glorify capitalism, don't seem to have a good idea of how modern capitalism works. All venture capitalists have their dogs; they get ahead because some of their ventures pay off spectacularly. The DOE estimates that the losses represent only 2.9% of its $28 billion USD in government loan guarantees for renewable energy projects, which also funded such successes as the massive farms of thin-film solar cells from the US manufacturers.
Advocates of public investment say flops are an inevitable part of moving towards a carbon-neutral future, just as they are for venture capitalists seeking the next Google. Yale economics professor Kenneth Gillingham -- who studied energy issues as part of President Barack Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisers -- says: "You should probably have more than one or two high-profile failures. Otherwise, you haven't invested aggressively enough."
* INDIA SOLAR: As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("India Bets On Barren Land, Rail Tracks To Raise Solar Capacity" by Sudarshan Varadhan, 1 February 2020), India once saw expanding coal power as the country's future -- but the falling cost of solar and other renewable energy, as well as ghastly air pollution, are making renewables more attractive all the time.
India's finance ministry has announced a plan to boost solar power generation by promoting the installation of panels along rail tracks and on barren land. That's towards the goal of raising renewable energy capacity to 175 gigawatts by 2022. Its renewable capacity rose 16% to 85.9 GW in 2019, while coal-fired capacity rose 3.9% to 198.5 GW.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman says a proposal is under consideration to set up large solar power capacity alongside rail tracks, and raised the outlay for the renewable energy ministry by 48% for 2020:21. She also extended lower tax rates to utilities, which some experts say should mostly help boost renewable energy. The plan also envisions that almost 30 old coal-fired plants would be shut by 2022. In addition, India has introduced a scheme to encourage farmers to use solar instead of diesel-fired irrigation pumps. Sitharaman said the scheme will be expanded to cover 3.5 million farmers.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS (12): As discussed by another article from ECONOMIST.com ("Thinking Outside The Box", 26 April 2018), global commerce hasn't come to a complete halt, even in an age of economic nationalism. Consider, for example, the MUNICH MAERSK, one of the latest super-sized container ships, which entered service in mid-2017. It is highly automated, with a crew of only 28; loading and unloading the 20,000 containers the vessel carries only requires the supervision of a single crew member.
Between 1985 and 2007, trade volumes rose at around twice the rate of global GDP. In the 1990s, the world's largest container ships only had space for 5,000 or so containers; now the MUNICH MAERSK carries four times that many. In 2014, the estimated total revenues of the global logistics industry ran to $4.3 trillion USD. However, the fundamentals of the business haven't changed so much from the time the industry took on its modern form in the 1950s and 1960s: use containers of standard sizes that can be loaded onto trains, trucks or ships to get them where they're needed; invest in scale to cut costs; keep control of everything with a physical paper trail.
The global financial crisis of 2007 had a drastic impact on this way of doing things. The big players like Maersk could keep on buying superships, but the smaller lines could not. European aerospace giant Airbus had planned to introduce an air freighter version of its A380 superjumbo jetliner to compete with the dominant Boeing 747 air freighter, but had to give up on the idea -- with ultimately fatal consequences for the A380. With a glut of shipping, the bottom fell out underneath freight rates, with some estimating that they fell by a staggering three-quarters.
Simultaneously, the growth of e-commerce saw customers acquiring a greater focus on the "last mile" of logistics -- that is, getting purchases from fulfillment centers to buyers. While there's a lot of interest in drones and driverless vans to that end, the more fundamental aspect of this transformation is the handling of "big data", knowing where hundreds of millions of products are to be found, knowing how they are getting to buyers, and knowing how to act on that data.
Companies that have acquired skills to deal with the "last mile" issue -- Alibaba and JD of China, Amazon in the US -- are now expanding their vision to deeper supply-chain issues. The business of moving goods internationally from factory to factory, and warehouse to warehouse requires much more capability capabilities than trucking items from local warehouses to doorsteps. However, it also accounts for 90% of the logistics' industry's global revenue. How much the intruders can displace the incumbents and what new business models come out of the struggle will help determine how much world trade can grow, and who the winners and losers from that growth will be.
Companies trying to move components through their supply chain, or finished goods to retailers, have two main options. The first is express-delivery services such as DHL Express (part of Deutsche Post DHL), FedEx, and UPS are fast and flexible --all the more so now, because they have adopted new data-management systems. However, they are also expensive, especially for long-distance air freight. Shipping a 70-kilogram (155-pound) parcel from Shanghai to London with DHL Express takes three times longer, and costs four times as much, as buying a human of the same weight an airline ticket. The passenger gets a baggage allowance and free drinks, too.
That means that most goods make their way across the world using the second option: containerized freight. The non-domestic cargo business is estimated to have revenues of $2.6 trillion USD a year. A lot of that revenue goes to middlemen. Dealing with customs clearances, insurance, transfers between sea and road and rail and all the other physical, procedural, and bureaucratic hold-ups that freight must endure demands the services of a freight forwarder. These companies account for over a fifth of the logistics industry's revenues; in some cases, they skim off as much as 45% of the total delivery cost. In 2016 Deutsche Post DHL's in-house freight-forwarder made over $26 billion USD in revenues. Its smaller rivals Kuehne + Nagel, of Switzerland, and DB Schenker, of Germany, made $20 billion USD and $17 billion USD respectively.
For the most part, freight-forwarding companies charge a percentage of the total cost of the shipment. This is a bit of a racket, since it gives them little incentive to cut costs. In a free and transparent market where all the shipping options were easily known, competition would solve that problem. However, the complicated world of shipping contracts doesn't feature much transparency, and of course -- as is true of other lines of business that lack transparency -- the incumbents have obvious motives to keep it opaque.
Zvi Schreiber, founder of Freightos -- a website headquartered in Hong Kong that is introducing some transparency by allowing users to compare and book different options -- says many firms may take two or three days to quote a price for taking an air-freight pallet or a shipping container from A to B. Forwarders are also often unable or unwilling to say whether the goods will get from China to Europe in one month or two. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (93): US forces in Japan were hastily thrown into fight in Korea, but they were poorly trained and equipped, and were driven steadily back. The Americans and South Koreans were forced into a defensive perimeter around the city of Pusan, in the southeast corridor of the country. The line held; the North Korean offensive had largely run out of steam, while supplies and troops poured into the Pusan perimeter to reinforce the defense.
The battle theater commander, General Douglas MacArthur, then organized an amphibious landing at Inchon, the port for Seoul, which took place on 15 September 1950. MacArthur's forces drove across the peninsula, while his forces also broke out of the Pusan perimeter. Survivors of the North Korean Army fell back in haste across the 38th parallel. Truman approved the decision to pursue them north to the Yalu River boundary with China. The war would be fought to a win.
Mao Zedong's government issued warnings that China would not tolerate a hostile force on its border; the warnings were ignored, the Americans not taking China seriously as a military force. In November 1950, as UN forces approached the Yalu River, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) attacked, with UN forces tumbling back towards the 38th parallel. Mao wanted to drive south across the parallel and overrun South Korea, but PLA forces gradually ran out of steam in turn, suffering severe losses and outrunning their supply lines. UN resistance stiffened, with savage fighting into early 1951 resulting in a static war -- the PLA and the UN fighting from largely fixed lines of fortifications, as with the First World War.
MacArthur wanted to attack Chinese staging bases north of the Yalu, but Truman didn't want a wider war; he didn't want to get bogged down in China, much less get into a fight with the Soviet Union -- which was supplying weapons to the Chinese, including MiG jet fighter planes, flown by Red Air Force pilots. He discussed using the atomic bomb in Korea and decided against it.
MacArthur did not take NO for an answer, and so passed his "victory plan" on to allies in Congress, who leaked it to the press. That was grand insubordination, all the more so because it sabotaged Truman's efforts to bring about a settlement of the conflict. On 11 April 1951, Truman, under his authority as commander-in-chief, sacked MacArthur. The general was popular with Republicans, and firing him caused Truman's shaky public approval ratings to plummet; Republicans in Congress called for his impeachment. MacArthur came back home to a triumphant welcome from his admirers in Congress. Nonetheless, he stayed fired, and the general's attempts to promote a more aggressive war in Korea went nowhere. Nobody else wanted a wider war either. In time, the consensus would be that Truman had done the right thing. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Factbox: Global Efforts To Develop Vaccines, Drugs To Fight The Coronavirus", 19 February 2020), the emerging global coronavirus pandemic has killed thousands of people, leaving researchers scrambling to come up with a response.
The most important long-term effort is to develop a vaccine. China released the genome of the virus, formally designated COVID-19, early on, allowing researchers to get a quick start on the work. A dozen or so different vaccine projects are underway around the world -- but given the challenges of test and qualification, not to mention mass production, a vaccine won't be available until well into 2021, or even into 2022.
Over the short term the focus is on treatments, with researchers repurposing existing drugs in hope of finding something that works against the new virus. BioCryst Pharmaceuticals' Galidesivir works by interfering with a virus' ability to replicate. It has shown promise against a number of viruses, including coronaviruses, and has proven safe in healthy volunteers. The work is backed by the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is developing REGN3048-3051, a combination of two antibodies, produced by from immunized mice that have been genetically modified to produce "humanized" antibodies. The work expands on Regeneron's partnership with the US Department & Health and Human Services for a related coronavirus. Regeneron will test its drug in humans through the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Gilead Sciences Inc's remdesivir is an antiviral that didn't work on Ebola, but has shown promise in monkeys against a related coronavirus. Gilead has partnered with Chinese researchers to conduct two clinical trials, under the coordination of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing. The studies are expected to be completed in April. Other efforts include:
Chinese scientists are also treating patients with blood from COVID-19 survivors, an older technique that has been used to fight rabies, diphtheria and other infections. A small batch of patients has shown significant improvement with the treatment, with no severe side effects.
ED: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the emergence of antiviral drugs. That's one of the silver linings of the HIV pandemic; before HIV, we had few drugs that had any effectiveness against viruses. Although not much has been said about it, there's also the possibility of drugs being used for "pre-exposure prophylaxis (PREP)", as is done with HIV, with people at risk taking drugs to treat COVID-19 before it can take hold. I suspect chloroquine phosphate is being evaluated with an eye towards PREP, since it is used as a guard against malaria.
* According to an article from NATURE.com ("World's Most Powerful Solar Telescope Is Up And Running" by Alexandra Witze, 29 January 2020), the 4-meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (IST), the most capable instrument of its type, is now in operation. First light was in December 2019, though the facility won't be fully operational until June 2020.
The IST is sited at the Haleakala [Mountain] Observatory on the Hawaiian island of Maui. It was two decades in the making, with construction from 2012, and cost $344 million USD. It upstages the previous biggest solar telescope, a 1.6-meter instrument at Big Bear Solar Observatory in southern California. The IST features five different instruments on a turntable. The IST can image details on the Sun as small as 35 kilometers (22 miles) across, and will also perform detailed magnetic field measurements of the Sun.
Since solar observations tend to produce a great deal of heat, the observatory features a powerful cooling support system. European astronomers are now planning their own 4-meter solar telescope, to be sited in the Canary Islands.
* As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Woman Is First To Receive Cornea Made From 'Reprogrammed' Stem Cells", 2 September 2019), Japanese opthamologist Nishida Kouji of Osaka University has used "induced pluripotent stem (IPS)" cells to repair a patient's cornea -- the transparent layer that covers and protects the eye.
The patient, a woman, had a disease that degraded her cornea, impairing her vision, and could have ultimately rendered her blind. Traditionally, the affliction was treated by cornea transplants from donors who donated their bodies, but that's not a reliable source of supply. Nishida's team instead created sheets of corneal cells from IPS cells. The IPS cells were produced by reprogramming adult skin cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state from which they could transform into other cell types, such as corneal cells.
Nishida said that the woman's cornea remained clear, and her vision had improved a month after the operation. Japan has been a leader in approving the clinical use of iPS cells, which were discovered by stem-cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, who won a Nobel Prize for the work. Japanese physicians have also used iPS cells to treat spinal cord injury, Parkinson's disease and another eye disease. Nishida is planning other corneal operations, and expects the procedure to be in clinical use by the middle of the next decade.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* EYES OF THE DEEP: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("In The Deep, Dark Ocean Fish Have Evolved Superpowered Vision" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 9 May 2019), it is well-known that fish and other organisms living in deep case environments will lose the use of their eyes, since they're useless in the permanent darkness. Now researchers have found that fish that live in the dark depths of the ocean have instead acquired super-vision, an ability to spot the faint glow and twinkle given off by other creatures. They owe this power to an extraordinary increase in the number of genes for rod opsins -- retinal proteins that detect dim light -- with the fish generating opsins that can capture every scarce photon at multiple wavelengths.
Researchers had earlier observed that the deeper a fish lives, the simpler its visual system is, and had assumed that the trend would continue to the bottom of the sea. However, in recent years, researchers have realized there is light in the depths, provided by the creatures that live there, a faint bioluminescence from flashing shrimp, octopus, bacteria, and fish. The human eye can pick it up.
To learn how fish can see it, a team led by evolutionary biologist Walter Salzburger from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied deep-sea fishes' opsin proteins. The researchers hunted for opsin genes in 101 fish including seven Atlantic Ocean deep-sea fish whose genomes they fully sequenced. Most fish have one or two RH1 opsins, like many other vertebrates, but four of the deep-sea species stood out. Those fish -- the lantern-fish, a tube-eye fish, and two spinyfins -- all had at least five RH1 genes, while one, the silver spinyfin (Diretmus argenteus), had 38. No vertebrate has that many.
To make sure the extra genes weren't just nonfunctional duplicates, the team measured gene activity in 36 species, including specimens of 11 deep-sea fish. Multiple RH1 genes were active in the deep-sea species, and the total was 14 in an adult silver spinyfin, which lives down to 2,000 meters. Salzberger says: "At first it seems paradoxical -- this is where there's the least amount of light,"
Different opsins may be sensitive to different wavelengths of light; researchers can predict the wavelengths that an opsin protein is most sensitive to from its amino acid sequence. The deep-sea fish had a total of 24 mutations that alter the function of their RH1 proteins, fine-tuning each to see a narrow range of blue and green wavelengths, which are the colors of bioluminescence. The silver spinyfin, it appears, has exquisite color vision, but within a limited range.
According to Gil Rosenthal, a behavioral ecologist at Texas A&M University in College Station: "Some of these opsins might be tuned to detect particular bioluminescent signals associated with food, danger, or social interactions,"
The four deep-sea species belong to three different branches of the fish family tree, showing that that their super-vision evolved repeatedly. The large number of different opsins also help explain the unusual anatomy of the spinyfin retina. Some of its rod cells are much longer than normal, and many are stacked one on top of another, instead of being arranged in a single layer. The enlarged cells and the stacking help ensure more incoming photons are detected -- but it also appears that the larger cells may have pick up different wavelengths of light.
Given that these fish can only survive in the deep sea, it is problematic to test their vision. That remains an ambitious future project. However, it now seems highly probable that the dark deeps of the sea are not dark at all to these fish, that the faint bioluminescence in the depths could be as vivid and varied as the bright surface world.
* A related article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This Shrimplike Creature Makes Aluminum Armor To Survive The Deep Sea's Crushing Pressure" by Rachel Fritts, 30 April 2019) discusses another organism with adaptations to the deep sea.
Amphipods are shrimplike crustaceans. Most of them can't survive below 4,500 meters (14,750 feet), because of crushing pressures and low temperature -- as well as higher acidity that causes the calcium carbonate in their exoskeletons to dissolve. Now researchers have discovered a species of amphipod named Hirondellea gigas that is armor-plated to survive the deeps.
Researchers first came across H. gigas specimens found at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, more than 10,000 meters (33,000 feet) below the surface of the ocean. They found that this extreme amphipod covers itself with a layer of aluminum hydroxide gel.
Aluminum hydroxide isn't abundant in ocean water itself, but it is common in ocean sediments. To determine how the creature acquired the aluminum hydroxide, the researchers isolated its gut chemicals, then exposed them to sediments from the Challenger Deep. The chemicals freed up aluminum ions, which reacted with seawater to produce the gel. The armor not only provides reinforcement against pressure, it prevents the acidic seawater from eating away at the amphipod's exoskeleton.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* LOCKHEED MARTIN SST: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Lockheed Martin Floats Supersonic Airliner Concept" by Guy Norris, 19 June 2019) the supersonic transport (SST) has been a "technology of the future", since its inception in the 1960s. While SSTs, like the Anglo-French Concorde, were built and flown, they proved economically impractical -- and were also afflicted by environmental concerns, including sonic booms.
As of late, there has been a resurgence of interest in SSTs, one example being a concept for a Mach 1.8 SST that could carry up to 40 passengers on trans-Pacific routes. The company believes the SST could be economically operated, while defeating the problems of sonic boom and airport noise that did much to cripple the Concorde. The LMSST design leverages off new enabling technologies in design, propulsion, aerodynamics and systems that previously were not available or mature.
The LMSST leverages off the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration's (NASA) X-59 Quiet SST (QueSST) design for a low-boom demonstrator, for which Lockheed Martin has been the prime contractor. The X-59 won't fly until 2021, but X-59 design work has established a baseline for new SST technology. Michael Buonanno, Lockheed Martin air vehicle design lead for X-59, comments:
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We now have the technology to dramatically reduce the impact of those sonic booms that were completely unacceptable from the Concorde. [With the X-59] we are shifting the whole design space and proving we can shape sonic booms to make them dramatically quieter. Leveraging data from X-59, regulators may replace the current boom with standards that future manufacturers of supersonic airliners could design to. So, this could really usher in a new age of commercial transportation.
END QUOTE
The LMSST design is 68.6 meters (225 feet) long, with a wingspan of 22.2 meters (73 feet), making it longer than the Concorde, but narrower in span. Its proportions are much different from those of the Concorde, the LMSST featuring a nose almost a third of the length, with a passenger cabin over a third of the length. It is powered by twin tail-mounted non-afterburning engines, rated at 119.6 kN (12,195 kgp / 40,000 lbf) thrust each, with the engines mounted between V-tails.
To validate the economic feasibility of the design, Lockheed Martin conducted a rigorous SST market analysis, which established a set of basic requirements for range, take-off field length, passenger capacity, sonic-boom loudness at the start of cruise, over water and overland cruise Mach number, and airport noise. These were each given minimum threshold values, below which the concept would not be viable, along with goals for optimum performance.
The threshold range was set at 7,770 kilometers (4,825 miles / 4,200 NMI), which would allow the aircraft to fly between most major city pairs, while the objective range was set at 9,805 kilometers (6,090 miles / 5,300 NMI). Target take-off field length is less than 3,200 meters (10,500 feet), though under 2,895 meters (9,500 feet) is preferred, with passenger capacity being 40 seats, and the minimum economically feasible number of seats being 19.
Specified noise level -- both for sonic boom and for airport noise -- will be slightly greater than the X-59's, but much less than the Concorde's. For overland cruise Mach number, Lockheed's design is optimized for Mach 1.7 or higher; going slower than Mach 1.6 would undermine aircraft utilization and cruise efficiency. For flight over water, Mach 1.7 or greater is preferred, but speeds above Mach 1.8 begin to get challenging on sonic boom loudness.
The airframe's "shaped boom" configuration will reduce noise, as will engines with optimized inlets, plugs, and fan blades, while its "natural laminar flow" wing will provide supersonic cruise efficiency. Since the long nose of the LMSST will obscure forward vision, a high-definition camera and display system, being developed by NASA for the X-59, will be used to allow the aircrew to see where they're going. There's no commitment to building the LMSST yet; Lockheed Martin is simply exploring the technology, to see where it goes.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Cremation Has Replaced Traditional Burials" by Sandee LaMottem 23 January 2020), burials are an American tradition -- but cremation became the top choice in 2015, and continues to grow. According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), more than half of all Americans who die in 2020 will be cremated, and NFDA predicts that the ratio will approach 80% by 2040.
Fading of religious restrictions is a factor, but cost is a big issue. In 2016, the cost of a funeral was $8,000 USD, and it continues to grow. Even if people have plenty of money, they don't see any point to going to considerable expense after they're dead. The average cost of a cremation in 2016 was $2,400 USD. Mike Nicodemus, licensed funeral director and vice president of cremation services for the NFDA, says:
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They've had family and friends that have passed away and have liked what they've seen at a memorial service, Then they tell their family: "I don't want all this funeral stuff. Just have me cremated and have a simple service somewhere."
END QUOTE
People are becoming increasingly imaginative in handling the ashes:
Other options include integrating the ash with fireworks; sequestering it in a stuffed toy; mixed with concrete in an artificial reef; or even blasted into orbit. Most of the time, however, people just want their ashes scattered in some pleasant place.
* My sentiments exactly. I have instructed my niece and nephew -- my heirs -- to handle my funeral as cheaply as possible. It's not like it's going to concern me. Speaking of my niece and nephew, I communicate with them regularly, and much of that involves money ... from me to them, it's a mercenary sort of relationship. I like it that way. It can involve communications of vital information that has to be kept secret, and that means encrypted communications.
I searched around online and found out about the "Signal" app from the Signal Foundation, an open-source group. It's free, and I downloaded it to my two Android phones. It's easy to use, it's just a messenger app, I just plug in a name or a phone number and write a message. The message ends up in the Signal app on the remote end; if there isn't a Signal app on the remote end, I believe I get an error message back. I have the option of sending an invitation to install Signal, along with a link to download the app. It is possible to send text messages with Signal, but it seems like a bad idea, leading to possible confusion over whether a message that's sent is encrypted or not. I leave that setting OFF.
My only problem was trying to figure out how to set up a phone number; I didn't see an option for it in Signal. I finally realized, duh, that I should use the Contacts app on the phone. Samsung has its own Contacts app, but for consistency I downloaded the Google Contacts app, which complements the Google Contacts webpage I use on my PC. That figured out, I ran into another problem, in that my nephew had changed his phone number -- but when I updated his contact information, the old phone number was still listed,
After getting a bit flustered in searching for a way to delete it, I finally decided to make a new Contacts entry with a dummy name, fill out my nephew's information in the new entry, delete his old entry, and change the dummy name to the proper one. Clumsy, but it worked. One fun thing was that I had both smartphones running the Contacts app at the same time, just to see how the one I wasn't adjusting reacted. It magically followed right along with the one I was adjusting.
I found out there was a Signal app for Windows, too, and downloaded it. I haven't played with it yet, but it should be straightforward -- and I'd certainly prefer to use a proper keyboard, instead of punching at a smartphone screen.
* My local McDonald's began a renovation about a month ago; I could still get a burger, but I had to use the drive-through. That annoyed me, I hate to just sit in my car, using up fuel on idle and going nowhere. Fortunately, that didn't last long, with the remodel done in about four weeks. When I went up to the updated building, I thought to myself: "Touchscreen ordering!" Yep, just as I expected. Touchscreen ordering in fast-food joints is nothing all that new, but it's not something I'm used to.
I really like it, my only difficulty being figuring out the protocol -- which wasn't a big problem, it just took a little fumbling. For a time, I paid cash to a worker after ordering, but that was clumsy, and I decided to start paying with a charge card at the kiosk. Normally, I don't like to charge petty expenses because I have to log them against my checking account, but I don't go to McDonald's all that often, and it's less difficulty overall than paying at the counter.
The kiosks also support mobile money, so I got to thinking about using Google Pay instead of a charge card. When I found out that Google Pay could transfer funds from Paypal, I was really intrigued: I could load up my Paypal account with a few hundred dollars periodically, and perform petty charges against it, without much worry about balancing it.
Alas, getting Google Pay to work on my smartphones was not trivial. That's what happens when I do something new and unfamiliar, going from one petty obstacle to the next. One was that my older smartphone doesn't have a near-field communications interface -- okay, duh again, it won't work. More of a problem was validating my charge card and Paypal, which was troublesome. I'm not done yet, but I'm over the worst. At least I think I am. [ED: I wasn't.]
* Considering my purchase of a new Honda Fit / Jazz last month: somewhat to my surprise -- though it shouldn't have been -- I started to get a litter of spam in my postal box, for example trying to sell me an extended warranty. Extended warranties are nonsense in the first place, just overpriced insurance; it is hard to understand why anyone would think to get an extended warranty from fly-by-night operations. They push a number of different scams. I'm not working too hard to figure out what they are, I just toss the mails now.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE