DARQ

Accenture has a report on 2019 technology trends, which they call “post-digital”. Post-digital doesn’t mean digital technology is gone, it just means we are kind of over it and it is now the new minimum level of technology that other technologies build on. They also focus on something they call DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing.” I had to look up distributed ledger technology – this is basically the same thing as blockchain.

I was curious what they think is going on with quantum computing. They don’t have a lot to say actually, but if you dig into the full report there are a couple paragraphs.

And while quantum computing is the furthest from full maturity and impractical as a current investment for most companies, advances in quantum research are bringing costs down significantly. The number of qubits (the quantum equivalent of a bit in a traditional computer) in leading chips is accelerating: it took 19 years to get from a chip with two qubits to a chip with 17, which IBM achieved in 2017; later that year, IBM bested its own record with 50 qubits, and by 2018, Google had unveiled a chip with 72.9,10 In concert with these advances, Microsoft, Rigetti Computing, 1QBit, and other leaders in quantum research are increasingly making their quantum systems available for experimentation via APIs and software development kits (SDKs, or QDKs).11 These offerings give companies a way to develop and test quantum solutions for specific enterprise use cases today.

Volkswagen has used quantum computing to test traffic flow optimization, as well as to simulate the chemical structure of batteries, hoping to accelerate battery development…

what would reparations for slavery actually look like?

This New York Times article attempts to answer the question, but left me a little confused. It seems that many serious studies go back to the idea of “40 acres and a mule” promised to freed slaves by Abraham Lincoln. That promise was never honored. There are several estimates of what that could mean today. But see if you can make sense of this statement: ” He used the current average price of agricultural land and figured that 40 acres of farmland and buildings would amount to roughly $123,000. If all of the four million slaves counted in the 1860 census had been able to take advantage of that offer, it would have totaled more than $486 billion today — or about $16,200 for each descendant of slaves.” There are also ideas for “longer-term investments in education, housing and businesses that build up wealth”.

Here are a few facts the article points out. First, the net worth of the average black household is only about a tenth the net worth of the average white household. I knew there was a gap, but the size of the gap is shocking to me. Second, the United States has paid reparations to descendants of citizens held in Japanese-American internment camps.

Personally, I support reparations in principle, although I think native Americans and anyone born into poverty through no fault of their own suffers just as much as an African American in a similar economic circumstance. One idea would be to pilot social programs like universal health care, child care, and free college initial for African Americans and Native Americans, and then expand them to the general population as they are fine tuned and shown to be successful.

Iran attacking its own customers? Why?

I try to avoid commenting on rapidly unfolding current events, but I’ll make an exception for this supposed attack by Iran on Japanese and Norwegian oil tankers. I can’t actually find this in news stories, but it seems that these tankers must be either on their way to pick up Iranian oil for delivery to world markets, or on their way to world markets with Iranian oil. So what incentive could Iran possibly have for attacking its customers? None that I can see, and this makes the U.S. claim that Iran is responsible completely incoherent. Part of the U.S. claim, if I can understand it correctly, is based on seeing Iranian boats in the area that were involved in rescuing survivors of the attacks. The only possible incentive I can think of for Iran is to demonstrate they can disrupt ships at the mouth of the Persian Gulf if they want to. But there is no need for that – the entire area is bristling with advanced anti-ship missiles and this is not a secret. So to sneak out and secretly attach mines to these ships, then secretly remove them, then rescue the survivors – well, I already said it a couple times, and it is not making any more sense to me the more I think about it.

Who would have an incentive to give Iran’s customers pause in doing business with it. Well, any of Iran’s enemies. This list would include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United States, and Israel.

Or any non-state terrorist group that just wants to sew chaos and make states and oil companies nervous. Sneaking out to secretly attach a mine sounds like their playbook to me. These groups have a tendency to want people to know they are responsible though, and it is strange that there is no mention of that happening.

U.S. officials aren’t even trying to make a plausible case here. It’s embarrassing. The other thing people are point out is the U.S. making the case that Iran is breaching the agreement it made in 2015 to limit uranium enrichment, when it is the U.S. that has declared that agreement null and void.

species persistence and ecosystem fragmentation

Here’s a new paper on relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem fragmentation/connectivity. If I could go back to school and just study whatever I wanted for fun and without economic constraints, maybe this would be it. My basic question would be how much you can really expect to optimize patches and corridors within urban and suburban areas, agricultural areas, and protected natural lands to preserve as much ecosystem function as possible while still supporting a human population.

Species persistence in spatially regular networks

Over the past decades, numerous studies have provided new insights into the importance of spatial network structure for metapopulation persistence. However, systematic work on how variation in patch degree (i.e., the number of neighbors of a patch) in spatial networks modifies metapopulation dynamics is still lacking. Using both pair approximation (PA) and cellular automaton (CA) models, we investigate how different patch network structures affect species persistence while considering both local and global dispersal. Generally, the PA model displays similar metapopulation patterns compared to the CA simulations. Using both models, we find that an increase of relative extinction rate decreases global patch occupancy (GPO) and thereby increases the extinction risk for local dispersers, while increasing patch degree promotes species persistence through increasing dispersal pathways. Interestingly, patch degree does not affect local species clumping in spatially regular patch networks. Relative to local dispersers, species with global dispersal can maintain the highest GPO, and their metapopulation dynamics are not influenced by spatial network structure, as they can establish in any patch randomly without dispersal limitation. Concerning species conservation, we theoretically demonstrate that increasing patch connectivity (e.g., constructing ecological corridors) in spatial patch networks would be an effective strategy for the survival of species with distance-limited dispersal.

is the U.S. becoming a developing country?

This Bloomberg article has a list of areas where the U.S. is following behind its peer group of developing nations.

  • roads, highways, bridges
  • high construction costs for all types of infrastructure, particularly high speed rail causing planned projects to be canceled
  • health care costs and outcomes
  • life expectancy
  • maternal mortality
  • rents rising faster than inflation
  • opioid addiction
  • suicide
  • lead in drinking water
  • poverty and hunger

The article offers the cautionary tale of Italy, which has been sliding backward over a decade or so following many years of similarly flashing warning lights before that.

“competing” with China

This article in Defense One says the U.S. Department of Defense has been ordered to “compete” with China, but they don’t know what that means. One interpretation seems to be that it means a good old-fashioned advising, training, and arms sales. But another interpretation seems to be alliance forming and economic competition. Neither one of these is the military’s job, and they know they don’t have the expertise to perform these functions.

The article does offer some clues as to why some in the military feel threatened by the Belt and Road Initiative.

In Greenland, for example, Beijing sought to finance and build three airports that the DOD feared it could seize for military purposes if Nuuk fell behind on its payments. In Africa, Pentagon leaders are watching to see whether Beijing will invest in a West African port that could harbor its warships at need. “We need to understand it so that we know how to respond to it,” said the Army official.

Belt and Road

The Council on Foreign Relations has a primer on China’s Belt and Road initiative here.

Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings, both westward—through the mountainous former Soviet republics—and southward, to Pakistan, India, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Such a network would expand the international use of Chinese currency, the renminbi, while new infrastructure could “break the bottleneck in Asian connectivity,” according to Xi. (The Asian Development Bank estimates that the region faces a yearly infrastructure financing shortfall of nearly $800 billion.) In addition to physical infrastructure, China plans to build fifty special economic zones, modeled after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which China launched in 1980 during its economic reforms under leader Deng Xiaoping.

Xi subsequently announced plans for the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road at the 2013 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia. To accommodate expanding maritime trade traffic, China would invest in port development along the Indian Ocean, from Southeast Asia all the way to East Africa.

a peace race?

This article in History News Network talks about proposals since World War II for general and complete disarmament. We tend to scoff at ideas like that, assuming that they are impractical and have always been considered so. But actually, it is a case of shifting baseline syndrome where ideas we take for granted to today would have been considered fairly radical in the past, and we don’t realize that because we have lost our memory of the past.