* 22 entries including: US Constitution (series), COVID-19 economic challenge (series), COVID-19 menace (series), internet of things (series), deadly dark matter, social media and moderation, hybrid simulations, Africa solar village, & artificial chloroplasts.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JUNE 2020: If things seemed bad in the USA in May, the pain went up another notch in June. The big thing was that, on 25 May 2020, a black man named George Floyd of Minneapolis died under more than merely suspicious circumstances after being apprehended by police. The death of Floyd led to a wave of demonstrations across America -- accompanied by out-of-control rioting that resulted in massive damage.
The rioting was not in the main by the protesters, instead being performed by malicious actors exploiting the disorder. It seems that the rioters included opportunistic looters and vandals; gangsters engaged in organized looting; Leftist terrorists, known as the "Antifa" for "anti-Fascists"; and white supremacist terrorists. Thousands were arrested, with the authorities attempting to sort them out and determine if people were coordinating the attacks. The protests then became more peaceful, in part because night protests stopped; in part because protesters began to police their ranks better, jumping on people who broke windows and otherwise acted up.
There remained worries about COVID-19 spreading through the protests -- though surprisingly, over the remainder of the month, nothing much happened on that front. The protesters were generally masked and in the open air, where the virus doesn't spread so easily -- while the number of people in them was much less than the number of people who decided to stay home and out of trouble.
In response to the unrest, on 1 June President Donald Trump decided to make a gesture of toughness, leaving the White House to visit an Episcopalian church that had been damaged during the riots. The event was a fiasco. To make way for the president, peaceful protests in Lafayette Square were cleared out by force, with the president finally having his picture taken in the church, looking like a wax figure, awkwardly holding a bible.
Criticisms were loud and angry, all the more so because Trump had been called governors "weak" in their response to the protests, saying the protesters needed to be "dominated", and threatening to send military forces into the states. That was going way too far. Defense Secretary Mark Esper seemed to back up the president at first -- but then emphatically said that he did not favor sending troops into the states, much to the annoyance of the White House.
Senior military brass did not like the idea of bullying American citizens -- it would severely damage the military's reputation. Marine General Jim Mattis, once Trump's defense secretary, did not want to criticize a sitting president, but finally had enough, issuing a statement titled "In Union There Is Strength":
BEGIN QUOTE:
I have watched this week's unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words "Equal Justice Under Law" are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand -- one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values -- our values as people and our values as a nation.
When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a "battlespace" that our uniformed military is called upon to "dominate." At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington DC, sets up a conflict-a false conflict- between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that "America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat." We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that "The Nazi slogan for destroying us...was 'Divide and Conquer.' Our American answer is 'In Union there is Strength.'" We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis-confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people -- does not even pretend to try; instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln's "better angels," and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path -- which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals -- will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.
END QUOTE
Other retired military brass joined in on the condemnation. The US military has long scrupulously obeyed Trump, even when they didn't like it, but he threatened to corrupt the military to his own personal use.
* Trump's presidency is now falling down a very long flight of stairs. Uber-hawk John Bolton, previously Trump's national security advisor, published a book titled THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED that was most unflattering to Trump. The Trump Administration tried to block publication of the book, but the courts didn't go along. Ironically, the book was more damaging to Bolton than to Trump, since it didn't say anything bad about Trump that wasn't basically already known -- while Bolton came across as, to put it simply, a jerk.
Bolton rationalized his refusal to testify in the impeachment trial by bad-mouthing the Democrats, calling them foolish for taking on an impeachment that was doomed to fail, while also saying that Trump needed to be impeached. Of course, the Democrats were compelled to try to impeach Trump, they had no choice; and the fault in the matter was the Republicans, who gave Trump a green light to do whatever he pleased. The Democrats have no cause to regret their actions, while the Republicans discredited themselves over the longer run. Bolton also declared that re-electing Trump would be a disaster, but then said he would not vote for Joe Biden. One might hope Bolton is given his come-uppance eventually; but if not, he can at least be forgotten as the irrelevance he is.
America continues to lurch painfully towards the election in November, burdened by a medical crisis, a social crisis, and a political crisis. Trump's re-election campaign is in chaos, attempts to smear Joe Biden don't work -- Tara Reade, who implausibly accused him of sexual assault, has effectively disappeared -- while everything is going wrong for Trump. Over protests, Trump conducted a campaign rally in Tulsa OK on 20 June, proudly boasting that a million had signed up to attend. The local fire marshal said the headcount was only 6,200, the count having been inflated by pranksters from the TikTok video site, who signed up and forgot about it. It's too early to know how much contagion there was at the rally.
There is little reason to fear the outcome of the election; Trump is tanking dramatically in the polls. Maybe half of those who voted for him in 2016 didn't idolize him, they just didn't like Hillary Clinton, and now Trump is bleeding those voters. The worry is that the chaos will take over, throwing the USA into convulsions. The reassurance is that the chaos is rooted to some considerable degree in Trump, and he will pass. America will return to normalcy, if not the same normalcy as before, and we will wonder how the country could have ever been reduced to such turmoil by such a person.
The election is four months away. In the moment, America's health crisis is getting worse, with COVID-19 rates soaring in states that were lax on dealing with the pandemic. The problem is rooted in a "resistance movement" of sorts that refuses to wear masks and proclaims the pandemic is a hoax, created by the Liberals working with the Chinese. They are taking their cue from Trump, who refuses to appear in public with a mask and tries to dismiss the pandemic -- while making sure that extraordinary measures are taken behind the scenes to protect himself from the virus. July is going to worse than June; August will either see a change in national mindset, or a further progression downward. [ED: Things continued to stumble along until after Trump left office.]
BACK_TO_TOP* THE COVID-19 MENACE (2): The assault of SARS-CoV-2 on the lungs is not necessarily a major threat. Some COVID-19 patients recover, in some cases with no more support than oxygen breathed in through nasal prongs.
Others don't fare so well -- sometimes deteriorating, often very suddenly, developing a condition known as "acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)". Oxygen levels in their blood fall, and they find it ever harder to breath. Their lungs, when scanned by X-rays and computerized tomography, prove to be riddled with white opacities where black space-air-should be. These patients usually end up on ventilators, and often die. Autopsies show their alveoli became stuffed with fluid, white blood cells, mucus, and the detritus of destroyed lung cells.
Some clinicians suspect the driving force in many seriously ill patients' declines is a disastrous overreaction of the immune system called a "cytokine storm," which other viral infections are known to set off. Cytokines are chemical signaling molecules that guide a healthy immune response; but in a cytokine storm, levels of certain cytokines soar far beyond what's needed, and immune cells start to attack healthy tissues. Blood vessels leak, blood pressure drops, clots form, and catastrophic organ failure can ensue.
Some studies have shown elevated levels of these inflammation-inducing cytokines in the blood of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Jamie Garfield -- a pulmonologist who cares for COVID-19 patients at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia -- says: "The real morbidity and mortality of this disease is probably driven by this out-of-proportion inflammatory response to the virus."
Others are not convinced. Joseph Levitt -- a pulmonary critical care physician at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California -- replies: "There seems to have been a quick move to associate COVID-19 with these hyperinflammatory states. I haven't really seen convincing data that that is the case." A number of drugs that suppress a cytokine storm are in clinical trials, but Levitt worries they may end up weakening the immune response needed to fight the virus.
Other scientists are investigating a different organ system that they say is driving some patients' rapid deterioration: the heart and blood vessels. In Brescia, Italy, a 53-year-old woman walked into the emergency room of her local hospital with all the classic symptoms of a heart attack, including a menacing electrocardiogram and high levels of a blood marker suggesting damaged cardiac muscles. More tests showed cardiac swelling and scarring, and weak heart function. However, when doctors injected dye in her coronary arteries to find the blockage normally associated with a heart attack, they came up with nothing. Further investigation revealed the woman was infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Nobody understands how the virus attacks the heart and blood vessels, but there's no shortage of reports that show that it often happens. One research paper documented heart damage in nearly 20% of patients out of 416 hospitalized for COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. In another Wuhan study, 44% of 138 hospitalized patients had heart arrhythmias.
The problem seems to extend to the blood itself. Another paper reported that among 184 COVID-19 patients in a Dutch ICU, 38% had blood that clotted abnormally, and almost a third already had clots. Blood clots can break apart and end up in the lungs, blocking vital arteries -- a condition known as "pulmonary embolism", which has reportedly killed COVID-19 patients. Clots from arteries can also lodge in the brain, causing stroke. Behnood Bikdeli -- a cardiovascular medicine fellow at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City -- says: "The more we look, the more likely it becomes that blood clots are a major player in the disease severity and mortality from COVID-19." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (107): As a significant footnote to the actions of the Johnson Administration in 1964, the Warren Court delivered a landmark judgement in that year in the case of REYNOLDS V. SIMS, which redrew America's legislative map. The case was rooted in the apportionment of electoral districts in states. Some states worked to ensure their electoral districts had roughly equal populations, while others did not. In Nevada, for example, the populations of the districts ranged from less than 600 persons, to about 127,000 -- an apportionment ratio of over 200 to 1.
The case was brought by a group of voters of Jefferson County, Alabama, against the state government. Alabama, at the time, had a worst apportionment ratio of over 40 to 1. The case migrated up through the Federal District Courts to SCOTUS.
In the 1962 judgement in the case of BAKER V. CARR, the Supreme Court had determined the Federal judiciary could rule on the sizes of legislative districts. By 1964, SCOTUS was confronted with a set of 15 cases on apportionment, with REYNOLDS V. SIMS becoming the lead case. SCOTUS judged 8 to 1 to make "one person one vote" the law of the land, based on the 14th Amendment declaration that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers." Each citizen was to have equal weight in determining the outcome of state elections. Earl Warren, writing for the majority, said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen. The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
END QUOTE
There was considerable resistance against the SCOTUS decision, but the states all quickly fell in line anyway, with legislative districts redrawn across the USA over the next few years. It was a quiet revolution, somewhat overshadowed by other civil rights actions of the time.
LBJ had his worries about running for president in 1964, but the civil rights act gave him more confidence, as did his intervention to resolve a labor dispute in the railroad industry. The election of 1964 pitted him against Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who ran on a platform of Right Republicanism that rejected the progressivism of Eisenhower.
Goldwater, however, also rejected the extreme Rightism that had emerged in the postwar period, most notably represented by the vehemently anti-Communist John Birch Society, and indirectly backed by Libertarian thinkers, such as Ayn Rand, who had emerged in that same timeframe. LBJ still managed to paint Goldwater as an extremist -- with much help from Goldwater's overheated rhetoric -- and defeated him handily, the Democrats also obtaining solid majorities in both houses of Congress. The Right Republicans retrenched for later efforts. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: The toylike two-seat Robinson R22 piston-powered helicopter has been around for three decades, being seen as a good value for its low cost. As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("UAVOS Advances Unmanned VTOL UAV Developments" by Kelvin Wong, 31 January 2020), the UAVOS company -- an international firm with headquarters in Hong Kong -- has now introduced a drone version of the R22.
The UAVOS "UVH R22" is immediately recognizable as an R22, but with its windows blanked out. It is of conventional main-tail rotor configuration, both main and tail rotors having two blades, and with skid landing gear. It is powered by a 4-cylinder Lycoming O-320-A2B flat-four air-cooled engine that produces up to 92 kW (124 HP). It can cruise and sprint at speeds of up to 160 and 189 KPH (100 and 117 MPH) respectively, and has a service ceiling of 4,200 meters (13,780 feet).
The drone helicopter has a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 635 kilograms (1,400) pounds; measures 8.8 meters long and 2.7 meters in height (28.9 x 8.8 feet), and has a main rotor diameter of 7.7 meters (25.25 feet). It has a 270-liter (71.25 US gallon) fuel tank, giving it an operational range of 1,020 kilometers (635 MPH) or a flight endurance of up to six hours. It can operate from a patch of level ground at least 15 x 15 meters (50 x 50 feet) in size; it has automated take-off and landing capability.
The UVH R22 can carry 40 kilograms (88 pounds) when flying with a full fuel load. Possible sensor payloads include a light detection and ranging (LIDAR), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), electro-optical imagers, or scientific measurement devices. Initial flight of the first UVH R22 prototype was in April 2019, at Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology.
The machine appears to be targeted at civil users, in applications such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, carrying food, fuel, water, supplies, medicine, communications gear, and electrical power generators. Other possible duties include agricultural applications; radio relay; video surveillance; and airborne data collection, such as meteorology, hydrology, and earth monitoring.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("USAF Seeks To Modify Tanker-Transport Fleet Into Command And Control Nodes" by Gareth Jennings, 4 February 2020), the US Air Force operates a fleet of Boeing KC-135R and KC-46A tanker-transports to support the reach of American air power.
The USAF now plans to fit its fleet of tanker-transport aircraft with beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) communications pods, so the aircraft can act as command and control (C2) nodes in battle spaces. The request for information (RFI) issued to the aerospace industry said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The focus of this RFI is on the identification of existing technologies and the near- to long-term development potential for the next generation of BLOS communication systems that can be [housed] within a wing-mounted pod on tanker platforms, and capable of providing voice, video, and data communications capabilities.
BLOS communication systems that exist today include tropospheric scatter and high frequency systems as well as various tethered and untethered unmanned aerial vehicles that act as relays. The government is interested in systems that could provide the best redundancy to satellite communications (SATCOM) systems in terms of performance characteristics. The response should address aspects such as operating distance of each technology, reliability, throughput, latency, time of day, and weather dependence.
END QUOTE
No schedule for the pods, or how many will be obtained, is available yet. The USAF currently fields 396 KC-135Rs, and is in the process of obtaining up to 179 KC-46As.
* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("DARPA Seeks Active Flow Control Aircraft" by Graham Warwick, 30 July 2019), the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is initiating a program to build and fly an aircraft with no flight-control surfaces, instead being flown by "active flow control (AFC)" technologies.
A NATO task group that investigated AFC control for tail-less unpiloted combat air vehicles (UCAV) concluded the technology is "feasible and reasonable" for flight control. Magma, an unmanned aircraft designed by the University of Manchester and BAE Systems in the UK under the NATO effort, investigated AFC technologies during flights in April from Llanbedr, Wales. Magma is based on an existing Boeing UCAV design.
The flights of the flying-wing Magma drone demonstrated wing circulation control using supersonic blowing through narrow slots in the trailing edge, and fluidic thrust vectoring for pitch control using distributed air jets in the engine exhaust nozzle. The DARPA effort is named "Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE)"; if funded, will begin in 2020. DARPA says that AFC offers: "Elimination of moving control surfaces for stability and control, [improved] take-off and landing performance, high-lift flight, thick airfoil efficiency, and enhanced high-altitude performance."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DEADLY DARK MATTER? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("If This Type Of Dark Matter Existed, People Would Be Dying Of Unexplained Gunshot Wounds" by Juanita Bawagan, 19 July 2019), it is well-known that the Universe is more massive than can be accounted for by visible matter. Exactly what this mysterious unaccounted "dark matter" really is remains a subject of investigation: scientists know it's there, they just don't know what it is.
There have been a number of theories to explain dark matter, one being "weakly interactive massive particles (WIMP)". As the name indicates, WIMPs are massive, but they rarely interact with normal matter. Nobody has detected WIMPs yet. A variation on WIMPs, known as "macros" would be in the form of even heavier particles. They would be rarer than WIMPs, but their collisions with ordinary matter would be violent and obvious.
Glenn Starkman and Jagjit Singh Sidhu -- theoretical physicists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland OH -- were searching for traces of macros in granite slabs. In the course of their investigation, Robert Scherrer -- a collaborator, a theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN -- made a wild suggestion: "Why can't you just use humans as a detector? The energies you're talking about, these things would probably at best maim a person, at worst kill a person."
The two physicists constructed a model that suggested being hit with an interacting macro would be like being shot with a 0.22-caliber rifle bullet. Such incidents would take place every infrequent now and then -- but a literature search turned up no persuasive reports of any mysterious "shootings" in the US and Canada. Scherrer adds that this finding doesn't rule out even heavier particles, which would interact too rarely to be spotted, while other variants on the theme wouldn't have such violent interactions.
Other researchers are engaged in the hunt for heavy particles, for example Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Freese has searched for traces of WIMPs in ancient minerals; she points out that macros would leave clear traces in rock, melting a cylindrical path that would quickly resolidify into new forms. When light-colored granite is melted, for example, the melted rock would harden as a channel of dark obsidian-like stone.
The Case Western Reserve researchers are not continuing their human death hunt, instead focusing on monuments, countertops, and graveyards for dark, elliptical patches that could be signs of macros hitting granite slabs. They plan to identify characteristics for a range of macros and then train people to look for the marks on granite surfaces around the world. This would be a less morbid approach to using humans as particle detectors.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* TWITTER TROUBLE: As discussed by an article from GIZMODO.com ("Trump's Executive Order on Social Media Is the Worst Kind of Bullshit" by Tom McKay, 27 May 2020), in late May, US President Donald Trump posted a tweet to Twitter, accusing the Democrats of promoting voting by mail in order to commit voter fraud. This is nonsense; some US states have had voting by mail for years, and it's never been troublesome. Although Twitter had previously allowed all postings by Trump to stand, in this case they tacked a fact-check alert to the tweet.
Trump, as usual, threw a tantrum, quickly signing an executive order to task the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with investigating whether tech company moderators harass, shadow ban, and censor conservatives. Trump told reporters: "We're here today to defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history, frankly. A small handful of powerful social media monopolies control the vast portion of all private and public communications in the United States."
OK, this is also nonsense, but it shines light on a problem that will outlive Trump: obtaining a balance between free speech and responsibility on social media. Few want to shut down honest discourse on social media; but not many are comfortable with the way that social media has been used to propagate misinformation. The fact that hostile foreign powers -- read as "Russia" and "China" -- have used social media to attack Western democracies has lent a sharp edge to such concerns.
The key issue in the argument is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996. As its name implies, the CDA was originally intended to censor porn on the internet -- but the courts judged its language too broad, and its effect on internet porn was limited. It was Section 230 that proved of greater significance: it said that social-media firms would not be legally liable for content issued by users on their systems. If somebody releases a vicious and slanderous video on Youtube, Youtube cannot be sued for it. It does require that social-media firms remove material in violation of copyright.
Section 230 was largely rooted in cases involving radio broadcasters and book publishers dating back to the 1930s. Publishers were responsible for the content of the books they published, because they exercised editorial control over it; they could be sued for libel. However, a bookstore owner could not be sued for selling libelous books, since it was not reasonable to assume the owner had read every book.
In the early days of the internet, the courts had decided that a social-media firm was a media outlet, like a bookstore, and so a social-media firm could not be held liable for user content. There was a big catch to that, in that if the firm moderated the content, it was then liable. The result was predictable: pioneering social-media firms stopped moderating content. That led to Section 230 -- which allows internet companies to engage in moderation, even delete content completely off their pages, without being penalized by the legal system.
In other words, social-media firms are given very broad discretion in what they do and do not let people post to their websites. Both political parties tend to complain about Section 230, but revoking Section 230 would be disastrous to the internet economy. For companies like Amazon, user reviews would become a huge liability. A good number of popular websites, like Facebook and Twitter, would have to be shut down.
In essence, Trump's executive order accuses Twitter of violating its terms of service with users through its (alleged) harassment of conservatives. It then -- by some grand leap of logic -- claims this forfeit's Twitter's immunity under Section 230, and orders the FCC to establish strong rules for the moderation of these websites. The FCC would do this without any Congressional oversight. The reality is that, once that was done, trolls would immediately assault every social-media website, pushing the limits and seeking pretexts for lawsuits. The internet social-media industry would promptly collapse. Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, suggests the directive is hot air:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The White House can ask the FCC to initiate the rule-making process, but the FCC [as an independent agency] has the discretion to decline. Further, if the FCC were to provide its opinion about interpreting Section 230, that interpretation would have no legal effect because Congress hasn't given the FCC any authority. As a result, the result of the rulemaking process would be a lovely document that everyone would be free to ignore -- and would likely ignore.
END QUOTE
The executive order also orders the FCC to examine user complaints and take appropriate actions against social-media firms in response -- which the FCC already does to an extent, but not to an extent that pleases Trump. Although FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is friendly to the Trump White House, even he is unlikely to accept such a half-baked order. Daphne Keller, platform regulation director at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, says that the executive order ...
BEGIN QUOTE:
... reads like a stream of consciousness tweetstorm that some poor staffer had to turn into the form of an executive order. The underlying issues it raises are really important, of course: We need an informed public debate about the power of platforms over public discourse. But that's not what the EO is. It isn't reasoned discussion, and for the most part it isn't even lawmaking, because very few of its passages have real legal consequences.
END QUOTE
A final shot in the executive order suggests that Federal agencies not spend advertising dollars on social-media firms that Trump doesn't like. Keller says the executive order is political theater and a deliberate distraction from issues of far greater public consequence, such as the 100,000-plus American deaths from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. However, if it's legally ridiculous, it still serves Trump's agenda to intimidate social-media firms, as we progress through a nasty election season.
It seems to be working to that extent, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly criticizing Twitter for cramping Trump's style. Zuckerberg then ran into intense criticism from Facebook's rank & file, suggesting the unstable state of social-media firms: working on a business model that supports out-of-control fraud and foreign subversion -- while being unable to come up with a better vision, as the politicians ramp up the pressure. Things can't continue as they are.
* ED: As a follow-on to this article, in mid-June House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed to the wild propagation of pandemic misinformation on social media, the speaker saying was strong bipartisan support to "get tough on platforms" relative to COVID-19.
She called on advertisers to "know your power" and put pressure on social media companies over allowing users to spread falsehoods, adding: "We need to send a message to social media executives that you will be held accountable."
Indeed. Anyone who uses Twitter can't avoid posters who spread malicious lies about the pandemic, and most appallingly shrug off the hundreds of thousands of lives it has claimed. Things will have to change. They are very likely to after Trump is gone, since that will eliminate the biggest forcing function driving misinformation on social media.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (1): As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How Does Coronavirus Kill?" by Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Jocelyn Kaiser, & Catherine Matacic, 17 April 2020), the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. While we know the genome of the virus and can describe its structure down to the molecular level, we still don't understand its behavior very well.
Coronaviruses were discovered in the 1960s. They infect both mammals and birds; two variants that infected humans were known up to 2003, these being seen as mostly-harmless viruses that could have mild respiratory or gastro-intestinal symptoms. In 2003, however, the "severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" appeared, also centered on China, which over the course of a half a year infected more than 8,000 people and killed about 800 of them. It caused losses of tens of billions of dollars from disrupted trade and tourism. Two more mild coronaviruses that had been circulating in humans were found after SARS emerged -- and then, in 2012, a sixth exploded onto the scene, named the "Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)", which killed about a third of those infected.
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus to be discovered. Clinicians and pathologists are struggling to figure out exactly what the virus does to its victims. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, it can have destructive effects on other organs, including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain. Cardiologist Harlan Krumholz -- of Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, who is leading multiple efforts to obtain clinical data on COVID-19 -- says that the virus "can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences. Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling."
Understanding what the virus is doing is of course vital to determining proper treatment -- particularly in the roughly 5% of patients who become critically ill. A tendency towards blood clotting has been recently observed that can turn some mild cases into life-threatening emergencies; and there are also concerns that an overactive immune system may play a role in the worst cases. One particularly puzzling observation is that some patients that aren't having any problems breathing still have low blood oxygen levels. Add to that the growing realization that some people seem to have no problem with the virus at all.
Even though hundreds, going on thousands, of papers have been published on COVID-19, nobody is certain of what the virus is doing. It has become frighteningly apparent that the SARS-CoV-2 virus -- as it is formally known -- acts like no other pathogen known to medical science. There is no substitute for laborious, large-scale, and time-consuming clinical trials to figure out what's going on. In the short term, all researchers can do is try to obtain clues from small studies and case reports, often published hastily with little or no peer review.
It is generally known how SARS-CoV-2 infects its victims. When an infected person exhales virus-laden droplets and another person inhales them, the virus enters the nose and throat. It easily takes root in the lining of the nose, researchers have discovered; the cells there are loaded with a cell-surface receptor named "angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)". ACE2 normally regulates blood pressure, and it's common through the body. SARS-CoV-2 targets it, using it to enter and then take over cells, to begin rapid replication.
In the early stages of an infection, the victim may feel fine, but the virus is replicating rapidly, and the victim is shedding large numbers of viruses that can infect others. Some do develop symptoms, such a fever, dry cough, sore throat, loss of smell and taste, or head and body aches. If the immune system doesn't suppress SARS-CoV-2 during this initial phase, the virus then moves down the windpipe to attack the lungs, which is where the trouble starts.
The thinner, remote branches of the lung's respiratory tree end in tiny air sacs known as "alveoli", each lined by a single layer of cells that are also loaded in ACE2 receptors. Under normal circumstances, oxygen passes from the alveoli into the capillaries around them, with the oxygen then carried through the rest of the circulatory system. However, the viral assault disrupts this transfer. White blood cells, providing a first-line defense, release inflammatory molecules known as "chemokines", which in turn call in more immune cells that target and kill virus-infected cells. That leaves a nasty wreckage of pus -- fluid and dead cells -- in its wake. The result is pneumonia, with symptoms such as coughing; fever; and rapid, shallow breathing. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (106): LBJ's War on Poverty was overshadowed by LBJ's civil rights offensive. JFK had attempted to push a civil rights bill through Congress in June 1963, and gone nowhere. Southern congressmen used procedural trickery to prevent the bill from coming to a vote, and held other bills as hostages -- notably the tax reform bill -- to force the administration to give up. Johnson picked up the bill again, enlisting Bobby Kennedy to drive it. Although LBJ and Bobby Kennedy could barely stand each other, LBJ kept him in his administration; one reason was that Bobby Kennedy could take the blame if the effort failed, while Johnson could take the credit if it succeeded.
Johnson had been a congressional insider and was adroit, at getting the bill through Congress. He was a particular master of persuasion, being noted for the "Johnson treatment", which was a peculiar and overbearing mix of charm, bullying, gentle persuasion, and a hard sell. LBJ appealed to the religious sensibility of Americans, with biographer Randall B. Woods writing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
LBJ wrapped white America in a moral straitjacket. How could individuals who fervently, continuously, and overwhelmingly identified themselves with a merciful and just God continue to condone racial discrimination, police brutality, and segregation? Where in the Judeo-Christian ethic was there justification for killing young girls in a church in Alabama, denying an equal education to black children, barring fathers and mothers from competing for jobs that would feed and clothe their families? Was Jim Crow to be America's response to "Godless Communism"?
END QUOTE
Very significantly, LBJ managed to get Republican leader Everett Dirksen to support the bill. The "Civil Rights Act of 1964" was passed in March, with strong majorities in both houses of Congress. It is said that, after signing the bill, LBJ told an aide: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." If he truly said it, he was prophetic.
Nonetheless, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major accomplishment, banning racial discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, other public accommodations, and in programs with Federal funding; desegregated public facilities and public education; and discrimination in voter registration. It left some things to be desired, one thing being that discrimination wasn't banned from private clubs, with "private" not being carefully defined. It also didn't ban voter qualifications, such as literacy tests, only saying that the rules had to be even-handed.
As progress was being made on civil rights, a dark cloud was growing on the horizon, in the form of the war in Vietnam. When John F. Kennedy died, there were 16,000 US military personnel in South Vietnam, supporting the government in the war against North Vietnam. LBJ knew Vietnam was trouble, but he couldn't abandon South Vietnam; at the very least, the Republicans would pillory him for "losing Vietnam".
South Vietnam was crumbling, and Johnson knew that if he did nothing, the fight would be lost. In early August 1964, there was a confrontation between two US destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The facts of the incident remain murky, but in any case, LBJ used the incident to obtain authorization from Congress for an escalated response under the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". Overt air strikes against North Vietnam began, with increasing numbers of troops sent to South Vietnam.
Nobody really knows what JFK would have done about Vietnam had he lived. It seems he was giving thought to pulling out after the 1964 election -- but Johnson had the same advisors Kennedy did, and was under the same pressures. In any case, public response to LBJ's stronger response to North Vietnam was favorable, with almost half of Americans approving, and less than a sixth wanting a settlement and withdrawal. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for May included:
-- 05 MAY 20 / LONG MARCH 5B TEST FLIGHT -- A Long March 5B booster was launched at 1000 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island on its first test flight. The Long March 5B is a human-rated version of the Long March 5 series of boosters, intended for support of China's crewed space program. The booster carried a boilerplate crew capsule. It also carried an experimental secondary payload, meant to test inflatable heat shield re-entry technologies; it malfunctioned during its return to Earth on 6 May.
The Long March 5B's main stage features ten main YF-77 engines, using LOX-LH2 propellants, plus four strapon boosters with two engines each. Total launch thrust is almost 10,700,000 kN (1,090,000 kgp / 2,400,000 lbf). The booster is 53.7 meters (176 feet) tall and has a launch weight of 820 tonnes (900 tons). The Long March 5B differs from the baseline Long March 5 by not having a second stage. It can put 25 tonnes (55,000 pounds) into low Earth orbit. It is intended to launch modules for a future Chinese space station.
This launch also introduced a new payload fairing, which was more than 20.5 meters (67 feet) long and 5.2 meters (17 feet) in diameter. The shroud enclosed a demonstrator for China's next-generation crew capsule, which will eventually replace the country's Shenzhou spacecraft to ferry astronauts to a space station in Earth orbit.
The new capsule design will be capable of carrying astronauts to the moon, and can handle up to six crew members at a time -- more than the three astronauts that can fly on the Shenzhou. In an alternate configuration, the crew capsule could launch and land with three astronauts, plus up to 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of cargo. In addition, the new capsule can be reflown, up to a total of ten flights. With its propulsion and power module, the crew spacecraft is almost 8.8 meters (29 feet) long. It will weigh around 21,600 kilograms (47,600 pounds) fully loaded.
-- 12 MAY 20 / XINGYUN 2-01, 2-02 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0116 UTC (local time - 8) to put into space the first two satellites for China's Xingyun Internet of Things communications and data relay constellation. Each weighed about 95 kilograms (205 pounds). The Xingyun constellation will eventually consist of 80 satellites. The Kuiazhou 1A is a road-mobile, solid-fuel booster, presumably derived from a mobile missile system.
-- 17 MAY 20 / USSSF 7 (OTV 6) -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1314 UTC (local time + 4) to put the USAF "USSF 7" payload into space for the US Space Force. The primary payload was an X-37B / Orbital Test Vehicle spaceplane, on the program's sixth flight. This was the first flight of the X-37B with a new service module attached to the aft end of the spaceplane, providing additional capacity for experiments and payloads.
The launch also carried the "FalconSAT 8" demonstrator satellite from the USAF Academy, with a launch mass of 135 kilograms (300 pounds). The rocket flew in the "501" vehicle configuration with a five-meter fairing, five solid rocket boosters, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.
-- 20 MAY 20 / HTV 9 -- An H2B booster was launched from Tanegashima at 1731 UTC (next day local time - 9) to put the ninth "H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV 9)" AKA "Kounotori (White Stork) 9", an uncrewed freighter, into orbit on an ISS resupply mission. It docked with the ISS five days later. This was the last flight of the H2B and the HTV. They will be replaced by the H3 booster and HTV-X freighter.
-- 22 MAY 20 / EKS 4 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0731 UTC (local time - 4) to put the "EKS 3" missile-launch early warning satellite into orbit. It was designated "Cosmos 2546".
-- 25 MAY 20 / LAUNCHERONE TEST FLIGHT (FAILURE) -- The Virgin Orbit "Cosmic Girl" carrier aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, operating out of the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, performed the first test launch of the "LauncherOne" air-launched booster over the Pacific Ocean at 1850 UTC (local time - 7). It carried a dummy payload, plus a NASA "Starshine" smallsat, being a sphere covered with small mirrors for laser tracking. The first stage ignited, but failed during ascent.
-- 28 MAY 20 / XJS G & H -- -- A Chinese Long March 11 booster was launched from Xichang at 0542 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Xinjishu Shiyan (XJS) G" and "XJS H" demonstrator satellites into orbit. They carried inter-satellite networking links and new ground observation tech.
The satellites were developed by the Shanghai Institute of Microsatellite Innovation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XJS G), and the National University of Defense Technology (XJS H). Previous satellites in the series were launched on 19 February 2020. That mission orbited four satellites, including "Xinjishu Shiyan C" to "F"; XJS C and XJZ D were built by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), XJS E by the Harbin Institute of Technology, and XJS F by DFH Satellite CO LTD of the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST).
This was the ninth launch of the solid-fuel four-stage Long March 11, starting from 2015, including the CZ-11H version launched from a maritime launch platform. This was the first launch of the LM 11 using a payload fairing with a diameter of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet). It also used an improved and more intelligent launch system.
-- 30 MAY 20 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON DEMO 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1922 UTC (local time + 4), carrying a "Crew Dragon" space capsule on its first flight with a crew. The capsule was named "Endeavour", and the crew included NASA astronauts Doug Hurley (3rd space flight), the flight commander, and Bob Behnken (also 3rd space flight). The capsule docked with the ISS Harmony module the next day.
-- 31 MAY 20 / GAOFEN 9-02, HEAD 4 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0853 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 9-02" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. It carried a microwave imaging payload with best resolution of less than a meter, to be used in civil land studies and disaster relief. The "HEAD 4" satellite flew along as a secondary payload.
Gaofen ("High Resolution") is a series of civilian Earth observation satellites developed and launched for the state-sponsored program "China High-definition Earth Observation System (CHEOS)", initiated in 2010. The "Earth Observation System & Data Center" of China National Space Administration (EOSDC-CNSA) is responsible is in charge of CHEOS, with the Gaofen satellites being an element in a comprehensive surveillance network featuring stratosphere airships, and aerial observation platforms.
The Gaofen satellites launched to date have included:
* OTHER SPACE NEWS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Ice-Tracking Space Laser Could Also Map Sea Floor And Monitor Health Of Coral Reefs" by Paul Voosen, 14 April 2020), NASA's ICESat 2 satellite was launched in 2018 -- its primary mission, as its name implies, to map the world's ice sheets with its precision laser altimeter instrument.
To no great surprise, ICESat 2 laser altimeter can do much more than measure ice sheets. Late in 2018, just after coming online in space, ICESat 2 passed over Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, site of 23 nuclear weapons tests. There was no intent to observe the atoll, but when mission scientists inspected the laser altimetry data, they were surprised to see reflections from underwater. Adrian Borsa, a geodesicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, says: "We were not just seeing the atoll. We were seeing this huge reef system underneath it."
In the spring of 2020, mission scientists began a program to use ICESat 2 to map the shallow sea floors along the world's coastlines. The satellite's green laser, probing up to 40 meters (130 feet) into the ocean, will generate bathymetric data that could be "game changing," especially for mapping coral reefs and monitoring their health -- according to Greg Asner, an ecologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Ironically, the shallows off the world's coastlines are very poorly mapped, since survey vessels can't safely cruise in them -- leaving an unknown "white ribbon" around the coastlines on nautical charts.
ICESat 2 splits its laser beam to scan the globe along three parallel tracks, with the scan crossing every spot on Earth four times a year. The laser fires 10,000 times per second, and each shot generates up to 60 reflected photons detected by the satellite's telescope, with the travel time revealing surface height to within millimeters. The result is a torrent of data, trillions of elevation measures. The satellite's capabilities are so impressive that the European Space Agency modified the orbit of its aging radar altimeter satellite, CryoSat 2, so its data could be compared with ICESat 2's more easily.
The ICESat 2 team knew the satellite's green laser would probe deeper into the ocean than the infrared beam of its predecessor, ICESat -- but they assumed only to a depth of a meter or two, which wasn't deep enough to provide useful data. However, the data started coming in to show the laser could see much farther under the sea. Now that the data is proving useful, further work is being performed to factor out the effects of waves, which can reduce the accuracy of the measurements.
Lori Magruder -- a remote sensing scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, who will lead the ICESat 2 bathymetry project -- says that the data will help with coastal navigation; the US Coast Guard and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have already expressed interest. She adds: "There's also a rich opportunity to understand the before and after of natural disasters," including how hurricanes reshape sediments. The data will also capture changes to major features of the shallows, such as mangrove roots or kelp forests, to show environmental changes. It could have considerable use in mapping and monitoring coral reefs.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 CHALLENGE (3): The ultimate solution to the COVID-19 problem is to develop a vaccine and vaccinate most of the world. It doesn't have to be a 100% effective vaccine; even if it's less than perfectly effective, as long as it reduces the rate of passing on infections to less than one per infected person, it will result in "herd immunity", with viral propagation fading out. However, it normally takes the better part of a decade to develop a vaccine, due to the need to conduct trials, and nobody expects a vaccine to be distributed until later in 2021 at earliest.
To speed up a vaccine, Harvard economist Michael Kremer and others advocate government co-funding of research, development, and manufacturing. Vaccine manufacturers can't be expected to bear all the risk. While governments should directly fund development, they can also promise "back-end" compensation, through guaranteed fixed-price purchases of qualified vaccines.
Another way to accelerate development is the use of "challenge trials" of a vaccine, in which experimenters deliberately infect volunteers instead of waiting for subjects to get exposed by chance. A group called "1 Day Sooner" has lined up thousands of young, healthy volunteers who are willing to risk getting sick. The biggest problem with challenge trials is that COVID-19 doesn't bother some healthy people at all, while it kills a few of them as dead as a brick -- and we don't know how to distinguish these two cases yet.
For business, the primary concern is keeping employees and customers safe while getting back up to speed. The anti-maskers do not understand that a business that negligently allows its employees and customers to get sick, even die, will be sued out of business -- litigation is a major consideration in the pandemic.
One scheme is the "quaranteam" -- a small group of people who associate with each other, but keep their distance from other quaranteams. When possible, of course, it's best to keep working from home; the pandemic has been a massive boost to videoconferencing, and it turns out to be surprisingly effective. Jimmy Etheredge, chief executive officer of North America for Accenture PLC, says his consulting organization's productivity metrics were higher in March and April 2020 than in January and February. Of course, a lot of jobs demand a physical presence, but safety procedures can be implemented: it's now common for cashiers to have plastic shields to protect them from customers, while of course face masks are now widespread and proving highly effective at reducing transmission of the disease.
Nonetheless, some businesses are in deep trouble. Nobody's going to get on a cruise ship for the time being, and airline traffic has been brought to a crawl by quarantine and the hazards of travel. Mass gatherings are dangerous now; movie theaters are in an impossible situation, with drive-ins enjoying a resurgence.
A full shutdown has the advantage of clarity, the rules being simple: everyone stays home. However, it cannot be maintained indefinitely, or even for very long. Unfortunately, re-opening is inevitably loaded with ambiguities and confusions. Trump has left the tough decisions to the states, despite tweeting in April that re-opening is "the decision of the President" and later bashing Democratic governors who followed his own administration's guidelines in delaying re-opening.
Police departments are placed in a particularly difficult position, having to enforce rules that are constantly changing as the pandemic itself changes. Monifa Bandele -- senior vice president of MOMSRISING.org, which has protested heavy-handed enforcement of stay-at-home orders in minority neighborhoods -- comments, giving some sympathy to the police: "Police officers are not social workers. They're not homeless outreach coordinators. They're not medical professionals."
Resources need to be provided to support re-opening -- again, trying to go cheap will cost more over the long run -- while both imagination and flexibility need to be applied to solutions. Thinned-out seating in offices and public places and on planes and trains is better than no seating at all. Similarly, why not carefully re-open schools, but tell children who live with their grandparents or have other complications that they'll have to continue learning online? Better some students in the classroom than none. The end of social distancing increases the threat to residents of nursing homes, because it means their staffs will be more exposed to the virus while at home. So why not pay workers extra to live on the premises? The government could help cover the cost.
Money still remains the fundamental issue. At the outset, Republicans in Congress cooperated in passing a huge relief bill -- but though it clearly wasn't enough, then they balked at doing it again. With elections coming up in November, the Republicans are under growing pressure to keep the money flowing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a shrewd politician, has kept up the pressure on them, for example: "It's always interesting to see how much patience some people have with the pain and suffering of other people,"
To dismiss Pelosi's rhetoric as mere posturing would be unwise. Even Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve and a noted deficit hawk, has made it clear that not spending what is necessary now will cost more later, saying in a 13 May speech that "additional fiscal support could be costly but worth it, if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery."
America, unfortunately, is saddled with two problems that most other countries don't have: a chief executive, Trump, who is not merely unwilling but incapable of taking the pandemic seriously; along with a resistance movement, based on blind ignorance and with tendencies toward violence, that has become more than a fringe through the encouragement of Trump. The end result has been to make a difficult situation well more difficult. While Americans fight with each other, the virus follows its evolutionary imperatives, spreading whenever an opening appears, and only too often killing. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* HYBRID SIMULATIONS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("From Models Of Galaxies To Atoms, Simple AI Shortcuts Speed Up Simulations By Billions Of Times" by Matthew Hutson, 12 February 2020), useful simulations of real-world phenomena can demand immense amount of computing power. There are ways to simplify simulations by using algorithmic shortcuts, with such "emulator" systems able to reduce the workload. Now, researchers have demonstrated that how artificial intelligence (AI) tricks can easily produce accurate emulators that can speed up all scientific simulations by billions of times.
A traditional scientific computer simulation might calculate, at each time step, how physical forces affect atoms, clouds, galaxies, or anything else being simulated. AI emulators based on machine learning do not attempt to reproduce nature in detail. If fed with the inputs and outputs of the full simulation, emulators record patterns in the data, to learn to guess what the simulation would do with new inputs. The problem is that creating training data means running the full simulation many times, which is the problem the AI emulator is supposed to evade.
Machine learning is stereotypically based on "neural networks" -- artificial analogues of biological neural networks like the brain. In all kinds of neural networks, there are multiple layers of discrete neurons, each connected to many neurons in input layers, and to many neurons in output layers. The neurons "learn" with experience, increasing the strength of their connections through training to direct input patterns to desired output data.
It is possible to reduce the training burden using a trick called "neural architecture search", which can optimize the connection pattern for a given task. Working from a general neural architecture search developed by computer scientists at Stanford, a research team led by Muhammad Kasim -- a physicist at the University of Oxford who led the study -- developed a derivative named "Deep Emulator Network Search (DENSE)" for emulator systems. DENSE randomly inserts layers of computation between the networks' input and output, and tests and trains the resulting wiring with limited data. If an added layer enhances performance, it's more likely to be included in future variations. Repeating the cycle refines the emulator.
Kasim's team used DENSE to develop emulators for ten simulations, in physics, astronomy, geology, and climate science. One emulated a simulation that models the way soot and other atmospheric aerosols reflect and absorb sunlight, affecting the global climate. The simulation can take a thousand computer-hours to run; an earlier machine learning emulator could work much faster, but it was tricky to use, and couldn't produce high-resolution outputs, no matter how much data was thrown at it.
All the emulators that DENSE created, in contrast, excelled despite the lack of data. When they were turbocharged with graphical processing chips, they were between about 100,000 and 2 billion times faster than their simulations. The speedup is not unusual for an emulator, but the DENSE emulators were highly accurate.
In one test, an astronomy emulator's results were better than 99.9% identical to the results of the full simulation, with all the rest of the ten emulators proving remarkably effective as well. Kasim says he thought DENSE would need tens of thousands of training examples per simulation to achieve these levels of accuracy -- but in most cases, it used a few thousand, and in the aerosol case only a few dozen.
Kasim says DENSE could even enable researchers to interpret data in real time. His team studies the behavior of plasma pushed to extreme conditions by a giant x-ray laser at Stanford. Using conventional analysis techniques take days, much longer than the run time of the laser -- but a DENSE emulator could interpret the data fast enough to modify the experiment while it's in progress. He says: "Hopefully in the future we can do on-the-spot analysis."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INTERNET OF THINGS (8): In July 2019, the Bank of England announced that its new 50-pound note would carry a picture of Alan Turing, a British mathematician widely regarded as one the godfather computer science. Along with excerpts from a seminal paper in 1936 and a binary representation of his date of birth, the new note contains a quotation from 1949, when only a handful of computers existed in the world: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come ... "
Turing foresaw a revolution, and the revolution is ongoing. Now we have a world with tens of billions of computers. The IOT promises to raise that number a hundred-fold. Consider what has happened so far. In the quarter-century since the internet first became a consumer phenomenon, it has upended businesses. Data are the currency of the online world, gathered, analyzed, sold and often stolen in a business model that has produced some of the world's most valuable companies -- but which is drawing increasingly unfriendly scrutiny from governments and regulators, and which its critics denounce as "surveillance capitalism".
Ubiquitous computing will offer companies that can grasp its significance the ability to mine the real world for data, in much the same way that Big Tech currently mines it in the virtual. The result will be an incremental revolution of quantifiability, which knowledge that was once fuzzy, incomplete, even non-existent becomes increasingly precise. No one gain obtained by this effort will be very important, but there will be a great many of them, and they will amount to a revolution in productivity.
Companies will change the way they operate. In a world in which more things are computerized, more companies will come to resemble computer firms. In expensive, high-tech industries on the leading edge of the revolution, the results are already visible. Rolls-Royce, the big British maker of jet engines, launched its "Power by the Hour" service in 1962, offering to maintain and repair its engines for a fixed cost per hour. Its digital transformation began in earnest in 2002, built around the ability to do continuous, real-time monitoring of its products. Real-time data mean that the firm's engineers can watch engines wear out as they fly. When something needs fixing, repair teams will be there when the aircraft arrives. The firm's data offer flying tips to pilots that can result in fuel savings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Changing business means a changing culture. Rolls-Royce now hires computer programmers as well as aeronautical engineers. It has an internal software division, named "r2 Data Labs", which is run like a startup, to seek new ways to turn the flood of data into new businesses. It even plans to remodel parts of its industrial-looking campus, replacing the low brick buildings with the manicured-lawn-and-mirror-glass architecture popular in Silicon Valley.
Rolls-Royce is not alone. General Electric, its chief rival in the jet engine business, offers similar services. With falling costs, the model is spreading. At an IOT conference in London in 2019, companies from TVH, a Belgian firm that makes forklifts and industrial vehicles, to ABB, a Swedish heavy engineering firm, were queued up to describe the benefits of what Alexandra Rehak, an IoT expert at Ovum, a firm of analysts, describes as "servicization".
As ubiquitous computing turns companies of things into companies of services, the IOT is transforming consumers of things into computer users -- with the implication that customers become sources of data. Smart televisions already watch the users watching them, sending back data on program choices and viewing habits; some even monitor background conversation. Such data, sold on to advertisers and program-makers and crunched by machine-learning systems, subsidizes the price of the televisions themselves -- which explains why non-connected, "dumb" televisions are disappearing. Consent is a problematic issue. In 2017 Vizio, an American TV-maker, was fined $2.2 million USD by the Federal Trade Commission after regulators determined it had not been seeking users' permission to harvest and resell information on viewing habits.
It's not just televisions, either. Smart scales track weight and fat percentage, a gold mine for the fitness industry. IRobot, maker of the Roomba line of robot vacuum cleaners, created an uproar in 2017 when it revealed plans to share the maps its products build up of users' homes with Google, Amazon, or Apple -- it has since said it would not share such data without the explicit consent of users. Gadgets from high-tech locks to new cars come with privacy policies running to thousands of words.
Luddites will refuse to put such devices in their homes, but they will still be under surveillance every time they go to public places. The advertising industry is already experimenting with "smart" billboards that can use cameras and facial-recognition software to assess people's reactions to their contents. Hundreds of American police departments can request access to video recorded by Ring, an Amazon subsidiary that makes camera-equipped doorbells. Internal emails show that Ring has dealt with police forces to promote the company's products to citizens, and encourage citizens to share the recordings obtained with the authorities. The American Civil Liberties Union complains that the result is a half-private, half-public, murkily regulated video-surveillance network.
Another difficulty with the spread of IOT is that it also gives companies a greater ability to control the use of their products. US tractor maker John Deere has American tractor-maker, has been engaged in a lengthy dispute with farmers chafing at the restriction applied to their Deere tractors. Some of the farmers argue that they no longer own their tractors, but merely purchase a license to operate them.
At present, most users don't worry about the intrusiveness of IOT technology, having little problem with seeing advertising on their devices. However, that is changing, as Big Tech comes under escalating fire. Like the original internet, the IOT promises huge benefits; but unlike the original internet, the IOT will mature in an age that has become skeptical about where a connected, computerized future might lead. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (105): The central preoccupation of the Kennedy Administration remained the Cold War, Southeast Asia becoming the focal point. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem remained troublesome; the Americans became aware that a military coup was being plotted against Diem, but did nothing to stop it. The coup took place on 1 November 1963; Diem was overthrown, to be executed the next day.
Although the killing of Diem was a shock to the Kennedy Administration -- the belief had been that he would be exiled -- there was a broad sense that the coup was all for the good, that events in South Vietnam would start to get on track. That was exactly the opposite of reality, with the country falling into the hands of a corrupt and ineffective military regime that was, at best, no improvement.
JFK did not live to see that happen. Later in the month, Kennedy went on tour in Texas to shore up his political support there. On 22 November, he was on a motorcade through Dallas, along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson; when the motorcade went past the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald -- an employee at the depository, a Communist who had lived in the Soviet Union for a time -- shot the president twice with a cheap rifle Oswald had smuggled into the building, killing JFK immediately.
* Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) was immediately sworn in as POTUS 36. There were wild fears that the assassination had been plotted by the Soviets as a prelude to an attack, but intelligence quickly revealed the USSR was in no particular state of military alert. Oswald escaped from the depository, to be apprehended by Dallas police after shooting and killing a police officer. On 24 November, Oswald was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail, when he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, an unbalanced nightclub owner.
One of the first things Johnson did as president -- even before November was over -- was establish a commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate and report on the assassination. Republicans in Congress were moving to perform an investigation themselves; LBJ wanted to keep control of the process, recruiting Warren because of his prestige and public reputation, and also because he was a prominent Republican. The Warren Commission presented its report in September 1964, concluding that Oswald had indeed killed JFK, and that he had worked alone. The report was very thorough, but hysteria had taken hold; conspiracy theories accumulated, becoming ever more wild, and only fading out after the end of the century. The Federal government would repeatedly revisit the Kennedy assassination.
The first legislative action of the LBJ Administration was to pass Kennedy's tax cut, which would be enacted early in the next year as the "Revenue Act of 1964". It was hardly anything radical, reducing the top income tax rate from 91% to 70%, and the corporate tax rate from 52% to 48%. Johnson pushed the tax cut as a means of obtaining leverage for his social programs, which he envisioned as creating a "Great Society". It involved desegregation, anti-poverty measures, healthcare reform, urban renewal, crime control, and educational reform.
The effort had two main branches: a "War On Poverty", and an effort to end segregation. The opening shot on the War On Poverty was the "Economic Opportunity Act of 1964", which created the "Job Corps" and the "Community Action Program", intended to deal with local poverty. Other aspects of the act included "Head Start", to boost child education; a food stamp program to address hunger; "Work Study", to provide jobs education; and the "Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA)", a domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. LBJ's efforts to deal with poverty were broadly successful, with the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line dropping from 23% to 12% during his time in office. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Electric Vehicles Pose A Major Threat To Autoworkers' Jobs" By Chris Isidore, 4 December 2019), one of the aspects of an electric vehicle (EV) is that electric motors that roll them along have far fewer moving parts than traditional internal combustion engines and the transmissions that go with them.
Putting together a traditional powertrain is the most labor-intensive part of building a car; building an EV requires about 30% less labor than building a traditional gasoline powered car with its engine, fuel system, transmission and other complex parts, according to estimates from Ford and other industry experts. That means a shift towards EVs implies fewer workers. In addition, while car companies tend to build engines and transmissions themselves, electric motors are more easily outsourced.
Brett Smith -- director of research at the Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan think tank -- says: "Building engines and powertrains has been a core part of these companies for more than 100 years. It's something they do better than anyone else. Does it make sense for GM to build their own electric motors? Not as much sense as it did to make their own internal combustion engines."
The US Labor Department estimates that there were about 150,000 US jobs in building engines, transmissions, and axles at US factories in 2018. That compares to 235,000 jobs at auto assembly plants, where parts are brought together to build a car or truck. There are many other parts on a traditional car that aren't needed in an EV, including a radiator and exhaust system, which means a reduction in jobs there as well.
EVs are still scarce, and so they haven't had much impact on car manufacture. Employment in the auto industry does have its ups and downs, but EVs aren't the real cause of the downs yet. However, unions representing autoworkers are perfectly aware of that EVs will impact jobs. IG Metall, the German union for most of that nation's autoworkers, estimates that 75,000 German jobs building engines and transmissions will be eliminated by 2030. The union is encouraging companies and government to help manage the job losses through retirements and retraining. In the USA, the United Auto Workers are similarly trying to come to grips with EVs. Nobody thinks EVs can be derailed, but they know they've got to prepare for a future beyond oil.
* GIZMODO.com mentioned a cute little gimmick from a company named Sonoff: a cheap little module named the "Micro" with USB-in on one side, USB-out on the other, that plugs into a USB power socket, and to a USB lamp or other USB appliance on the other. It's wi-fi enabled, allowing the appliance to turn to be turned off or on remotely. It comes with a controller app.
The Sonoff Micro acknowledges the fact that USB, once strictly an interface scheme, has become a power-distribution scheme for low-power appliances. My own house now reflects that reality, having a number of wall adapters with USB outlets. Incidentally, there are wi-fi USB hubs to permit wireless interface with USB devices, but it seems they're not all that popular.
* In other USB news, the USB-C "power USB" specification -- featuring a connector that can be plugged in either way, and capable of driving relatively high power -- is finally arriving, pointing to a future in which our gadgets don't have proprietary power supplies, and also can be plugged in anywhere on the planet.
Not everybody is happy with USB-C, Apple preferring its "Lightning" port scheme for the iPhone as such. Apple was not happier when, in January, the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted to mandate USB-C as the charging scheme for phones sold in Europe. Apple has never been noted for much enthusiasm for standards, being inclined to go their own way. In this case, Apple is bucking the trend.
[Incidentally, my relatively new Samsung Galaxy S10+ phone has USB-C -- I was a bit confused trying to plug it in for a while. I wasn't expecting it, and didn't notice the difference from the older smartphone USB connectors. Having become aware of it, now it's instantly recognizable. Funny how that works. I like the USB-C connector, but alas it means getting new USB cables. No worries, I'll buy a few some month.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 CHALLENGE (2): The International Monetary Fund estimates that shutdowns will wipe out $9 trillion USD in world economic output in 2020 and 2021. Based on that estimate, the world will then save $375 billion USD for every month by which it manages to shorten them. The short-sighted read on that statistic is to insist that the economy be re-opened whatever the human cost -- which, as noted before, is dangerous and ridiculous, since the runaway pandemic would bring the economy to its knees anyway, at ghastly cost. Opening only to shut down again will leave everyone worse off.
It is better seen as a justification for spending crazy sums to make the re-opening safe. Throwing massive resources into vaccine development would pay for itself if it meant a vaccine arrived even a month earlier. Build multiple factories to produce different vaccine, produce as many as needed even before qualification, and then throw the losers away? That's right.
COVID-19 has turned the economic rules upside-down: things that made sense before don't now, things that were absurd before are reasonable now. Spending enormous sums of taxpayer money is not wasteful at all; scrimping is penny wise, pound foolish. That logic applies to going big on aid to families and businesses struggling to get by in the shadow of the virus. Yes, there will be inefficiency and corruption; but in a crisis, the best is the enemy of the good. Aid will save lives, since people won't be so desperate to re-open the economy.
Some find that vision of profligate government and huge deficits hard to swallow. However, to date all the policy failures in the pandemic have been failures of imagination. Trump has been consistently myopic, but he wasn't the only one early on. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson briefly gambled on letting the virus spread to recklessly achieve herd immunity, before being infected with COVID-19 himself; the doctors caring for him were ready for him to be administered last rites. Even now, many European countries have more deaths per capita than the USA does. New York City's ghastly outbreak is partly the fault of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who feuded and fumbled the response in its early days, with disastrous results.
Defeating the virus means understanding it, not trying to sweep it under the rug. We cannot make realistic plans for re-opening if we don't; the virus will, in its mindless way, find any weaknesses in our plans, and exploit them. Kim Gang-lip -- South Korea's vice minister of health -- vividly warned on 8 May after an outbreak at nightclubs that a single infected person entering an unexposed population "is like dropping a blob of ink into clean water." Refusing to take the threat seriously is a prescription for disaster.
Very much the hard way, we have learned some things that work. The pandemic-fighting strategy that was pioneered by China and has been applied successfully elsewhere is to get the rate of new infections low enough that new flare-ups can be contained through testing and tracing. If the flare-ups get too big, there's nothing that can be done but lock down again, regionally. That has become ever more difficult in the USA as resistance, sometimes armed, to lockdown grows, with encouragement from Trump -- and bots on social media, some of which may be operated by foreign powers seeking to subvert the USA. The Chinese, who have no reason to like Trump, still find him useful in that his belligerent isolationism weakens the global influence of the USA, creating a vacuum that China can exploit.
The short-term solution to the pandemic is to massively increase testing and tracing. Not only would that help control the pandemic, but it would give employment to people thrown out of work by COVID-19. Testing is more important than tracing, as demonstrated by simulations put together by New York University economist Paul Romer. He writes in his re-opening roadmap: "To control this pandemic, and any future pandemic, the US should make the investment necessary to test people every two weeks, which would mean 25 million tests per day on an ongoing basis." That daily requirement is well more than the number of tests performed in the USA to date. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AFRICA SOLAR VILLAGE: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Africa's First Fully Solar-Powered Village Wants To Be A Model For A Renewable Future" by Emma Reynolds, 16 December 2019), the little village of Id Mjahi, near Morocco's Atlantic coast, is now being promoted as Africa's first completely solar-powered village. Solar power has a lot of potential for Africa, but it is yet to be developed: according to International Energy Agency (IEA), the continent produces less than 1% of all the solar power in the world.
Morocco is working hard to change matters. It already meets 35% of its electricity needs from renewables, and intends to increase its use of renewable energy to 52 percent by 2030, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The country currently has the world's largest solar farm, the Noor-Ouarzazate complex. Now Id Mjahdi, on the outskirts of the city of Essaouira, is being played up as a demonstration for how to power remote villages that would be expensive to connect to a national electricity grid.
When Moroccan solar power company Cleanergy came up with the idea of testing a sustainable model for electrifying remote communities, it looked for a village "where they need everything," according to the company's founder, Mohamed Lasry. Traditionally, the villagers used candles for light, and could only afford to use them for about an hour a night. They would burn tree bark for heating and cooking, which generated noxious fumes. Id Mjahdi did not even have a nearby source of water, and girls in particular often missed school days to walk several kilometers to a well.
The first phase of the $188,000 project was to build a water tower for the community. The second stage was to install a power station with 32 solar photovoltaic panels, which generate 8.32 kilowatts of electricity for distribution via a mini-grid. The power station is connected to around 20 homes in the village, serving more than 50 people. Each house was provided with a fridge, water heater, television, oven, and an outlet to charge devices. The solar network has a battery that can supply up to five hours of electricity outside daylight hours.
The project was assisted by Cluster Solaire, a Moroccan non-profit that supports green-tech companies, which enlisted financial help from the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy, as well as French businesses Intermarche and Petit Olivier. In the fall of 2019, Cleanergy unveiled several solar-powered buildings: a hammam (public baths); a workshop where women study and produce oil from the kernels produced by the Moroccan argan tree; and a preschool for children of ages from three to six, which allows their mothers to work.
While the children play and draw, 30 women -- many of which did not go to school as children -- learn reading and writing, train for scholarships, and crush argan kernels in the workshop. Cosmetics company Petit Olivier buys all the argan oil the women produce. According to Fatima el Khalifa, from Cluster Solaire:
BEGIN QUOTE:
People that were not working at all and not having any sustainable revenue, the fact that they are working in their village and creating value is very important and very, very valuable. We created an association like a cooperative at the village, and they own the whole production.
END QUOTE
The association takes a small fee from the argan oil sales to maintain the solar network, with Cleanergy training the villagers on how to manage it. Lasry says the mini-grid is straightforward to replicate for villages of 100 to 1,000 people, and can be maintained by the citizens: "It is possible to duplicate anywhere in the world. "It is not a complex system, it is easy to do, it is robust."
Cluster Solaire is now seeking funding to build more solar villages. Fatima el Khalifa says there are 800 villages without electricity in Morocco alone; the World Bank estimates that 840 million people lack access to electricity worldwide. The World Bank judges that mini-grids could be the most cost-effective solution for remote areas with a high enough demand, and could provide electricity for 500 million people by 2030.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INTERNET OF THINGS (7): Improving the security of the Internet of Things will not be easy. One difficulty is complexity. Ford's popular F150 pickup truck, for estimated to have about 150 million lines of code. A rule of thumb is that competent programmers working for competent managers will average about one bug per 2,000 lines of code -- and so any computerized gadget is loaded with bugs. Most are trivial; some are not.
Another problem is that few of the companies that make IOT gadgets have much experience with cyber-security, and do not worry too much about it. The irony is that customers complain about security when it fails, but don't think about it when it works. When IOT devices are hacked to be used as botnets to attack third parties, neither the vendor nor the customers are much affected. A recent paper from Stanford University that analyzed telemetry from 83 million connected devices found that millions used old, insecure communication protocols or weak passwords.
Education helps. In 2019, the Industrial Internet Consortium -- a trade body focused on industrial deployments of the IOT -- published a guide to security written by experts from experienced firms such as Fujitsu, Kaspersky Labs and Microsoft. It also helps to get tools from suppliers; Arm has reinforced fortified its chip designs with built-in security features, as has Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker.
While vendors focused on IOT devices are slow to embrace security, big computing firms see it as a selling point, and are accordingly working to improve IOT security. Under the "Azure Sphere" label, Microsoft has developed a security-focused, low-power microcontroller designed to drive IoT devices. Those microcontrollers run a security-focused version of the Linux operating system and communicate through Azure's cloud servers, which have additional security features of their own.
Mark Russinovich, Azure's chief technology officer, says many of the security features were obtained through lessons learned from the firm's Xbox video-gaming division. Videogame consoles are high-profile targets for hackers, and the Xbox division has plenty of experience in dealing with them. Coffee chain Starbucks, whose connected coffee machines can download new recipes, is an early customer for Azure Sphere.
Governments are getting involved in IOT security as well. In 2017 America's Food and Drug Administration issued its first cyber-security-related product recall, having found that some wireless pacemakers were vulnerable to hacking. In 2018, California became the first American state to mandate minimum security standards for IOT products, including a ban on the use of default passwords. Most customers don't change the default passwords, making the devices easy to crack. Britain's government is considering similar laws to require manufacturers to provide contact details for bug-hunters and to spell out how long products can expect to receive security updates.
However, the computing giants can't solve the IOT industry's security challenge for them. The computing industry moves at high speed: smartphones are obsolete in about five years, and no longer get security updates. Products like cars or factory robots have much longer lifetimes, and so keeping them secure over the long run is expensive and troublesome.
Angela Walch -- an American lawyer who specializes in tech -- believes the over-riding question is that of legal liability. The software industry uses licensing agreements to try to exempt itself from the sort of liability that attaches to firms that ship defective goods. So far, the courts have been agreeable to letting software firms off the hook. That will become problematic as software spreads into the sorts of physical goods that, historically, have not been granted such legal exemptions. She asks: "What are we saying? That if buggy software or compromised software kills someone, you won't be able to claim?"
Bruce Schneier, a prominent American security expert, suspects that the security problem could mean that businesses and consumers will reach "peak connectivity" and begin to wonder if it really makes sense to connect everyday objects. He makes a comparison with nuclear energy, which enthusiasts once saw as powering everything in the world. He writes that, these days "we still have nuclear power, but there's more consideration about when to build nuclear plants, and when to go with some alternative form of energy. One day, computerization is going to be like that, too." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (104): The third major decision of the Warren Court during the Kennedy Administration was GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT, which affirmed the right of defendants to representation in court. It began on 3 June 1961, with a burglary at Bay Harbor Pool Room in Panama City, Florida, in which a cash register was looted, a cigarette machine was broken into, and various items were vandalized. One Clarence Earl Gideon was charged for the burglary, simply because he was seen at the pool room with wine and Coca-cola, plus change in his pockets.
Gideon was too poor to afford a lawyer and the court wouldn't assign him one, so he had to plead his case on his own. He was convicted, and sentenced to serve five years in the Florida state penitentiary. From prison, Gideon appealed to SCOTUS, placing a suit against the secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, Louie L. Wainwright. Gideon argued that denying him legal counsel violated his 6th Amendment right to counsel, as applied to the states via the 14th Amendment.
SCOTUS did assign counsel for Gideon, in the form of the prominent attorney Abe Fortas, later a Supreme Court justice. SCOTUS delivered its judgement in favor of Gideon in 1963, stating that the 6th Amendment did indeed require that counsel be provided to defendants who couldn't afford a lawyer. As a consequence of the decision in GIDEON, about 2,000 individuals were released in Florida alone. Gideon wasn't one of them, instead being given a new trial with appointed defense counsel. His attorney picked apart testimony that had convicted Gideon the first time around, suggesting that Gideon had been framed, and he was acquitted in the second trial.
The JFK Administration also saw the ratification of the 23rd Amendment to the US Constitution, in 1961. Of course, JFK had barely been sworn into office when the amendment was passed; it had been endorsed by Eisenhower, with both Nixon and JFK adding their endorsements during the 1960 campaign. The amendment was highly specific, granting electoral votes to the District of Columbia:
BEGIN QUOTE:
TWENTY-THIRD AMENDMENT: The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
END QUOTE
When the District of Columbia had a small population, its lack of political standing wasn't such a problem. In addition, during the 19th century, there were plenty of territories in the West that were also under the direct control of the Federal government, and their citizens didn't have formal representation either. However, as Washington DC became more populous and the Western territories became states, the awkward status of the seat of the Federal government became more obvious.
In addition, at the time of the ratification of the 23rd Amendment, Washington DC had become a majority-black city, "Chocolate City", and both parties were out to court blacks to their ranks. However, that's as far as it's gone. Notions for making Washington DC a state -- at present, it has a greater population than Wyoming or Vermont -- haven't been taken seriously. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by a media release from the ESA and the NASA Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute / HSTSCI ("Hubble & Gaia Reveal Weight of the Milky Way" by Bethany Downer, 10 Mary 2019), observations from the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and the ESA Gaia star mapper, have been combined to yield a refined estimate of the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy: 1.5 trillion solar masses, out to a radius of 129,000 light-years from the galactic center.
There have been many such estimates over the decades, but they have never agreed much among themselves, ranging from 500 billion to 3 trillion times the mass of the Sun. The variation in estimates has been due to different approaches to measuring the distribution of "dark matter" -- the unseen mass that makes up about 90% of our Galaxy. Laura Watkins -- of the European Southern Observatory in Germany, who led the team performing the analysis -- says: "We just can't detect dark matter directly. That's what leads to the present uncertainty in the Milky Way's mass. You can't measure accurately what you can't see."
The team used globular clusters to come up with their refined estimate. Globular clusters are spherical communities of stars that orbit the spiral disk of the Milky Way at great distances. Their orbital velocity will be greater, given a more massive Galaxy. Traditionally, it was only possible to measure the velocity of the globular clusters along their line of sight to the Earth, using the "redshifting" of their light. However, the precision stellar mapping data provided by the Gaia probe allowed the researchers to determine the true or "proper" motion of the star clusters, out to a distance of 65,000 light-years.
The team combined that data with Hubble observations that allowed faint and distant globular clusters, as far as 130 000 light-years from Earth, to be compiled into the study. As Hubble has been observing some of these objects for a decade, it was possible to accurately track the velocities of these clusters as well. Roeland P. van der Marel of the HSTSCI says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We were lucky to have such a great combination of data. By combining Gaia's measurements of 34 globular clusters with measurements of 12 more distant clusters from Hubble, we could pin down the Milky Way's mass in a way that would be impossible without these two space telescopes.
END QUOTE
* As reported by an article from NATURE.com ("Malaria Cases Are Falling Worldwide" by Giorgia Guglielmi, 04 December 2019), a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in early December stated that the number of malaria infections recorded around the world has fallen for the first time in several years. Rising numbers of cases in 2016 and 2017 led to fears that malaria was resurgent, but the WHO estimates that there were 228 million reported cases in 2018 -- a decrease of roughly around 3 million from the previous year.
The drop was attributed in large part to fewer cases in Southeast Asia. The WHO found that, over the past decade, the most significant decline was in six countries across the Mekong River basin: Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. From 2010 to 2018, malaria cases dropped by 76% in these countries, while malaria-related deaths fell by 95%. In 2018, Cambodia reported zero malaria-related deaths for the first time in the country's history. India also reported a huge reduction in infections, with 2.6 million fewer cases in 2018 than in 2017.
It is true that, in countries with poor medical surveillance systems, the extent of malaria can be under-reported. Nonetheless, Abdourahmane Diallo -- chief executive of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, an organization in Geneva, Switzerland, that supports efforts to control and eliminate the disease -- says that countries in the Mekong area have made "tremendous progress" in tackling the disease by funding malaria-control programs and deploying health workers in remote regions to hand out treatments and report new cases.
He adds that progress in driving down infections is also the result of successful strategies to contain drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest malaria-causing parasite, these resistant strains having been spreading across the region. There have been successes elsewhere, the report saying that Algeria and Argentina were both certified malaria-free in 2019.
In other parts of the world, malaria is gaining. Countries in Africa, for example, reported an increase of 1 million cases from 2017 to 2018, with the continent accounting for almost 94% of global cases and deaths from the disease in 2018. The problems there are due to poor health-care systems and a corresponding lack of funding.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 CHALLENGE (1): As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Trump Is Gambling on a Resurrection, With Lives and Livelihoods" by Peter Coy, 21 May 2020), US President Donald Trump's reaction to the global COVID-19 pandemic has been interesting, to use one word for it: a confused reaction to the crisis, with an insistence on shifting the blame, coupled to a push to re-open the USA at any cost -- while encouraging armed resistance to state health measures, promoting a drug named hydroxychloroquine that doesn't have any demonstrable effect on the virus, and in general hinting that the president is not right in the head.
David Rocke, a mathematician at the University of California at Davis, suggests that Trump's actions make more sense than they seem to, representing a game theory gambit known as "gambling for resurrection". Since all indicators suggest Trump will be defeated in the presidential election in November, he has nothing to lose by taking wild chances, and hoping something turns up to shift the odds in his favor.
As for the American people, they are clearly not going to benefit from this strategy -- but if Trump loses in November, he can think that won't be his problem any more. It would seem to be going too far to believe that Trump has thought any of this out, of course, being more representative of his fixed inclination to low cunning, bluster, and shifting the blame. Rocke admits as much, saying that with Trump, "it's very difficult to tell how much is craft and how much is idiocy."
COVID-19 places the USA in an impossible position. There's a desperate need to re-open the economy, but a massive resurgence of the disease would leave the country worse off. US unemployment is now 14.7%, with joblessness at 1930s levels; by the end of May, over 100,000 Americans had died. Trump's strategy for re-election makes sense, though it's beyond cynical, with regards to his self-interests; indeed, it could work for him, but that wouldn't be the way to bet. What about everybody else? What's the right strategy for companies, Congress, state and local governments, and families in the face of the pandemic?
Trump is framing America's choice as lives versus livelihood. He told reporters on 5 May: "Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon."
This is a false dichotomy: re-opening too soon is likely to cost both lives and livelihoods. The economy won't get back on track if people remain afraid to leave home, or if fresh outbreaks force renewed closures. Other countries from Iceland to South Korea to New Zealand have shown that stopping the virus cold first is the most effective way to save the economy. Even then, vigilance has to be maintained, China having continued to enforce regional lockdowns in the face of flare-ups.
Trump wants to get stadiums full of his fans again. Indeed, his son Eric suggested that the pandemic was a plot organized by the Democrats to undermine his presidential campaign -- with the reply that it was strange the all-mighty Democrats could con the world into believing in a fake pandemic, but couldn't get Hillary Clinton elected. The reality is that normalcy will only return once we have been vaccinated, and in the meantime, life will be troublesome and poorer. Nobody's going on cruise ships; nobody's going on international tours. We're stuck with mask-wearing, isolation of the elderly, and bans on large gatherings. The USA is not even properly equipped to cope with the status quo, with levels of testing remaining inadequate to monitor the spread of the disease.
Trump has been promising a vaccine by the end of the year, but nobody who understands vaccine development thinks that will happen; unavoidable qualification says that won't be until later in 2021 at earliest. Kasai Takeshi, the World Health Organization's regional director for the Western Pacific, said in a briefing on 14 May: "We have to find ways to live with the virus for now, and this is the new normal. As long as the virus is circulating in this interconnected world, and until we have a safe and effective vaccine, everybody remains at risk." [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ARTIFICIAL CHLOROPLASTS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Artificial Chloroplasts Turn Sunlight And Carbon Dioxide Into Organic Compounds" by Robert F. Service, 8 May 2020), plants are driven by sunlight, using photosynthesis to live and grow. Humans of course make wide use of plants as feedstocks, and they also draw carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air, working against climate change.
Plants do have the difficulty in that the efficiency of photosynthesis in exploiting the Sun's energy is low. Synthetic biologists have now improved on photosynthesis by redesigning the chloroplast, the cellular organelle that performs photosynthesis. They combined the light-harvesting machinery of spinach plants with enzymes from nine different organisms to build an artificial chloroplast that can operate out of cells to convert CO2 into energy-rich molecules. The researchers hope their turbocharged photosynthesis system might eventually convert CO2 directly into useful chemicals, or help genetically engineered plants soak up ten times the atmospheric CO2 of regular ones.
Photosynthesis is a two-step process:
The CO2 conversion step begins with an enzyme named "RuBisCO", which prompts CO2 to react with a key organic compound, starting a chain of reactions needed to make vital metabolites in plants. This scheme has a limitation: it's sluggish. Tobias Erb -- a synthetic biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany -- puts it simply: "RuBisCO is super-slow ." Each copy of the enzyme can grab and use just 5 to 10 CO2 molecules per second, which puts a bottleneck on plant growth.
In 2016, Erb and his team set out to design an accelerated process. Instead of RuBisCO, they substituted a bacterial enzyme that can take CO2 molecules and get them to react ten times faster. They built up a system with 16 other enzymes from nine different organisms to create a new CO2-to-organic-chemical cycle they named the "CETCH" cycle.
That dealt with the second step, but then Erb's team had to backtrack to the first step -- the conversion of sunlight. To handle that task, the researchers went to chloroplast components known as "thylakoid membranes", which are pouches that hold chlorophyll and other photosynthesizing enzymes. Earlier research had shown that thylakoid membranes can operate outside plant cells, so Erb and his team extracted thylakoid membranes from spinach leaf cells, then showed that the membranes could absorb light and transfer its energy to ATP and NADPH molecules. Pairing the light-harvesting thylakoid membranes with their CETCH cycle system resulted in an "artificial chloroplast" that can use light to continually convert CO2 to an organic metabolite called glycolate.
To get the two subsystems to work together, the researchers had to tweak the CETCH cycle, swapping in and out a few of the CETCH pathway's enzymes. To optimize the complete system, Erb and his team collaborated with Jean-Christophe Baret, a microfluidics expert at the Paul Pascal Research Center at the University of Bordeau. Baret's team designed a device that generates thousands of tiny water droplets in oil, then injects each one with different amounts of thylakoid membrane assemblies and CETCH cycle enzymes. Mass production allowed the researchers to zero in on the most efficient recipe for producing glycolate. Further consideration of all the possible combinations and concentrations of different elements could make the process even more efficient.
Erb says he and his team want to adapt their setup to produce other organic compounds that are more valuable than glycolate, such as drug molecules. They also hope to more efficiently convert captured CO2 into organic compounds that plants need to grow. That would pave the way to engineering the genes for this innovative photosynthesis pathway into crops to create new varieties that grow much faster than current varieties.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: The COVID-19 pandemic, hideously troublesome to begin with, has become even more troublesome in the USA, as the RWNJ (Right-Wing Nutjob) element of the population protests the lockdown, and even wearing face masks. People have been killed in disputes over them.
It's not all bad news, however. Rock legend Gene Simmons of KISS got a shot of a 15-year-old fan name Abby who had devised a KISS ARMY face mask. He reposted the shot on Twitter -- she's really cute -- and replied: "Abby, you rock!"
Simmons then got flak from the nutjobs on Twitter, one writing: "Except those cloth masks don't keep you safe only a medical mask does and a good one at that." Simmons, a legendary bad boy, replied in calm, measured, and articulate terms: "You are incorrect and misinformed. The idea of cloth masks or any other kind of mask, is not to protect you. It's to protect everybody else around you in case you cough or talk."
Of course, the nutjobs didn't give it up, they never do: "Face covers don't prevent the spread of viruses. It's more of a psychological thing. It's social pressuring. You are disrespectful if you don't cover your face. It's nonsense." Simmons: "I wish you good health, despite your point of view. Please wear a mask, to prevent your cough, sneeze or other, from infecting people. Be safe, not sorry."
Another nutjob said there was no reason for healthy people to wear masks. Simmons: "You need more information. You can show no symptoms and STILL have Covid 19, and STILL be spreading the virus to others. WEAR A MASK!"
Still, they persisted: "Sorry Gene, some of us don't have the luxury of mansions, and have to go to work." Simmons got a little annoyed: "This has nothing to do with mansions. Cut it out. Just wear masks, to prevent other people from getting whatever it is you may have. And stop the blame game. This affects every one of us."
KISS is now selling official face masks off the band's website. It's not for the greed, Simmons is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, instead to support a Global Relief Fund For Live Music Crews. If there isn't a public service campaign for masks going yet, there should be, with Simmons as a frontman.
* Along the same lines, REUTERS.com reports that Africans are getting into stylish face masks. In Lagos, Nigeria, fashion designer Sefiya Diejomaoh designed a mask of gold cloth and covered with bling to match her floor-length dress. She says: "When you come out in a stylish mask or with an accessory such as this, it doesn't seem as though we're fighting a war. It seems more fun."
Africans have their own style, tending towards the brightly colored, and they have adopted masks with enthusiasm. Sophie Zinga, a fashion designer in Dakar, Senegal, has set up a website, fashionfightscovid19.com, to sell her masks. She says: "As a fashion designer I think we are going to have to integrate each outfit with fashion masks."
Inga Gubeka of Johannesburg, South Africa, produces masks of leather and fabric, with traditional South African Ndebele prints. She says: "My business has been heavily affected in such a sense that the retail is on lockdown. There was a big shortage, we realized, of masks that can be usable every day without having to throw it away."
Back in Lagos, Diejomaoh says her face mask is a form of self-expression: "People going around in surgical masks is depressing. I have to maintain status quo and who I am despite the situation."
CNN adds that inventive face masks have become a global phenomenon. They're not so new in East Asia, where K-pop stars have used them as fashion statements. In Amman, Jordan, designer Samia al-Zakleh sells glitter masks, while in Hamburg, Germany, Sebastian Marquardt offers a range of styles, including copies of his own face. Marquardt felt too limited in expression wearing a mask, and wanted to emphasize that he is an "open and funny" person.
* As for here in Loveland, Colorado, mask wearing is common but not universal. There's not so much flamboyance yet. As I mentioned last month, I've been wearing old bandanas I had in a box, and they work very well, with a bit of style. I just bought a set of new ones from Amazon.com, waiting for them to come in; these appear to be better optimized for use as masks.
Masks have become a social statement. I always wear a bandana when I leave my house, even on my early morning walks, when I don't run into people. It's a statement that I care, and that I'm not embarrassed to show it. Although wearing masks is mandatory in town, a checkout clerk at my local supermarket told me a few people still refuse to wear them. They're making a statement, too: "Screw everyone."
They certainly must be feeling defensive, when everyone around them is wearing them. Indeed, the last time I went to the super in May, I didn't notice anyone without a mask. Studies show that, if everyone masks, the masks are highly effective, cutting viral transmission in half. Patience with anti-maskers seems to be running low; a video went viral of Staten Islanders chasing a woman out of a supermarket when she came in without a mask, screaming abuse at her. These are New Yorkers, of course, who are relatively quick to scream abuse at people, and NYC has been hit very hard; but I'm hoping it will be the start of a trend. I wouldn't go out of my way to light into anti-maskers -- but I saw others doing it, I'd join in, and get it on video with my smartphone.
In any case COVID-19 is, for now, under control here in Larimer County. With a population of over 350,000, we've had about 500 cases and 20 deaths. I continue to worry about a change for the worse; there's too much lunacy at the top and the bottom. Trump thinks he can gaslight COVID-19, but he can't. Confusion and muddle in the face of a dangerous threat is a recipe for disaster.
Incidentally, when I go for my morning walks, these days sometimes I find face masks as street litter. Street litter of course tends to reflect current trends; there was a time maybe a decade ago when CD-ROMs could often be found, but not now.
One thing that has long puzzled me has been often finding empty mini bottles of hard liquor, but I think I've finally figured that one out. I spotted an indigent in my neighborhood a few weeks back, having never seen one that close to my home before -- and it all snapped together. Indigents buy mini bottles of booze because that's all they can afford, and being indigents, they just throw them aside when they're done. I don't see the indigents around because they're generally only coming through at night, and keeping a low profile. The Loveland cops are not very patient with them.
Oh yes! I almost forgot to add, I was able to buy a bulk pack of toilet paper in my last trip to the super. Things are not getting back to normal, but they are improving.
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