The poles beckon

If anyone wants to dispute global warming, first check out what other species are doing to escape the heat. In terms of heading toward the poles, marine denizens are in the lead save for insects.

We know that global warming is forcing many animals around the world to flee their normal habitats, but now, an exhaustive analysis has shown marine species are booking it for the poles six times faster than those on land.

In the review, amphibians were found to be moving up slope at over 12 metres a year, while reptiles seem to be headed towards the equator at 6.5 metres a year.

Insects, which incidentally carry many diseases, were found to be moving poleward at 18.5 kilometres per year.

This discrepancy between land and water could exist for several reasons. It might, for instance, be a product of temperature sensitivity. Air conducts heat 25 times less effectively than water, and many land animals can easily regulate their body temperature if they want.

On the move says it all.

The light has gone out ...

A pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong in December.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Hong Kong, a free enterprise and successful democratic entity, is losing it's light thanks to Xi's determination to remain in power forever. Yours truly has two Hong Konger friends who have taught me much as to just how vibrant and interesting this city truly is, two essential quantities all societies need to stay healthy as civilization moves further into the 21st century. 

HONG KONG — China and its allies are using threats and pressure to get business to back Beijing’s increasingly hard-line stance toward Hong Kong, leading companies to muzzle or intimidate workers who speak out in protest.

Lawyers, bankers, professors and other professionals interviewed by The New York Times described a growing culture of fear in offices across the city. Employees face pressure to support pro-Beijing candidates in local elections and echo the Chinese government’s official line. Those who speak out can be punished or even forced out.

Read the detailed NYTimes piece in its entirety. It's the right thing to do.

Yet another visitor ...

Hubble yet again ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their best look yet at an interstellar visitor – Comet 2I/Borisov – whose speed and trajectory indicates it is from outside of our Solar System.

This Hubble image, taken on October 12, is the sharpest ever view of the comet. Hubble reveals a central concentration of dust around the solid icy nucleus.

For more information, visit https://nasa.gov/hubble.

"Ain't" science grand? :)

Water, Water everywhere ...

With data from the Hubble Space Telescope, water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth within the habitable zone of its host star.

K2-18b, which is eight times the mass of Earth, is the only planet orbiting a star outside the solar system (or “exoplanet”) within the habitable zone.

For more information, visit https://nasa.gov/hubble.

Just a matter of time when life is discovered and when it is, man's take on the universe will be changed forever.

The Economy after COVID-19

This is a shot taken by yours truly over 43 years ago, entering Wyoming on a trip lasting 3 weeks, camping in a beloved 1970 VW camper bus. I show this picture as entry point to an insightful article by a good friend who happens to know a great deal about finance and the economy and how it may spin out vis a vis COVID-19. We all know economics is not a science, never has been, never will be but it can be really valuable when practiced by guys as smart and humane as Dan. Enjoy. 

State of Play

What we are witnessing is the ongoing saga of how a solitary case of COVID 19, imported from China into Washington state, cascaded into a pandemic of epic proportions, triggered an economic crisis on a  Depression-era  scale, and continues to inflict human suffering on millions of Americans. Our fellow citizens are dying left and right, struggling to deal with the loss of their jobs and how to feed their families. Millions are experiencing a total collapse of everything they had only a couple of months ago. 

The Federal Reserve has unleashed everything in its arsenal: reducing interest rates to zero and declaring availability of unlimited liquidity in order to forestall a collapse of the financial system. Congress has declared a panoply of multi-trillion dollar emergency programs with acronyms that read like an alphabet soup.  

So where do we go from here?

An honest assessment of what we know and what we don’t, will give us some clues on where the economy is headed.  

What we know: a) according to scientists, a second wave of infection is certain to happen, b) a therapeutic drug will show up, we don’t know when, possibly after a year, c) a vaccine available on large scale is estimated to arrive late next year at earliest, and d) lack of observance of distancing in many states will prolong the duration of the pandemic.

What we don’t know is too numerous to list. Among the imponderables: how many will die before it’s over; when will the second wave hit and with what severity; when will safe and effective therapeutics and vaccines be available on a mass scale; will our medical infrastructure be able to cope with the next outbreak; how long will it take to test a large percentage of the population? The list goes on. 

Basically, we are in a highly volatile and unpredictable environment. Compounding the problem, management of the crisis by the Administration has been confused, conflicting and uncoordinated. Hence the variability of outcomes can be extremely wide; statisticians would call this a classic high standard deviation situation. That caveat notwithstanding, I will venture several observations: 

Given that unemployment claims to-date (mid-May) are approaching 40 million, or 26% of our workforce, we can safely assume that we are deep in the bowels of a depression rivaling the Great Depression when the unemployment rate peaked at 25%. 

The Office of Management and Budget and several branches of the Federal Reserve have estimated a 2nd quarter decline in GDP of around 40% annualized - the highest in decades. This is a stark reaffirmation of the severity of the trouble we are in.  

As months pass – how many months, is undeterminable - we will gradually creep out of a total shutdown and become semi functional again. At that point, statistics will show a deceleration in the rate of economic decline (as distinct from positive growth). In this phase, unemployment will “improve” from double digits with a 2 handle to something in the teens. At this point the President will no doubt cite the slowing in rate of decline as proof positive that his leadership is working and will restore the country to its former glory.

Overall, the economy will take a minimum of 3 – 5 years to stabilize and create meaningful job growth again. Jobs will come back excruciatingly slowly, and only when consumers build up enough confidence to consume again. Keep in mind that 70% of all economic activity is consumer based. The recovery will be slow and lengthy. Predictions of a V shape recovery are unfounded and unrealistic. Untold hardship will befall millions for years. Social programs will be needed to enable families to feed themselves. 

At the macro-economic level, the effects of trillions of dollars of spending on emergency aid will be felt for many years to come. Taxes will certainly rise. As they say, the piper must eventually be paid. Interest rates will initially remain low (a challenge to pensioners depending on interest income) as the Fed keeps financial markets flooded with funds. Over the longer term however, with the national debt far exceeding 100% of GDP, investors in Treasuries will demand higher yields on their investment.

Certain industries will never be the same again. Airlines will be nationalized, go bankrupt or keep struggling financially indefinitely. Many brick and mortar retailers will go the way of JC Penny and file Chapter 11. The cruise business will be decimated, becoming a shadow of its former self. Hotel chains will have to downsize or merge to survive. Office buildings will be financially challenged. Some will go bust as occupancy rates fall precipitously as a result of stay-at-home work becoming the norm for many workers. Many shopping malls will close for good due to lack of shoppers. Tens of thousands of restaurants have already closed and many will be shuttered forever. Note that restaurants are the second largest private employer with 15.6 million workers. 

Group-oriented activities will be hard hit, particularly sporting events. The NBA, NFL, AFL and the two baseball leagues will take a long time to recover, resorting to alternative non-audience formats in the meantime. 

Not since the Spanish flu have so many depended on the vagaries of a virus for their financial future.

The consequences of COVID 19 will reach far and wide. It will affect every aspect of human activity: from education to travel, from business conferences to contact sports, from grocery shopping to attending social gatherings. Only time will tell to what extent our lives will be modified.   

Conclusion

In physics, Newton tells us that every action causes a reaction. All human activity constitutes a collective action that affects the ecosystem. Now we are witnessing the reaction to our action. We cannot encroach on the animal world (bats included) with impunity. We cannot engage in human action that damages the environment and expect no reaction. Unless and until Newton’s Law is repealed, such human behavior is not sustainable.  Mother Nature will nurture and sustain us. But we abuse her blessings at our own peril. 

Arcline 1975

Selfie 101

What's your take on this guy? Sinister, serious, direct, intense, take your pick as the human face both reveals and conceals our innermost feelings 24/7 to the outside world. Up to now, this eval was done by us rubes, now there's a new evaluator on the scene that does it better than we can.

To whit ...

Russian researchers from HSE University and Open University for the Humanities and Economics have demonstrated that artificial intelligence is able to infer people's personality from 'selfie' photographs better than human raters do. Conscientiousness emerged to be more easily recognizable than the other four traits. Personality predictions based on female faces appeared to be more reliable than those for male faces. The technology can be used to find the 'best matches' in customer service, dating or online tutoring.

The article, "Assessing the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images," will be published on May 22 in Scientific Reports.

It's just a matter of time ... 

Intensity +

Things get crazed in the center of our galaxy.

The center of our Galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole of 4 million times the mass of the Sun. A great number of stars spin around it at very high speed. The UCLA Galactic Center Group discovered another class of objects orbiting the black hole: the G objects. These peculiar objects look like gas clouds but behave like stars. G objects are likely stars that are hidden in a thick envelope of gas and dust. They may have formed as the result of the merger of a pair of stars. This animation is a visualization of the orbital motion of G objects and stars in the Galactic Center. The G objects are shown in magenta, young stars in green and old stars in orange. The orbits are based on the Keck data obtained between 1995 and 2019. 

It gets better.

Ghez noted the center of the Milky Way galaxy is an extreme environment, unlike our less hectic corner of the universe.

“The Earth is in the suburbs compared to the center of the galaxy, which is some 26,000 light-years away,” Ghez said. “The center of our galaxy has a density of stars 1 billion times higher than our part of the galaxy. The gravitational pull is so much stronger. The magnetic fields are more extreme. The center of the galaxy is where extreme astrophysics occurs — the X-sports of astrophysics.”

Intensity +  without a doubt. :)

HK ... We hardly knew ye.

A candlelight vigil in Hong Kong in June, an annual tradition to commemorate victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

I have a close friend who's a native Hong Konger, a guy who loves his city beyond words and who now inwardly weeps as to what is happening to her as China begins to extinguish a truly international environment that benefitted the world in so many ways.

Hong Kong was born at the crossroad of empires, a hybrid of British and Chinese parentage. It may fade there, too.

This “barren rock,” as an envoy of Queen Victoria once called it, transformed into one of the world’s first truly global cities, a place where international finance has thrived as its people created a cultural identity all their own. Even the territory’s current political system is bound by a negotiated settlement, called “one country, two systems,” that, despite all odds and an inelegant moniker, seemed to work.

But this week, Hong Kong discovered the limits to the middle ground that it has carved out to nourish one of the most prosperous and dynamic cities on earth: between East and West, between rice and bread, between a liberal and an authoritarian order.

The Union Jack was lowered for the last time in Hong Kong in 1997, as Britain handed the territory back to China.Credit...Pool photo by Kimimasa Mayama

The territory’s fate is once again being decided in faraway halls of power, as Beijing moves forward with plans to strip some of the autonomy the territory was supposed to enjoy for 50 years after Britain returned it to China in 1997.

The death knell for Hong Kong has been sounded many times since that handover. But the proposed national security legislation could have crushing implications for a place so dedicated to the international language of commerce that the local form of English is stripped of embellishment. Can, no can?

Too often these days, the answer is no can.

Protesters in the Tsim Sha Tsui district on Christmas Eve, with Hong Kong’s distinct skyline in the background.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Read the detailed NYTimes piece, it's the right thing to do.

HK ... we hardly knew ye ... indeed.

3 into 2

Creativity to the max, this time layering 3 dimensions into 2, in this case, using time to enable code to correct errors in quantum systems at a rate thought impossible until now.

Dr. Benjamin Brown from the School of Physics has developed a type of error-correcting code for quantum computers that will free up more hardware to do useful calculations. It also provides an approach that will allow companies like Google and IBM to design better quantum microchips.

He did this by applying already known code that operates in three-dimensions to a two-dimensional framework.

“The trick is to use time as the third dimension. I’m using two physical dimensions and adding in time as the third dimension,” Dr. Brown said. “This opens up possibilities we didn’t have before.”

3 into 2 without question. :)

The last piece ...

AI, no longer controlled by us rubes in many disciplines given the fact real-time analysis of incoming data requires software able to update itself in real-time, cannot be done by humans in any way, shape or fashion, could not process symbolic math, until now.

More than 70 years ago, researchers at the forefront of artificial intelligence research introduced neural networks as a revolutionary way to think about how the brain works. In the human brain, networks of billions of connected neurons make sense of sensory data, allowing us to learn from experience. Artificial neural networks can also filter huge amounts of data through connected layers to make predictions and recognize patterns, following rules they taught themselves.

By now, people treat neural networks as a kind of AI panacea, capable of solving tech challenges that can be restated as a problem of pattern recognition. They provide natural-sounding language translation. Photo apps use them to recognize and categorize recurrent faces in your collection. And programs driven by neural nets have defeated the world’s best players at games including Go and chess.

But a problem remained.

However, neural networks have always lagged in one conspicuous area: solving difficult symbolic math problems. These include the hallmarks of calculus courses, like integrals or ordinary differential equations. The hurdles arise from the nature of mathematics itself, which demands precise solutions. Neural nets instead tend to excel at probability. They learn to recognize patterns — which Spanish translation sounds best, or what your face looks like — and can generate new ones.

The situation changed late last year when Guillaume Lample and François Charton, a pair of computer scientists working in Facebook’s AI research group in Paris, unveiled a successful first approach to solving symbolic math problems with neural networks. Their method didn’t involve number crunching or numerical approximations. Instead, they played to the strengths of neural nets, reframing the math problems in terms of a problem that’s practically solved: language translation.

Soon, he and Lample plan to feed mathematical expressions into their networks and trace the way the program responds to small changes in the expressions. Mapping how changes in the input trigger changes in the output might help expose how the neural nets operate.

Zaremba sees that kind of understanding as a potential step toward teaching neural nets to reason and to actually understand the questions they’re answering. “It’s easy in math to move the needle and see how well [the neural network] works if expressions are becoming different. We might truly learn the reasoning, instead of just the answer,” he said. “The results would be quite powerful.”

An understatement to say the least.

Read the rest of the excellent Quanta's Magazine piece to see why the last piece ... of developing truly intelligent AI is now in place to enable this tech to become ... truly intelligent.