According to Five Thirty Eight,
Three factors are required for a storm to be classified as a blizzard at a particular place, besides falling or blowing snow:
1. Sustained winds or frequent wind gusts of 35 mph or greater
2. Visibility under a quarter-mile
3. These conditions must persist for three hours.
This definition is the same whether you’ve got 1 inch or 40 on the ground.
New U.S. government nutrition guidelines are out. And predictably, they are being criticized by nutritionists.
This year, for example, there were notable differences between the Advisory Committee’s recommendations and the final guidelines. According to scientific evidence, individuals should reduce their consumption of red and processed meats and sugar-sweetened beverages, such as soda, to prevent chronic diseases. The scientific evidence for those two recommendations is “so clear, so strong,” says Willett — yet neither recommendation was included in the final guidelines…
The final guidelines also don’t include the Advisory Committee’s emphasis on sustainability of the food supply, including the need to reduce portions of beef, cited as “the single food with the greatest projected impact on the environment.”
“This is virtual proof that the USDA is not allowed to say anything negative about red meat,” says Willett. “The basic censorship of the report from the Advisory Committee is deeply troublesome.”
The report from the advisory committee is not exactly censored. It’s here, readily accessible for people who know how to find stuff on the internet.
I and some people I know will be very excited about this. Which means I know some very weird people.
An R package for modelling actual, potential and reference evapotranspiration
Evapotranspiration (ET) is a vital component of the hydrological cycle and there are a large number of alternative models for representing ET processes. However, implementing ET models in a consistent manner is difficult due to the significant diversity in process representations, assumptions, nomenclature, terminology, units and data requirements. An R package is therefore introduced to estimate actual, potential and reference ET using 17 well-known models. Data input is flexible, and customized data checking and pre-processing methods are provided. Results are presented as summary text and plots. Comparisons of alternative ET estimates can be visualized for multiple models, and alternative input data sets. The ET estimates also can be exported for further analysis, and used as input to rainfall-runoff models.
Reporting fro Davos…er…Philadelphia – the theme of this World Economic Forum is “the fourth industrial revolution”.
The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
There are three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.
The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
I’ll pull out a few quotes from Obama’s State of the Union that are relevant to the theme of this blog.
First, automation and globalization:
Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated. Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and they face tougher competition. As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.
What automation and globalization have in common is that if you are a relatively low-skilled worker in a relatively high-income country like the U.S., there is a risk your job could be replaced either by a computer (automation) or a low-skilled worker in a low-income country (globalization). Where they differ is that automation is starting to squeeze those low-skilled workers in the low-income countries too, and gradually it will also start to squeeze the higher-skilled workers in the higher-income countries. Obama’s solutions to all this – education and training, unemployment and wage insurance, healthcare and childcare benefits to make employment more flexible, lowering barriers to entrepreneurship, are the obvious ones, but we’ve been tinkering with these things for a long time with only slow progress, and the trends are only going to accelerate.
Second, biotechnology and genetics:
Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot,America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade. (Applause.) So tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done…let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.
This seems to be a nod to biomedical research and biotech more generally, which I am convinced is the next big technology revolution akin to the information revolution we have been going through over the past few decades.
Next, climate change and fossil fuels:
Now we’ve got to accelerate the transition away from old, dirtier energy sources. Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future — especially in communities that rely on fossil fuels. We do them no favor when we don’t show them where the trends are going. That’s why I’m going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet. And that way, we put money back into those communities, and put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.
Actually, I am not sure what he is talking about here. I would support a revenue-neutral carbon tax, with the proceeds invested in education, training, research and/or infrastructure. But I’m only speculating. If there was some initiative announced along these lines I missed it.
Finally, corruption in U.S. politics:
We have to reduce the influence of money in our politics, so that a handful of families or hidden interests can’t bankroll our elections. (Applause.) And if our existing approach to campaign finance reform can’t pass muster in the courts, we need to work together to find a real solution — because it’s a problem… Those with money and power will gain greater control over the decisions that could send a young soldier to war, or allow another economic disaster, or roll back the equal rights and voting rights that generations of Americans have fought, even died, to secure.
This is pretty vague. I would support a constitutional amendment to clarify that a person is a human being and a human being is a person. Human beings should have the right to free political speech, but corporations and other special interest legal entities should not. The law can be written to preserve the important rights corporations do have that create a fair and predictable playing field for businesses to compete – equal protection under the law, access to the courts, protection from arbitrary seizure of property, and so forth. But the richest and most powerful shouldn’t be able to buy politicians and write the rules of the game unfairly in their favor.
On the possibility of those right-wing self-interested corporate entities joining forces with right-wing grass roots impulses, resulting in something truly ugly:
But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future. And then, as frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.
I wouldn’t have believed that was likely a year ago, but here we are approaching the official beginning of an election season that is turning out to be very surprising, with Obama riding off into the sunset.
Here’s an article about “Strong AI“:
This is how computers interact with us. They don’t understand English or whatever language we speak, but they do understand binary code. A human programmer tells the computer how to respond to you based on your input. The same thing goes for chess. The computer does not at all understand that it’s playing chess or any other game – it doesn’t even know what a game is. It only knows that, if you make a move in chess, that equates to some machine code to which it should respond. It then references its giant chess book – put there by humans and written in machine code – to decide how to respond to you.
Over the years, these tomes have become enormous. Using the chess example again, it would take many years for a human to sift through one of these tomes, but a computer can do it in seconds. As a result, you now have computers that simulate the total sum of human knowledge with regards to chess and yet they don’t understand a lick of it. What they cando, however, is obey the instructions put there by a human to beat you, handily…
Once we have the technology to make an ambulatory, perceptive robot using pre-written instructions (i.e. the ‘tome’), the challenge will then be to ‘birth’ one that has no pre-written instructions and no prior knowledge of the world, forcing it to learn like a human child. This sort of self-learning robot is an example of what Searle calls ‘Strong AI[10]’.
Recently I was talking about how much I enjoyed On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. I knew there was some controversy over the book, but I didn’t realize how much. I actually assumed she was a journalist, but it turns out she is a sociologist and some sociologists think they are not supposed to write books like that. (Later though, the article says that journalists have criticized her and sociologists have defended her, so I am a little confused there.) I don’t think I know any sociologists, or a lot about them. Once I knew an anthropologist, and I asked him how he was different from a sociologist, but he just laughed and never answered my question. The problem, some say, is that she got too close to her subjects, was too quick to repeat everything they told her, and reinforced stereotypes. On the last, I think that is completely false. If anything, she does a lot to humanize and find redeeming qualities in people who do some risky and violent things. As for the way she got personally involved with her subjects, that is what makes the story so engaging. I think ultimately it is a story told from a certain point of view, and you have to keep that point of view in mind almost as though you were reading a novel. Whether that is good academic sociology or not I wouldn’t know, but I enjoyed the book.
By the way, Alice Goffman did a TED talk which is more or less a summary of the book.
Pew Research Center has an interesting blog post showing some “striking findings” from their 2015 work, along with links to various surveys and analyses they did. Even if you didn’t tell me what the topics are, I would be interested in the graphics. Nice, clean time series plots, bar charts, “bump charts” – lots of bump charts, and even a pie. Their maps look good, except I don’t like the animated ones that move before you have time to look at them. They need a pause button.
You can see the striking findings on the site, but here are my top five:
Look at the pictures, they’re much better than my words.
Here are a Bill Moyers interview about, and an excerpt from Mike Lofgren’s essay about, “The Deep State.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries…
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee.
In killer robot news, there is a drone now that can roam around on its own and kill by injecting poison with a needle. No, it’s still not Ray Bradbury’s mechanical hound, which I am still expecting any day now. This one is roaming the Great Barrier Reef murdering starfish.
I still find it just a tiny bit disturbing. But I also wondered if chemical pesticides could be replaced by tiny drones that target specific pests. That is likely to be one topic of the science fiction masterpiece series I plan to write as soon as I become unexpectedly independently wealthy and retire from my day job. Of course, in my science fiction book, they will probably start running amok and killing all the pollinators, which will of course threaten the world food supply. But then someone will invent a pollinator drone, which will seem like a good idea for awhile until in a desperate attempt to save the world’s remaining natural ecosystems, we seed them with these various drones and they, well, run amok somehow. Aren’t most science fiction stories about something or other running amok?
And in one more robot story, there was an autonomous quadcopter unveiled at CES (you’re supposed to just know what that stands for) that can supposedly carry human occupants, although nobody has been brave enough to ride in it.
Ehang, the drone maker, claims its all-electric quadcopter, the Ehang 184, is the first in the world that is capable of operating autonomously. According to the company’s announcement, the vehicle is like an oversized drone – built just big enough to carry a single passenger. That passenger supposedly has only to plug in their desired destination, sit back, and enjoy the ride while the aircraft takes off and climbs up to 11,000 feet. If there is a problem, Ehang says the human passenger can take over the controls and pilot the chopper to safety…
Despite the skepticism, Ehang officials believe their autonomous quadcopter could revolutionize personal travel on a global scale. “It’s been a lifetime goal of mine to make flight faster, easier, and more convenient than ever. The 184 provides a viable solution to the many challenges the transportation industry faces in a safe and energy-efficient way,” said Ehang CEO Huazhi Hu. “I truly believe that Ehang will make a global impact across dozens of industries beyond personal travel. The 184 is evocative of a future we’ve always dreamed of and is primed to alter the very fundamentals of the way we get around.”
There are obvious military uses – no needles attached to these but I don’t see why there couldn’t be. It might seem dangerous to drive these things around town. But one more thought I have is that if we replaced our rubber-wheeled cars with something like this, it could obviate the need for so much pavement even if it were just elevated a few inches or feet off the ground. Maybe they could be soft and just bounce off each other at low speed without damage. Maybe they could stack or hang on hooks rather than needing horizontal parking lots. Maybe we could get rid of a lot of pollution and flooding caused by all that pavement, plus a lot of the toxins that come from tire and brake dust. It might take more energy though to both elevate these vehicles and propel them around than we use on cars now, I am not sure about that. A clean cheap energy source would always be a good idea.