Former Fife teacher found with child abuse images had ‘morbid fascination’ with torture and sadomasochism – The Courier

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A retired Fife history teacher was caught with a stash of extreme pornographic and child sex abuse images, described by investigators as among the worst they had seen.

Depraved Norman Czemerys, 71, had photographs depicting women and children being tortured, bound, sexually abused and raped.

Police raided his Dunfermline home in May last year and almost 1,300 images and videos were found on four devices seized from his study, some of them in the worst category.

Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court heard Czemerys had a morbid fascination with torture and sadomasochism which spiralled out of control.

Procurator fiscal depute Claire Bremner said that images examined during the investigation were some of the worst seen by the analysts.

Czemerys, of Victoria Terrace, Dunfermline, admitted possessing extreme pornographic images depicting the sexual assault and torture of women between March 9 and May 14 last year and taking or permitting to be taken or making indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children between September 2011 and May 2019.

He was warned by Sheriff Jamie Gilchrist QC it was very likely he would be jailed when he returns for sentence on April 8, but his suitability for a community-based disposal is to be assessed.

Married father-of-two Czemerys, an accomplished artist, was a teacher for 34 years, including at Dunfermline High School, before he retired in June 2006.

Solicitor Stephen Morrison told the court: Mr Czemerys is deeply ashamed by his behaviour, thoroughly embarrassed and indeed disgusted and repulsed.

He said Czemerys claimed to have had dark thoughts since adolescence, when he suffered psychological abuse.

He said: He started exploring in detail these thoughts after he retired.

He had always been fascinated as a history teacher about mans inhumanity to man.

He said Czemerys morbid interest began with the adult pictures but he became desensitised and his curiosity grew, leading him to view more extreme images and child sex abuse images.

Czemerys conceded there was a degree of sexual gratification, he said.

Mr Morrison said: Otherwise he was an upstanding member of the community.

As a consequence he that, he tells me, even as he was doing this searching and exploration he was both disgusted and repulsed first of all by his own behaviour and also by some of the images he saw, hence a high percentage of them were deleted.

Mr Morrison said Czemerys, who suffered bouts of depression when his offending escalated, recognised that his crimes were not victimless and he had sought help and counselling.

Czemerys was placed on the sex offenders register.

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Former Fife teacher found with child abuse images had 'morbid fascination' with torture and sadomasochism - The Courier

Microsoft, EY And ConsenSys To Make The Public Ethereum Blockchain Safe For Enterprises – Forbes

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Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder, Ethereum; Founder, Consensys

Blockchain, as a new technology, has faced fair critique in the last few years that it is a solution looking for a problem. This was mostly echoed by the predominant usage of blockchain in centralized, private and permissioned consortiums led by some of the largest enterprises in the world like Walmart, IBM and Carrefour. While they are trying to use the new technology for its obvious benefits like immutability, programmable smart contracts and the trustless nature of consensus-driven blockchain networks in areas like supply chain, financial services and healthcare, some of the benefits of using blockchain are minimized due to the centralized nature of the private networks.

Enterprises trying to escape from the private blockchain world encounter a challenge due to the many compliance and regulatory restrictions they face internally and externally and the general fear of their private data being exposed to the public or competitors. So far, we have seen several key examples when enterprises were using the public blockchain for important transactions. For example, late last year Banco Santander launched a $20 million bond on the Ethereum network, publicly revealing the issuing smart contract and the originating transactions on the ledger. The other significant effort was made by EY, releasing their privacy-protecting framework called Nightfall, which uses the popular zk-snarks technology to create an extra layer of privacy for Ethereum transactions.

This is all about to change soon as some of the largest players in the blockchain space like Microsoft, EY and ConsenSys are taking on the public Ethereum blockchain with their initiative called Baseline Protocol. This is a major development in the space because the initiative is taking a completely different approach than previous efforts. In the past, enterprises were looking at the blockchain network mostly as a settlement layer, a place to store the final state of their transactions. This was the most obvious usage as this is the logic that most closely resembles the centralized databases enterprises are used to. But that is not the case with the Baseline Protocol initiative: They are taking a different approach and looking at the public blockchain as middleware and not a settlement layer with the help of privacy-preserving techniques like zero-knowledge tools. There are many use cases in the enterprise world where you need to have an integration layer that is always available, without downtimes, stays the same and is accessible for all the partners on your network. Think about all the enterprises spending a lot of money to maintain development teams focused only on connecting different ERP and CRM systems with their internal databases while maintaining the integrity of the data. This heavy lifting can be mitigated now using the Baseline Protocol, which is released as an open-sourced project funded by Ethereum Foundation and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Over the last two years, we have been advancing the state of the art for private, secure transactions on public blockchains. This takes the groundwork we have built and starts filling in gaps such as enterprise directories and private business logic, so companies will be able to run end-to-end processes like procurement with strong security.

The effort is initiated by ConsenSys, EY and Microsoft, but also participated in by numerous others like Splunk, ChainLink, Unibright and MakerDAO, which are all important in the crypto and blockchain space. Each one of the dozen companies in the initiative brings something different and will play an important role moving forward.

A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what its not good at.

Suffice to say that we are living in exciting times as we continue to work on and build the different components of the blockchain stack. Enterprises moving from private, permissioned networks to using the public blockchain network will be a significant leap; it will need to pass many technical tests and be fitted into the cost analysis and risk management framework models we do for our current tooling. The inception of Baseline Protocol will only help and hopefully lead the way in that direction.

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Microsoft, EY And ConsenSys To Make The Public Ethereum Blockchain Safe For Enterprises - Forbes

The Global Struggle For Information About COVID-19 Is A Reminder Of Blockchains True Value – Forbes

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Patients infected by the COVID-19 coronavirus wait to be transferred from Wuhan No.5 Hospital to ... [+] Leishenshan Hospital, the newly-built hospital for the COVID-19 coronavirus patients, in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on March 3, 2020. - Across the world, 3,127 people have died from the new virus. More than 92,000 have been infected in 77 countries and territories, according to AFP's latest toll based on official sources at 1100 GMT on March 3. (Photo by STR / AFP) / China OUT (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

When crypto and blockchain technology get brought up in casual conversation, it often turns to the multiple ways they can be misappropriated by illicit actors. Examples include:

Laundering money

Financing terror

Trading drugs and other contraband

Crypto advocates immediately get defensive.

After all, they must concede that crypto could be used for these things, just like cash, but it can be difficult to present a tangible value proposition beyond investing that makes an impression.

No more. Not since COVID-19.

Since the virus first emerged, governments have struggled to find the right balance between providing up-to-date information without inciting panic and upending social order. In countries like the United States the issue is more about preventing fear mongering and ensuring a united front across the government.

For more authoritarian regimes the overarching concern is limiting social unrest and maintaining public faith in the regime.

This is a shame, because for something this important citizens should not have to rely on governments for what could turn out to be life-saving information.

With blockchain technology, they may no longer have to do so.

The Butterfly Information Effect in China

Countries like China were too slow to get information about COVID-19 to their population at the outset, and now they are struggling to allow for a tolerable amount of online dissent without losing control.

What does this look like in practice? According to a recent report from the University of Torontos Citizen Lab, censored content included criticism of government, rumors and speculative information on the epidemic, references to the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and neutral references to Chinese government efforts on handling the outbreak that had been reported on state media. Some specific examples cited in the report included:

YY, a live-streaming platform in China, began to censor keywords related to the outbreak on December 31, 2019, a day after doctors (including Dr. Li Wenliang) tried to warn the public about the then unknown virus.

WeChat broadly censored coronavirus-related content (including critical and neutral information) and expanded the scope of censorship in February 2020.

Whats worse, Citizen Lab found that the censors were blocking access toinformation sources,not just commentary about COVID-19.

The View From Tehran

In Iran, the government has been inundated with accusations that it is minimizing the impact of the virus within its borders. The numbers suggest there is truth behind them. For instance, according to official figures cited in theFinancial Times,Iran has the highest COVID-19 mortality rate in the world.

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 02: An ambulance staff wearing a protective mask and a suit takes a patient to ... [+] a hospital as death toll from coronavirus (Covid-19) rises to 66 in Tehran, Iran on March 02, 2020. The death toll from coronavirus in Iran has reached to 66 as 12 more people lost their lives due to the virus and the total number of confirmed cases rose to 1,501. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

This seems hard to imagine since by the time it reached Iran much more was known about the virus than when it first emerged in China. Therefore, there are only two ways that this can be true:

1.For some reason COVID-19 is more deadly in Iran than anywhere else in the world

2.The Iranian government is underreporting the number of cases in the country

If the latter is true, why would Iranian officials do this? Well, from the perspective in Tehran all of this obfuscation makes sense for a couple of reasons:

The healthcare system in Iran is substandard

The government is still reeling from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps accidentally shooting down a citizen airliner earlier this year

Obviously neither one of these options is ideal, but if the latter is true it could mean that the government unnecessarily exposed millions of citizens to the virus.

We All Deserve Better

Citizens in China, Iran, and other countries around the world should not have access to potentially life-saving information filtered, or censored, by governments with competing priorities.

Every governments top priority is to protect its citizens, and during times of global health emergencies that involves directly giving people full and correct information, or at the very least letting them find it for themselves.

Blockchain Technology and Open Protocols are the First Step

Blockchain technology at least solves one of these issues. Open networks are censorship-resistant and immutable. When information goes up on a blockchain it stays there forever. This could prove to be a necessary lifeline for individuals in affected areas.

Now, it is important to note that these traits are necessary, but not sufficient by themselves to solve the problem. We must have the infrastructure and applications necessary to send billions of messages and gigabytes of data. Additionally, citizens need ways to evaluate the accuracy of data and detect the signal from the noise. Finally, citizens in China, North Korea, and other restricted areas require consistent access to the Internet. Fortunately, work is taking place behind these scenes, and hopefully things will be different during the next crisis.

However, with blockchain technology the first step is in place, suggesting we are off to the right start.

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The Global Struggle For Information About COVID-19 Is A Reminder Of Blockchains True Value - Forbes

Don’t Touch Anything: The Unintended Consequences of Environmental Ecosystems – The Good Men Project

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So far Ive only written about human systems and the unintended consequences that arise from them. But the natural world is complex also. We are just beginning to understand the interconnections of living and non-living things. Environmental ecosystems can also be pushed in one direction or another by human intervention and other activities. That means plenty of second-order effects.

Ecosystems are often complex beyond our ability to appreciate them, but on the surface, they can seem simple. Maybe this is why there have been so many attempts to alter ecosystems by adding to them or subtracting from them. The impact of those additions or subtractions can tough to know in advance, but the impact can be estimated and controlled. Beyond intentionally changing an ecosystem, there are also all of the non-human changes that occur.

Theres a blurry line between invasive or introduced species and native or indigenous species. To be counted as invasive or introduced, there needs to be human intervention a distinction without a difference if the result ends up the same. Species move around the world on their own all the time (wind, sea, on or in the bodies of their hosts). Then there are gray areas, such as species that navigate to new environments by floating on plastic in the ocean. They can hitch a ride on floating material that is only there because of human activity, but it wasnt humans who brought the species to any specific place.

While it might seem odd today to intentionally introduce and spread species from other parts of the world, in the 1800s, this interventionist attitude was common in acclimatization societies.

From a Lecture on Acclimatisation in Australia: The societies were about the acclimatization or art of introducing the Mammalia, birds, fishes, and insects into countries to which they are foreign, utilizing them in places where they were formerly unknown, and in such congenial localities as may conduce to their being reared and propagated with success thus reducing our scientific knowledge to useful and practical purposes.

Two factors encouraged this work. First, there were food shocks felt around the world, including for example the effects of the potato blight in Ireland. One idea supporting species introduction was to lower the risk of dependence on only local foods.

The other factor encouraged or at least that didnt stop these societies is the lack of understanding of the risks they were creating. It was apparently rare in these societies to debate the impact species introduction might have on local ecosystems and how to introduce species in a controlled manner.

Here are ways that ecosystems change by the addition or subtraction of just one species.

Intentional introduction for food. Rabbits in Australia. Feral pigs in the Americas.

Introduced as a food source in the 1800s, rabbits have caused ecological damage by multiplying so quickly that the food they ate depleted plant life and led to soil erosion. Rabbits in Australia are an example of just how fast things can change when a small number of fast reproducing, fast-moving, versatile animals are introduced into a suitable environment.

Rabbits can bread only in Spring and Summer in Europe, but year-round in much of Australia. They were a good candidate to cause environmental scaling effects in Australia. And they did. Rabbits are the fastest reproducing mammal in the world.

Multiple efforts to eradicate or control them, from germ warfare to a fence spanning the western part of Australia, have been unsuccessful.

Pigs were introduced into the Americas multiple times. First by Columbus, who brought eight pigs on his voyage to Cuba in 1493. Then by Hernando de Soto who brought 13 pigs to Florida in 1539. Apparently, by 1542 that pig herd grew to 700, not including those that escaped. Hernando Cortez brought pigs to New Mexico in 1600. Sir Walter Raleigh brought pigs to Jamestown in 1607. Pigs were even introduced from Europe as late as the 1930s. In some locations, the wild pigs are a nuisance with repeated attempts to eradicate or control their populations. So far, control has not worked. Feral pig populations can expand quickly, even with efforts at control. Generalist eaters suited for many different environments and too big for most predators, they are mostly considered a nuisance today.

Intentional introduction to combat another species. Cane toads in Australia.

Cane toads are native to Latin America but were introduced to Australia to combat a beetle that ate sugar cane roots. The Australian sugar cane plantations were themselves a new experiment. And the cane toads never did eat many of those beetles.

Native species in Australia, unaware that cane toads are also poisonous, die trying to eat them. Predators seem to be learning though. Some birds learned to attack the toads underbelly and avoid the poison glands on its back, while some snakes with smaller jaws (which dont enable them to eat the large cane toad) succeeded in reproducing and passing on that trait.

Efforts at cane toad control include training potential predators like water monitors, quolls, and bluetongue lizards to avoid the cane toads by administering manageable amounts of toad, which convinces the would-be predators to stay away.

There was broad approval in the 1930s of the plan to introduce this species to Australia.

Intentional introduction as art. Starlings in the US.

Its not every day that we can blame the Bard of Avon and his fans for an unintended consequence. But Eugene Schieffelin hoped to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare. He imported starlings from England and released them in Manhattan in 1890 and 1891. Starlings soon started to drive native birds out of their habitats, ate massive amounts of crops, and spread disease. By the 1940s, starlings had reached California. They now number in the hundreds of millions.

If youre wondering, Shakespeare only mentioned starlings in Henry IV Part I. A list of all the other birds is here.

Accidental introduction. The brown tree snake in Guam and other islands in the South Pacific.

The brown tree snake, native to Australia and parts of Southeast Asia, was accidentally introduced into Guam. The theories are that the snakes hitched a ride on ships or aircraft landing gear after WWII. Guam was an easy location for the snakes to colonize quickly since the island didnt have natural predators for them. What followed was the local or total extinction of many bird species, including the Guam Flycatcher.

Guam, as a transportation hub, became the staging ground for the brown tree snakes entrance to many other environments that suited it. The attempt to kill off the brown tree snake population starting in 2010 (60 years after its introduction) was to drop mice stuffed with Tylenol (poisonous to the snakes) in trees where the snakes would eat them. This kill techniques design seems well targeted at brown tree snakes (well, well see). As one of the few snakes that will also scavenge for food (and will, therefore, eat the poisoned dead mice), the program has a chance. I cant find much detail related to how well the program has reduced the brown tree snake population. Well see.

Intentional reintroduction of native species that went extinct. Beavers in UK.

Beavers went extinct in UK in the 1600s. A few years ago they were reintroduced into Scotland and England for reasons including flood control and beavers encouragement of greater species diversity in places they inhabit. When beavers were reintroduced, people revolted. But these releases have apparently been controlled and studied in the small scale and it looks like the reintroduction has (so far) been beneficial. Again, well see.

The estimate is that there are 50,000 introduced species in the US (out of 750,000 species present here). The examples above are just a handful of the more noticeable ones.

Years ago someone told me a story about a big media company. They had to rip up part of the floor in one of their offices to make repairs and discovered a tangled mass of communications cables snaking underneath. What did they do? Replace and reconnect the cables? No. When they saw that tangled mass, they touched nothing down there and carefully replaced the floorboards. Who knows where each cable led and what content it carried? Better just to leave things as they were.

In a complicated system, unless you understand how your change makes things better, better just to leave things as is.

And if you want to read about a system falling apart in something as predictable as a pocket watch, see Mark Twain.

Previously published on Unintendedconsequenc.es.

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Herbs That Fight Viruses – Newsmax

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Herbal healing has been around for centuries and even in today's high-tech society, it has an important role in keeping us disease-free and healthy. A study published in the Journal of Functional Foods says that elderberry extract is an effective way to block viruses from entering, or even attaching to, healthy cells. Researchers applied a serum made from elderberries directly onto cells before, during, and even after they had been infected with the influenza virus.

"We found that the serum had a direct antiviral effect against the flu virus," said lead researcher Dr. Golnoosh Torabian. Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum, MD., author of "From Fatigued to Fantastic," tells Newsmax that he is "concerned" about the possible spread of the coronavirus and says, according to research by the National Institutes of Health, elderberry extract is also effective in inhibiting this particular novel virus.

"The form I would recommend is called Virapro," he says. "It not only contains elderberry, but also zinc, vitamins C and D, and retinol, which are critical for immunity."

Dr. Ellen Kamhi, Ph.D., author of "The Natural Medicine Chest," says it's important to shore up our immune systems whenever there is a threat of a viral invasion.

"The best approach is to do all you can do to help support the immune system since it controls our ability to fend off illness, whether it be a deadly disease, or even the common cold," she tells Newsmax. Eat a healthy diet and reduce stress, while enlisting herbs as part of your anti-germ warfare, she says. "Besides elderberry, technically called Sambucus nigra, which has been proven not only to prevent the flu but to reduce its symptoms, there is an arsenal of herbs to help you stay well."

Astragalus. One study by the National Cancer Institute demonstrated astragalus' ability to strengthen the body's immune response, especially against viral infections.

Echinacea. This well-respected and researched herb is an immune stimulant that increases the activity of white blood cells.

Garlic. Garlic has been used for centuries as food and as medicine, according to Healthline. It enhances the immune system by boosting the disease-fighting response of white blood cells thanks to its sulfur compounds. Studies show that garlic not only reduces the length and symptoms of illness, it can also prevent you from getting sick in the first place. One study showed that the group who took garlic regularly had a 63% lower risk of getting a cold, and their colds were 70% shorter. Garlic supplements, such as Aged Garlic Extract or AGE, retain the medicinal benefits of raw or cooked garlic against colds and flu.

Oil of Oregano. Chock-full of disease-fighting vitamins and minerals, this herbal blend contains many active chemicals that provide beneficial support to our bodies, says Kamhi. "It is exceptional in its ability to destroy several different kinds of microorganisms including bacteria, fungus, virus and parasites," she says.

Rosemary. This herb has been used as an anti-infective agent since ancient times. Kamhi reveals that it was burned in hospitals and sick rooms to purify the air and fight infections. "It was also used in courts to keep the judge and jurors from contracting plagues and fevers that the prisoner's brought up from the dungeons," she says.

2020 NewsmaxHealth. All rights reserved.

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Letter to the editor: Don’t get your coronavirus information from Rush – The Winchester Star

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The CDC has recently issued a warning about the potential threat of the coronavirus, stating the spread of the deadly virus in the USA is inevitable. In the February 27, 2020, edition of The Winchester Star appeared an editorial which noted that as the COVID-19 virus is dangerous and that inasmuch as its spread to the USA is inevitable, we should be worried about the potential consequences.

I am very much afraid that for many of The Stars readers this message will be met with scorn and simply dismissed as liberal tripe. That is because many of The Stars readers take their advice, pandemics-wise, not from the CDC or the media, but from their favorite snake oil salesman, Rush Limbaugh. On February 24, 2020, he said the virus is no more concerning then the common cold and that the media is over-hyping the potential danger and weaponizing the outbreak against Trump. He also maintains that the outbreak is a result of a Chinese government germ warfare research program gone awry. (He failed to say why the Chinese would want to give everyone a bad case of the sniffles! Perhaps they bought up stock in Kleenex.)

For those of you who do not find his absurd rhetoric appalling, listen up! Perhaps you could persuade him to test his thesis that the virus is no more dangerous than a common cold by getting him to travel to China. He could then expose himself to the virus to prove it is no more dangerous than the common cold. This selfless action would go a long ways toward establishing his credentials as an epidemiologist of note and a true humanitarian. I would contact him myself to make this suggestion, but alas we are not on the best of terms.

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Letter to the editor: Don't get your coronavirus information from Rush - The Winchester Star

What If Donald Got the Bug? – LA Progressive

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Have you gone off eating at your favorite Chinese restaurant yet? Are you sufficiently terrified of the Corona virus to have switched from Mexican beer to Coors? Maybe you shouldnt touch your screen while reading this column. Im writing it sitting in a Chinese buffet in the largely Asian San Gabriel Valley.

In the rightwing blogosphere, the word is out that Corona virus is really just a false flag conspiracy. The point of the conspiracy is to conceal the truththat the Donalds tariffs and trade-stalling policies are causing the Chinese economy to crash. Trumpanzees climbing every antenna tower in the Wall St. jungle want us to know that the Donalds policies are working, and worldwide scientists and economists are faking a pandemic risk to conceal the truth of the Donalds success.

Are you sufficiently terrified of the Corona virus to have switched from Mexican beer to Coors? Maybe you shouldnt touch your screen while reading this column.

Im skeptical. But the concept certainly sponsors other thoughts of conspiracies and ideas for plans with way more actual public benefit. The Donald is famously a germophobe. His love of McDonalds food is based as much in its imagined sterile character, always wrapped up, as in its grease content. The Donald apparently has never been told that each burger is actually assembled by human hands before being wrapped in sterile paper.

So heres my plan. Lets get someone to infect the Donald with Corona virus. First, since symbolism is so much more important than substance to the Republican base, how wonderful would it be for the Mexico-bashing wannabee king to be struck down by a virus named using the Spanish word for crown? It would surely be the crowning achievement of his presidency.

And this plan involves no complex planning or resources to pull off, no Jason Bourne super soldier training or Tom Cruise wire gags. Just reliance on the everyday conduct of those who know that their natural superiority exempts them from such things as law and science. Any White House visitor, but preferably one going to an Oval Office meeting, could deliver an unplanned, unexpected sneeze full of virus spores.

A member of the press could drop a used tissue into a wastebasket near an HVAC vent. The trick here would be to infect a member of Fox News, or Breitbart, or any other alt-white journalistic establishment. So when the Donald issues an executive order barring the liberal media from the White House as a health safety measure, but allowing the alt-white media to continue worshipping him, it will be one of his own acolytes earning the credit for the infection.

Will Billious Barr then prosecute the offending alt-white journalist for treason for attempting (and perhaps succeeding) to assassinate the president? If the Donald succumbs to the virus, Judge Pirro and Judge Napolitano can fill Fox with debates about whether U.S. law can punish deicide. Would the John Roberts Supreme Court hold deicide to be a protected exercise of sincerely held religious belief?

No one really needs to enlist either the liberal media or the alt-white pundits in any plot to give the Donald the Corona virus. The banality of politics is that it is very much like everyday life in its details. Any infected Secret Service agent, any office secretary, or White House janitor can spread the virus around the halls at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Completely by accident.

Sneeze once, then use your desk phone to call personnel to tell them youre going home, and the replacement worker who picks up the same phone to announce that theyre in place becomes a disease vector.

How about the guys who deliver copy paper to the White House loading dock, or fresh food to the White House kitchen? Will Barons private tutor or playmates hand off one virus spore or a billion? The Donalds Karl Rove, Stephen Miller could bring the virus back with him from his recent honeymoon.

The easiest protection against the Corona virus is to keep it out of the country. If we can build a wall to keep out big, burly beaners, then surely were up to building a wall to block itsy bitsy junk smaller than cells?! All we really need is to take a few $Billion more from the Pentagon (maybe from their germ warfare planners?) and transfer it to the corporate donor construction companies who are already getting the wall building contracts.

But this week, the Donald announced that hes going to admit 50% more foreign workers for seasonal employment this year than last year, to fill positions as golf course laborers and resort housekeepers. It seems that too many American workers either dont want the jobs at all, or at least demand that they actually receive pay for doing the work. So well bring in foreign workers, trusting in their promises that they have had no exposure to any foreign viruses.

What about all those ISIS and al Qaeda cell terrorists that weve been told lurk around the border, mingling with would-be immigrants? Why wont they infect the seasonal laborers to get Corona virus into the U.S.? There are a few clear answers in White House thinking: First, all those terrorists are infiltrating the gangs of immigrants at the border. So theyll never get mixed up with seasonal workers recruited further inland; Second, theyre all religious fundamentalists, therefore, as dumb about science as Southern Baptists, and incapable of planning an attack using diseases instead of bombs; Third, youre supposed to have stopped thinking about them, now that our press releases have moved past putting little brown children in cages.

One of the things that we dont need for sure is any more silly globalist cooperation with other nations. The Donald has closed down Americas pandemic planning and research operation that coordinated with foreign governments. It was part of the National Security Council deep state operations. Had to drain that deep state swamp.

We dont want any damn foreign diseases in our grate nation, any more than we want foreign workers (except seasonal ones). So as part of Making America Grate Again, we have reduced cooperation with foreign government disease researchers, just as we are reducing cooperation between British and American intelligence operations. Dr. Spock can no longer talk to Dr. Who, just like James Bond and Felix Leiter can no longer work together.

The Corona virus outbreak became public in December of last year. So the Donalds administration planners have known about it for a while. With that knowledge, the Donalds next federal budget proposal, released in February, calls for spending reductions for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those organizations do science, and we all know how Republicans feel about science.

And while well be cutting back on CDC research, the Donald also proposes cutting back on Medicare and Medicaid, to ensure that people who get the virus wont get the treatment.

During his Wednesday afternoon press conference, the Donald told us that hes appointing Mike Pence to run our Corona virus effort. Grate. Mike Pence, christian scientist, who, along with Mike Pomposo, wants to bring about Armageddon! Could Corona virus be the Pestilence the bible promises us? How can we give it grater effect?

As a show of his munificence, the Donald announced that he will allow U.S. citizens who caught the virus overseas to be allowed to return to their own home country where they are citizens. But they will have to remain in quarantine. Since they are mostly white and wealthy enough to travel, their quarantines will be of a different sort from the cages holding brown children. But still, hes only letting them come back home as a show of his kindness. Not because they have any legal rights that he has to recognize.

Now we have troops in Korea coming down with Corona virus. We dont know yet whether the grate orange munificence will allow them to return home. Soldiers are generally young, powerless, and as Phil Ochs wrote, so eager to go and die upon a foreign shore. Recent polls show too many troopers turning against the orange messiah. Maybe its best to leave them to ride out the disease in Korea or where ever.

It would be the height of patriotism for one of those returning citizens, or a soldier infected overseas, if invited to the White House or a campaign event as a campaign exploitation event, to sneeze the Corona virus on the Donald, or even just a Secret Service agent in the Donalds close personal protection detail.

Tom Hall

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What If Donald Got the Bug? - LA Progressive

Lawmakers vote to repeal minimum wage exemption for nannies and maids – Virginia Mercury

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Virginia lawmakers finalized passage of legislation Friday that repeals minimum wage exemptions for domestic workers such as maids and nannies.

The advocacy group Care in Action, which advocates nationally for the workers, said Virginia is the first state in the South to adopt such protections.

Weve been waiting for this victory for 400 years, Alexsis Rodgers, the groups state director, said in a statement. Due to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow era laws, domestic workers were left unprotected and seen as less than compared to other workers. Today, we let Virginia and the rest of the country know that domestic workers are valued workers and must be treated as such.

Domestic workers are already covered by federal minimum wage laws, which mandates workers be paid $7.25 an hour, but the law means the workers will be able to file unpaid wage complaints at the state level.

It also guarantees the workers will be included in any legislation raising the minimum wage at the state level, which lawmakers are still negotiating. Thats one of the reasons Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, said she proposed the legislation as a standalone bill.

We wanted to be sure at a minimum the domestic worker exemption went away, she said.

The legislation does not include au pairs, who are foreign workers who come to the country through a program regulated by the federal government.

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Lawmakers vote to repeal minimum wage exemption for nannies and maids - Virginia Mercury

Letters to the Editor: Readers weigh in on Democratic candidates – Charleston Post Courier

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Support Warren

I have worked in politics and on campaigns off and on for 20 years, since I was 19, constantly in search of a candidate who is inspirational, wise, thoughtful, brilliant, authentic, idealistic yet realistic, visionary yet practical, tough yet compassionate, a leader of honesty and integrity, a president who is a strong leader yet also one of the people.

I finally found my candidate: Elizabeth Warren.

I have been through a lot these past few years, battling tragedy, loss, illness, just as our country has been through a lot. Warren inspires me, she lifts me up, and she can do that for this whole country.

We need a president who inspires us to believe that great things are still possible, that big dreams are attainable, that hard work pays

off, that no one is left behind, a president who will work to help make these truths, dreams, ideas and ideals a reality for all Americans.

If my mom were still living, she and I would vote for Elizabeth Warren together. I trust Warren to be by the side of all when she is president.

President Elizabeth Warren. Gosh, that sounds awesome! Lets make history, South Carolina. Lets dream big and work hard together.

MICHELLE LINDSEY

Farr Street

Daniel Island

Reflecting on Bernie Sanders recent laudatory comments on the Castro regime in Cuba, I am wondering what good he might find in the Chavez/Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela.

NEWTON KLEMENTS

Confederate Circle

Charleston

I would like to make some comments regarding the Feb. 24 Post and Courier letter to the editor regarding Bernie Sanders for president. I am 70 years old. I am not an attorney, but I have been a CEO or president of several financial companies in my lifetime. Here are my concerns:

Geographic cost of living differences do not support one standard $15-an-hour wage because earners will be impacted differently. Do not forget any rise in wage expense will result in higher prices for goods and services, or lower company profits, which Sanders wants to tax at higher rates to pay for his agenda.

My fathers example to me was to make sacrifices to pay for his childrens education. My first job out of college paid me $500 a month and I saved to ultimately pay for my daughters college education. I am sure millions of other parents did, and do, the same thing. Why is that no longer acceptable?

I depend on Medicare. I have a deductible, have a supplement to help cover the costs Medicare does not cover, have a drug policy to cover what Medicare does not cover. My deductible and premiums went up this year. Dont be fooled: Medicare is not free. Watch what happens when hospitals and doctors have to accept Medicare-approved billing limits when there are no longer private insurers paying the larger charges.

There are not enough billionaires to cover all of what Sanders plans to give us for free.

DOUG MILLER

Old Tavern Court

Mount Pleasant

The next president of the United States will be the commander in chief of our military.

There are only two people running for president that have served in the military. All the others turned their back on this country, but now they want the country to support them.

How can you be commander of something that you know nothing about?

The two people who served are Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg, both in combat zones.

If you are a veteran or serving in the military, then you need to vote for one of them. I am giving my vote to Tulsi Gabbard. She seems to be a Christian. So if you are Christian, vote for Ms. Gabbard.

Vote for what is best for this country. Some of the men running for office claim a woman cant be president. If you are a woman, prove them wrong, vote for a woman. I do not know Ms. Gabbard and have never spoken to her.

I just want what is best for my country. Again, forget party this one time.

LARRY BAILEY

Linwood Lane

Summerville

I see The Post and Courier is very interested in S.C. Congressman Jim Clyburns 2020 presidential endorsement.

That is curious, considering the congressmans comments to the media last week when he had the audacity to say that African Americans unemployment during slavery was better than today because, in his words, they were fully employed during slavery.

With many of his voters and constituents forebearers, indeed, being slaves, Clyburn was incredibly insensitive to the district he represents and to the entire nation.

Instead of eagerly awaiting Clyburns endorsement, all candidates should be running from it.

In fact, it seems to me that our congressman is so out of touch with his constituents and the history of slavery that he should not run for reelection himself.

JOHN KUHN

Former state senator

Water Street

Charleston

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Letters to the Editor: Readers weigh in on Democratic candidates - Charleston Post Courier

How to Actually Close the Racial Wealth Gap – CityLab

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In Atlanta, a new study found that homes in predominantly black neighborhoods lost value even as homes in predominantly white neighborhoods gained. Chris Rank/Bloomberg Economic plans like Mike Bloombergs assume that boosting black homeownership and entrepreneurs will close racial wealth gaps. New research suggests it wont.

Owning a home and a business has always been central to the American Dream. But recent scholarship has called into question the idea that fulfilling this dream has actually improved African Americans quality of life.

For decades, encouraging African-American homeownership and entrepreneurship has been a common proposal for those who want to narrow the racial wealth gap. In a recent prominent example, Michael Bloomberg unveiled a plan in his presidential campaign to bolster economic outcomes for African Americans that banks on these tools.

(Disclosure: CityLab was recently acquired by Bloomberg LP. Michael Bloomberg is the company's founder and majority owner.)

The top-line goals of the plan, known as the Greenwood Initiative, are creating one million new black homeowners, 100,000 new black businesses, and investing $70 billion in the 100 most disadvantaged neighborhoods of the U.S. The New York Daily News called it an initiative similar to calls for reparations for slavery, and the Bloomberg campaign says it will close the racial wealth gap while saying homeownership in particular is a vital way to build generational wealth and community and is a pillar of the American Dream for many.

Its a worthy effort considering that the homeownership gap between black and white Americans is larger today than it was 50 years ago, before the Fair Housing Act was passed. In fact, the wage gap between black and white workers is also significantly wider now than it was in 2000, despite black wages last year exceeding 2000 levels for the first time since the recession dissipated.

Amongst 2020 Democratic candidates, Warrens and Sanders racial equity plans advocate for more sweeping wealth-redistribution changes, such as the Green New Deal, free universal health care,reparations, and offering federal housing assistance to victims of redlining. The Greenwood Initiative offers federal matching funds for housing down payments in the countrys most disadvantaged communities and offers to streamline housing down-payment programs in general. Its a results-oriented tack thats garnered Bloomberg quite a bit of black support, despite his more reckless record on other issues important to the black community, such as stop-and-frisk policing practices. But its not clear that it will achieve its intended goals.

Several new studies cast doubt on the idea that simply owning homes or businesses can help dissolve racial economic inequities. The first, from a group of University of Georgia geography scholars, concludes that a racial appreciation gap exists in the housing market that hinders African Americans ability to generate wealth through owning a home. The research team analyzed home sale values throughout the city of Atlanta and its immediate suburbs areas that have some of the highest rates of black homeownership and some of the most economically diverse populations of black homeowners in the U.S. and found that houses in predominantly black neighborhoods have failed to appreciate in value since the mortgage crash recovery began. Meanwhile, houses in predominantly white neighborhoods have appreciated considerably.

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By comparing the price of Atlanta homes before the most recent housing boom (from 2000 to 2003) with housing prices during the housing crash recovery (2014 to 2016), they found the largest price upticks occurred in neighborhoods that were at least 75% white and had the highest household incomes. These neighborhoods saw their houses appreciate by $91,414 in the study time period. For white neighborhoods with moderately high incomes, houses appreciated by $71,094, and by $57,742 in low-income white neighborhoods.

In the same time span, black neighborhood housing prices depreciated at every income level: By $22,168 for high-income, by $23,163 in moderate-income, and by $37,686 in low-income black neighborhoods.

That is not to argue that programs designed to lower down payments and reduce interest rates on home loans should not be pursued, reads the study, published this month in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. It is rather to stress that the persistence of a racial appreciation gap severely constrains the ability of such mechanisms to abate racial wealth inequality.

Racial segregation also plays a role in how companies are perceived by customers, and their profitability. A new study from the Brookings Institution found a correlation between positive Yelp reviews and revenue growth but not for minority-owned businesses. In fact, the businesses located in majority-black neighborhoods with the highest Yelp ratings actually saw less revenue growth between 2016 and 2019 than poorly reviewed businesses located in predominantly white neighborhoods. Thats true regardless of the race of the owner, which means the revenue gap is likely a function of racial segregation people spending less money with a business because of the black racial composition of the community.

Overall, the researchers found a 2% annual revenue gap between businesses in non-Black-majority neighborhoods and Black-majority neighborhoods, amounting to $1.3 billion in unrealized revenue each year, reads the report. This gap jumps to $3.9 billion when comparing highly-rated businesses in Black-majority neighborhoods with highly-rated businesses in other neighborhoods.

Racial segregation in both the housing and credit-finance markets have perpetuated the racial appreciation and revenue gaps described by the studies above. And Anne Price, president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, argues in a new paper that without reconstructing the systems that created those gaps in the first place, there will be little improvement in black lives mattering.

Focusing exclusively on closing the gap distracts us from reckoning with the systemic economic decisions that are actually driving racial wealth inequality and thus hinders us from addressing its root causes, she writes in her report, Dont Fixate on the Racial Wealth Gap.

Case in point: The same systems that helped black families buy homes and open businesses are the ones that foreclosed on those homes and businesses, particularly during the housing and finance crashes of 2008. Prices report points out that after the housing market collapse, cities with large black populations began increasing their reliance on criminal fines and court fees to plug budget holes, which in many places had a disproportionate effect on African Americans. Passing laws that eliminate voter suppression, strengthen labor laws, dissolve mass incarceration and curb corporate power all the myriad ways in which forces have extracted wealth from African Americans is a more important emphasis, Price argues.

If we focus on the structural, then we can think about this beyond just the pure financial measure of looking at a dollar amount, but rather focusing on all the kinds of less-tangible areas that wealth bestows, Price told CityLab, such as allowing us greater kinds of decision-making and less-constrained choices, which enables us to live much more dignified lives.

Warrens and Sanders plans to address racial justice issues tap a bit more into the structural revolutions that Price calls for. They both have explicit promises to end redlining, in all of its forms (though their solutions, too, may not quite be tailored to solve the problem), while Bloomberg seemed to be struggling in 2008 with what the real deleterious impacts of redlining have been for black communities.

Warren and Sanders are also both co-sponsors of a bill to create a commission to study reparations (as is fellow presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar), which Price believes is one of the most impactful policies on the table, along with a reconfiguration of the finance and credit structures that have produced the racial imbalances. The University of Georgia scholars, too, conclude that only comprehensive policies like reparations can provide meaningful fixes to wealth gaps.

Policymakers should challenge its fundamental assumptions and ask why it is homeownership an institution irrevocably imbued with racism that is the suggested path to financial security in the first place, they write. Why not a more robust social welfare system that would render the accumulation of personal wealth redundant? ...Why not a comprehensive reparations program?

Bloomberg supports the legislation to study reparations for African Americans, according to a campaign aide, but has otherwise been mum on the topic. (Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg also support studying reparations.) His Greenwood Initiative and Wall Street reform plans do call for programs that suss out race and gender bias in the credit and finance industries, as well as a shoring up of laws such as the Consumer Reinvestment Act.

In a statement, a Bloomberg campaign aide added: The studies you cite make a valuable point: Measures aimed directly at closing the racial wealth gap such as increasing ownership of homes and businesses will fall short on their own, in the absence of policies to address its root causes. The aid says thats why Bloombergs plan incorporates measures to defend civil rights, reverse systematic discrimination and make major investments in areas such as early childhood, health, education, infrastructure, environment and employment.

Despite plans that are more overtly progressive, Warren and Sanders both trail Bloomberg nationally among prospective black voters according to the latest (February 10) Quinnipiac poll. Not only that, but Bloomberg has picked up the endorsement of several high-profile black leaders, most recently, former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and dozens of current black mayors. Among those is Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who announced his support at the height of the fallout over Bloombergs leaked stop-and-frisk comments, and currently chairs the Bloomberg campaigns infrastructure team.

Asked why she supports Bloomberg in a recent New Yorker interview, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is a Bloomberg national co-chair, said that black voters want to know, What is your plan for black America? How are you going to create more black homeownership and close the income gap between blacks and whites? What are you going to do to create jobs and help small businesses grow?

Another explanation is that Bloomberg is offering distinct benchmarks that voters can hold him accountable on, according to Black Economic Alliance co-chair Charles Phillips, who is also the board chair for Infor, one of the worlds largest business software applications companies. The Black Economic Alliance is a non-partisan organization comprised of African Americans focused on improving the economic outcomes of black communities. It includes among its advisory board black figures across the political spectrum, from former Demos president Heather McGhee to former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele.

The BEA endorsed Bloombergs Greenwood Initiative on January 20, saying it has the breadth and vision ... designed to address the disparities particularly economic that have long stifled the dreams and aspirations of Black Americans.

It was one of the first African-American organizations to publicly show support, though its endorsement was purely for the plan, not the candidate. However, Phillips says none of the Alliances members have recanted support for Bloombergs economic plan since stories of his controversial past surfaced, nor have any of their donors pulled funding.

We liked [Bloombergs] numbers, said Phillips. What we were looking for is specifics in the plans and quantified goals. Its hard to hold people accountable to something if you dont have a specific target and scoreboard to measure them by. So, to take the Bloomberg plan, hes committed to one million new black homeowners in the next decade and 100,000 new black-owned businesses. The big one is the $70 billion in the top 100 most-disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country to invest in job centers and help entrepreneurs. Those are tangible things that you can point to and track year-by-year.

Price said that African-American support of Bloombergs plan could be explained by investment in the American Dream narrative that personal labor, education, and checkbook-balancing skills best dictate a persons economic destiny. She points to the Project Mosaic survey conducted by The Groundwork Collective last year, which sought to explain how black and Latinx Americans understand their economic experiences. In that survey, when asked what single factor most contributed to their economic status, black adults were more likely to say it was their personal drive and persistence rather than experiences with racism and race-based discrimination college-educated African Americans were the most likely to cite personal drive.

I think this speaks to why African Americans are resonating with Bloombergs policy platform, said Price. This perspective deserves greater interrogation and understanding.

CORRECTION: Due to an error in the Brookings Institutions study, an earlier version of this story misstated the percent difference in annual revenue between businesses in non-black-majority neighborhoods and black-majority neighborhoods. It is 2%.

Brentin Mock is a staff writer at CityLab. He was previously the justice editor at Grist.

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How to Actually Close the Racial Wealth Gap - CityLab

Read all over – The Journal

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We would be remiss, especially now, when the Democratic Party is poised to go farther left than it has been before, if we did not observe the 172nd birthday of the Communist Manifesto, published in London on Feb. 21, 1848.

The pamphlet, written by Karl Marx and the libertine industrialist Friedrich Engels, proclaimed the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. It posited that this struggle would inevitably end all struggles with the triumph of the working class over capitalism. It was slow to catch on at first, but by 1950, almost half the worlds population was living and languishing under Marxist governments.

The manifesto is easy to malign now given what eventually followed in its train, including the hoax of scientific Marxism, but its publication is still a pivotal event in the history of ideas. The standard take is that Marxism is a useful critique of capitalism, even if it is not a substitute for it, any more than you can replace a blender with monkey bars. When Bernie Sanders at the Las Vegas debate said, You know what, Mr. Bloomberg, it wasnt you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that, he was building on Marxs theory of surplus labor value.

Marx was the first ideologue. Ideology was the creation of Antoine Destutt, a French count and a proponent of the French Revolution until he was caught up in the Terror and imprisoned. With time on his hands, Destutt coined the term ideology for a philosophy that valued individual liberty, property and free markets. Napoleon Bonaparte turned it into a term of abuse for his liberal enemies. Decades later, Marx followed suit, calling Tracy an ideologue and his ideology a fish-blooded bourgeois doctrine and in that moment, Marx owned it in ideologys modern sense of a reductive world view. Marxs first enemy was not capitalism; it was the liberals who countenanced it.

His ideas had tremendous appeal from the start because they were so strikingly original. In the 1850s, he wrote many of the editorials in The New York Tribune, a paper Abraham Lincoln read and which shaped Lincolns view of the preeminence of labor. Marx supported the abolition of slavery in America, as did Lincoln, but Lincoln could not go as far as Marx in believing wage labor was the same thing. For Marx, racism did not exist in the class struggle, any more than morality was real.

In his preface to the English edition of the manifesto in 1888, Engels, who closely guarded Marxs reputation and also led Marxists into some of their more inane and destructive propositions, said he believed the work would do for history what Darwins theory has done for biology.

That is still debatable. Marxism has influenced the writing of history for the better and the worse. But down to the present, it is the confusion of the principles of Marxism with science and the war on liberalism that has defined the left. It is the savagery of the closed mind which covers itself in a mantle of compassion.

After Sanders won the Nevada caucuses last weekend, he tweeted: Ive got news for the Republican establishment. Ive got news for the Democratic establishment. They cant stop us.

In response, the liberal-progressive black filmmaker Ava DuVernay tweeted: Im undecided. But I know this isnt what I want.

As night follows day, Sanders supporters said things to DuVernay such as, How to get yourself on the guillotine list 101. Asked to explain how they could savage a black woman for speaking her mind, one Sanders soldier said, There is no racism in the class struggle.

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Read all over - The Journal

South Carolina Was Supposed to Give Black Issues a Spotlight. The Primary Failed Them. – Mother Jones

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The Forest Lake Country Club, a white facade on a picturesque lake just north of Columbia, South Carolina, has welcomed the state capitals white elite for nearly 100 years. Among the members of this bastion of segregation is South Carolinas governor, Republican Henry McMaster. He was reportedly a member when he served as a US attorney in the 1980s, launching his political career as a foot soldier in the war on drugs; when he served as chairman of the state Republican Party in the 1990s; when he became lieutenant governor in 2014; and when he ascended to the governors mansion in 2017. That year, the club finally admitted its first Black member. Like the Confederate flag that billowed over the capitol until 2015, it remains a symbol of the politics of South Carolina, a place where power stays in the hands of white politicians who insulate themselves from any challenge through gerrymandering and a photo ID law. Privilege has its memberships.

But every four or eight years, Democrats hold a presidential primary that gives African Americans in the state a voice. Anyone hoping to win South Carolinas Democratic primary has to make an effort to connect with the states African American voters, seek the support of local officialsthe only elected officials in the state who are Blackand elevate the needs of that community.

This year, though, the primary seems to have largely failed South Carolinas Black voters. Although the candidates and the party speak about race in sharper, less halting terms than ever before and have crafted several policies to match that rhetoric, the outreach itself wasnt sustained, often felt awkward, and failed to connect with a community that needs more support from its partyand which will be crucial to defeating Donald Trump in November. On the day of the primary, Black voters overwhelmingly supported Joe Bidens presidential bid, giving him a big win in the state and perhaps signaling to Super Tuesday voters that theres still juice in his campaign. Exit polls showed that the endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the states most prominent Democrat and one of the most influential African Americans in Congress, played a significant role in consolidating Black support behind Biden. Almost half of all primary voters Saturday pointed to Clyburns endorsement as a major influence in their decision.

Biden, the former vice president, had premised his entire campaign on the support of South Carolinas Black population. His frequent presence in the state for decades and his relationships with local leaders, as well as his having served alongside President Barack Obama, were supposed to elevate him above the field. And initial polls showed he was right. But political operatives in the state felt the Biden campaign took that support for granted. According to the Post-Courierevent tracker, Biden spent considerably less time in the state than many other candidates. Rather than tending to his relationships in South Carolina, he left them to wither. Clyburn didnt offer his endorsement until Wednesday.

The primary calendar incentivizes candidates to spend more time in Iowa and New Hampshire. But winning the support of Black voters in South Carolina requires an attention to retail politicking, the better to build and sustain relationships. For a population too often taken for granted, it makes sense to trust the person you know and not the one who blows in with a flurry of plans they may or may not actually intend to implement. Biden had these relationships, but he coasted on them and saw his support here decline precipitously in the wake of his poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. He was running a general election campaign, and he himself was not spending sufficient time here, says Clay Middleton, who ran the South Carolina campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, noting that Bidens strong performances this week in the debate and a CNN town hall the following day had buoyed his campaign. If he had been doing things along the way, his drop would not have been as significant.

His absence created room for other candidates. Initially, Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, both African Americans, invested heavily in the state and visited often, making efforts to attract young Black voters at the states many historically Black colleges and universities. Former Rep. Beto ORourke likewise spent a lot of time here. When all three dropped out before the voting started, they left a void. Efforts to reach Black voters the week before the primary met with poor results. In North Charleston, Pete Buttigieg arrived at a community discussion about investing in Black communities on Monday to find an overwhelmingly white audience waiting for him. On Wednesday, Elizabeth Warrens Charleston rally with John Legend attracted an almost entirely white crowd. In Columbia on Friday, a rap duo and a lineup of all Black speakers introduced Bernie Sanders to a predominately white crowd.

I bet if the calendar were reversed and South Carolina were the first of the four, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris would still be in the race, because attention is not provided the way it should be down here, says Middleton, who advised Bookers campaign in South Carolina this cycle. Before people run for president, they need to develop relationships down here so if and when they do run, they have a base to go to.

The most aggressive outreach to African Americans ultimately came from billionaire Tom Steyer, who drowned the state in an estimated $18 million worth of television ads while his paid canvassers crisscrossed the state. The candidate has run on issues of importance to Black people here, pointing to environmental catastrophes in minority communities and the lack of health care in rural areas, and calling for reparations for slavery, among many others. But these were gestures, and the campaigns heavy-handed talking points papered over a policy platform that falls short of dealing with many of these problems. Despite a plan to invest in struggling historically Black colleges and universities, for example, Steyer doesnt have a plan for free or debt-free college. His outreach attracted enough support among African Americans to help him to a third-place finish, but it wasnt enough to salvage his struggling campaign. He dropped out on Saturday, with little to show for his efforts. His only memorable moment came the night before, at a rally in an HBCU gym in Columbia that more closely resembled a night out at the club, with flashing lights, a DJ, and rapper Juvenile, along with a lot of free food. At one point, the candidate danced awkwardly on stage to Juveniles Back That Azz Up.

Whereas Steyer performed his dedication to the Black community, Pete Buttigieg took a more cerebral approach. On the trail, Buttigieg repeatedly acknowledged that he didnt share, as he put it during Tuesdays debate, the lived experience of, for example, walking down the street, or in a mall, and feeling feeling eyes on us, regarding us as dangerous. He told crowds that he approached the issue with humility and was ready to learn, which was perhaps the only possible route for a candidate dogged with questions about his handling of racial strife and discrimination as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. His campaign released a comprehensive plan to lift the fortunes and political power of African Americans, which he calls his Douglass Plan. Buttigieg put more time into the state than most of the remaining candidates, however, and it paid off in ways that are not readily apparent in the largely white makeup of his town hall audiences this weekalthough not enough to ultimately put a dent in Bidens support.

In the Greenville area, for example, the campaign organized early by holding house parties, attending church services, and building relationships to introduce their unknown, unlikely candidate to an electorate that seemed unlikely in turn to welcome hima continuation of a strategy deployed in other early states in which Buttigieg has turned to more rural communities to scoop up delegates. The campaigns investment encouraged Jalen Elrod, a Black community organizer who serves as the first vice chair of the Greenville County Democrats, to endorse Buttigieg earlier this month. I told Pete Buttigiegit wasnt really because of him as a candidate that I got on board, Elrod said. Its really because of the work his team has done here. Buttigieg has also won support from members of a younger generation of Black activists here, including state Rep. J.A. Moore and Walter Clyburn Reed, Rep. Jim Clyburns grandson. But Buttigieg stillfinished in a distant fourth place.

Outwardly, at least, Elizabeth Warren did everything right. She could boast the most impactful racial justice plans, according to the Center for Urban and Racial Equality, and she has stitched those plans into a holistic program that acknowledges the insidious legacy of slavery without portraying Black voters as only caring about a small basket of issues like criminal justice reform.* She has won the support of Black activists and had the help of a powerful surrogate, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, in her efforts to woo Black women. On paper, she looked greatbut that was the problem. On paper. Support among Black voters in the state never materialized in part because Warren didnt materialize. She did fewer events in South Carolina than Tim Ryan, who dropped out in October.

If anyone should have learned the lesson that relationships and time count for more than policies, it is Sanders. Four years ago, the frontrunner lost South Carolina by nearly 50 points to Hillary Clinton, someone with longstanding relationships in the state. This cycle, Sanders visited more than many of the other candidates, won over local officials, and had an impressive canvassing operation. His rhetoric, too, has changed in subtle ways, and he is more at ease now talking about the racial dimensions of inequality. Polls show that this outreach has gotten results, but as Middleton notes, he might have done better if he had tailored his approach to the needs of the older African American population by holding more intimate events rather than rallies. Because he does not do any retail politics, older folks dont feel like he comes across as a warm person, he said. On primary night, Sanders fell far short of where his campaign hoped he would be.

Five days before the primary, a coalition of mostly Black activists and minimum-wage workers staged a rally for a $15 minimum wage and union membership before marching to a McDonalds where the workers were striking. The event was meant to spotlight the poverty wages being paid to so many workers in the state, many of them Black. The Fight for $15 movement has attracted support from Democratic politicians throughout the primary season, but of all the candidates converging on Charleston, only Buttigieg bothered to show up in person. Warren and Sanders sent surrogates.

The next night was the states Democratic debate. It was supposed to focus on issues of particular importance to Black Americans. Instead it was dominated by chaos and bickering. This was, in miniature, the story of the South Carolina primary, which seemed at times to forget about the very people the candidates were trying to win over.

Correction: An earlier version of this article cited the wrong think tanks evaluation of Elizabeth Warrens racial justice plans. It was the Center for Urban and Racial Equality.

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South Carolina Was Supposed to Give Black Issues a Spotlight. The Primary Failed Them. - Mother Jones

Amazon Go Grocery: This Is The Future Of Shopping, Whether We Like It Or Not – Forbes

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SEATTLE, WA - FEBRUARY 26: A shopper enters Amazon Go Grocery on February 26, 2020 in Seattle, ... [+] Washington. The store in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood is Amazon's first large retail grocery location that uses the cashier-free model. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)

Amazon has unveiled its Amazon Go Grocery in Seattle, expanding the initial concept of a store without tills, evolving from a simple convenience store selling a few products to a practically complete supermarket with sections of various types, including fresh products.

This is the next phase of Amazons Just walk out technology and its application to more complex shopping contexts, ridiculing the skeptics lightweight arguments against it. The value proposition here is clear: as you take the items off the shelves, you place them in your trolley in the same bags you will use to take them home. Go in, take what you want, and walk out the door, without standing in line. It couldnt be simpler.

Whats more, the lower costs involved mean Amazon can offer its customers better prices than its rivals. But what Amazon really wants to do is to offer its customers a better experience, one that requires taking full advantage of the new technological environment. The complaints of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which has criticized the company for jeopardizing millions of quality jobs and has threatened to make this a campaign issue in the November 2020 elections, ignore the fact that Amazon is actually the company that has created the most jobs in the United States in recent years, more than half a million, and also tends to pay its employees, even at the lowest levels, significantly above the industry average.

When the company launched its first store in beta mode exclusively for employees, I noted that there are more than three and a half million supermarket cashiers in the United States who are paid an average of $10.78 an hour (the minimum wage at Amazon is $15 an hour), with no formal education requirement, and with an estimated decline of -4% for the decade from 2018 to 2028. These forecasts do not seem to take into account the effects of the development and possible generalization of a technology such as Amazons, as well as the need for other competitors in the distribution field to incorporate similar technologies if they do not want to go out of business.

The future of distribution does not include workers on tills doing a job that, while it may seem reasonably dignified today, makes no sense. When, in a few decades, we tell our grandchildren that people used to work as cashiers in supermarkets and describes what they did in their day-to-day life, those youngsters will see that as a kind of slavery.

Eliminating jobs makes sense when they impose repetitive and dehumanizing routines on us and because they result in lower productivity and more errors than a machine produces. Ultimately, a technology like this does not seek to eliminate jobs, but to put humans where they really add value, rather than by carrying out meaningless mechanical tasks.

Amazons scaling up from small shops to large supermarkets is just another step in a process that, whether some like it or not, is called progress. This is what has led to the disappearance of many jobs that seemed normal in previous centuries and today we would consider meaningless. And there will be many more to come. How is the world economy going to accommodate the disappearance of more and more jobs? Are we going to console ourselves by thinking that a similar or greater number of other types of jobs will be magically created in the future?

In this race for efficient automation, supermarket cashiers will soon be joined by drivers, brokers, assembly line workers and an ever-increasing range of jobs, while society will have to deal with the paradox that greater wealth generation through machine work may result in widespread impoverishment. To prevent this we need to redefine the social contract. Until we understand this, we will continue to try to measure the economy with the wrong indicators, criticizing interesting initiatives, reverting to religious approaches such as in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, and repeating the mistakes of the past.

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Amazon Go Grocery: This Is The Future Of Shopping, Whether We Like It Or Not - Forbes

Ken Liu’s ‘The Hidden Girl’ Loops Through Space and Time – WIRED

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I point up at the kite, hoping shell see how I picked out a fairy whose face looks like hers. But the kite is too high up now for her to notice the resemblance. Ive let out all the string . I wish the kite could fly higher, I say, desperate to keep the words flowing, as though unspooling more conversation will keep something precious aloft.

This particular story, as well as Altogether Everywhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer, are sort of structural analogs to a stark, short sketch called Memories of My Mother, in which a mother cheats death and time by electing to see her child only in slices, like a two-dimensional person might experience a three-dimenional person, once every seven years through a time-dilatory trick that swells the heart and ultimately reverses their roles.

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu | Buy on Amazon

Absent and illusory though Lius parents often are, their love remains fiercely real. (When the mother and daughter in Seven Birthdays are reunited after aeons, at the center of the galaxy, the world brightens with the light of a million billion suns.) That kind of tension between being together and being apart, between reality and non-reality, between corporality and etheriality, suffuses many of the stories. In The Hidden Girl, the narrator relishes the physicality of this mortal coil: I like to stay in this world, to remain surrounded by the night breeze and the distant hoots of the owl.

These stretchy dichotomies are particularly apparent when it comes to Singularity Stuff. What if humans uploaded into the Matrix become gods who long to fall back to earth? From The Gods Have Not Died in Vain: It turned out that deep down, all the gods had similar vulnerabilities, a kind of regret or nostalgia for life in the flesh that seemed reflected at every level of organization. It was a blind spot, a vulnerability, that could be exploited in the war against the gods.

Or is what we think of as our existence really something set in motion by some kind of superintelligence? Is a living planet just a computing machine powered by a sun? From Seven Birthdays: Even if weve always suspected that we also live in a grand simulation, we prefer the truth to be otherwise.

Woah man, that's deep. Yes, let the marble that is your (non-uploaded) brain roll around in that cosmic Klein bottle as you make your way through the book. Some of the stories, though, are less delicious to inhabit. Liu, who is also a Harvard-trained lawyer, says in his intro that a good story cannot function like a legal brief, which attempts to persuade and lead the reader down a narrow path suspended above the abyss of unreason. Hes right, and in a few places, like Byzantine Empathy, his characters start speechifying to each other and those tales are less delightful, less emotional (in a story about empathy, no less). In those (rare) moments, he loses the audience. But even in that story, hes navigating the space between whats real and whats not, tumbling and faceting that notion just as he does elsewhere, examining the people and aliens in this hot-fleshed chaotic world and how they might interact with spirits and memory, say, or even how they might express their love for the cool post-singularity mathematical souls that live inside the machine.

Further Reading

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken LiuAgain with the parenting themes in the titular story! And Lius first collection is just as varied and full of thought experiments as The Hidden Girl, from an ice cube soul (State Change) to the moment one soul engenders another in a kind of spiraling creation myth (The Waves) to an explication of horrific, real war crimes (The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.).

Cloud Atlas by David MitchellThis 2004 novel makes some of the same back-and-forth-through-time moves that Liu explores, with the requisite voice shifts, and the V-structure reminds me of Ghost Days.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin LiuKen Liu famously translated (and reorganized) this wild and brilliant epic that starts during the Cultural Revolution and leaps to another solar system. Barack Obama liked, it; Zuckerberg liked it; you will almost certainly like it too.

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Tesla Is Building Its First European Factory But It Has to Clear a Forest First – Singularity Hub

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Tesla is having a banner year, and were not even two months in. After reaching what was an all-time high in December at a value of $393.15 per share, last Wednesday the companys stock closed at more than double that: $917.42 per share.

While its car sales are strong, theyre not the source of Teslas skyrocketing value; people are investing in the company because they see it as the future of electric vehicles. After clearing a legal hurdle last week, Tesla is set for more growth, and in a brand-new market: Europe. Germany, to be specific.

CEO Elon Musk announced plans last November to build a fourth Gigafactory outside Berlin (the first three are in Nevada, New York, and Shanghai). But construction involves cutting down a pine forest the size of 100 soccer fields (not to mention removing buried World War II ammunition), and work was halted after local environmental groups protested. On top of having to cut down thousands of trees, the factory will border a nature reserve, and theres been much concern raised about how the areas water supply and wildlife will be impacted.

A Berlin-Brandenburg court stopped Teslas forest-clearing with an injunction earlier this month, but last Thursday overturned the injunction and granted the company permission to resume activity, finding that the legal requirements for early construction had been met.

The factory will be located in Gruenheide, a small town about 33 kilometers (20 miles) south-east of Berlin. Tesla intends to have the plant completed and fully functional by mid-2021, and will eventually produce up to 500,000 cars a year there. Though its moving forward with land-clearing and other construction preparations, the company technically doesnt have final project approval from German authorities. Tesla has projected that the factory will employ about 12,000 people.

Getting the state governments approval is just one of a few hurdles left to clear, and in fact may be more straightforward than the other tasks awaiting Tesla as it builds this factory.

German environmental laws dictate that construction must not interfere with the breeding period for wildlife, which starts in March; this essentially means that for the project to move forward on its planned timetable, tree-cutting would need to be completed in the next couple weeks.

Speaking of protecting wildlife, Tesla will also have to provide bats living in the forest with alternative spots to hibernate, put up fences to prevent reptiles from entering the area, relocate ant nests without destroying them, and find a way to humanely expel any wolves living in the area.

In a tweet from January 24, Musk emphasized that the factory will absolutely be designed with sustainability and the environment in mind. He added that Tesla will plant three trees for every tree it cuts down in the area.

Home to iconic brands like BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Volkswagen, German car manufacturing has been disrupted by companies that got an earlier and stronger start in electric vehicle technologyspecifically, Tesla. The companys Model 3 outsold all German competitors in both the US and European markets last year, and Germanys auto industry is now at a 22-year low.

The arrival of Tesla will, in the best-case scenario for German automakers, spur innovation through competition and encourage more private-sector investment. The Germans may not be leaders in electrification, but they certainly have a reputation for high-quality engineering. They would do well to follow in Teslas footsteps and start investing in energy storage technology and research; perhaps this could be the path to a rejuvenated German auto industry and economy.

But first, lets make sure those bats, wolves, lizards, birds, and ants are taken care of.

Image Credit: Artist rendering, Gigafactory. Image courtesy of Tesla

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What Is A Singularity? – World Atlas

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In the world of physics, a singularity is a concept that shifts the laws of physics as we know them. The theories on singularity came about when people first discovered black holes. The unusual nature of black holes has made scientists ask the question - what lies beyond?

Singularity, in this context, serves as a theoretical framework to explain the Big Bang, and gravity becomes the focus of the exploration.

Physicists have proposed the idea of the so-called gravitational singularity. From this type of standpoint, a gravitational singularity is an occurrence or an object where common laws of physics do not work. This type of singularity is a specific point in space-time, a construct that views the notions of time and space like they are almost glued together.

This gravitational singularity is a hard one to measure, at least in a traditional sense of the word. In fact, a space-time singularity becomes virtually independent of the coordinate system, or space, where it is observed. The data that is measured becomes, in a way, infinite. Because of this, a singularity creates a system where time and space no longer affect each other and practically become one thing. That is why the phrase space-time is so essential because the two entities stop having self-governing properties.

It does not come as a shock, how Albert Einstein, arguably one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, is the person responsible for this hard-grasping concept. After Einstein came out with his Theory of General Relativity, it was possible to discuss singularities. It could be said that the black holes themselves were, in a way, predicted by Einstein and that he created a theoretical frame from where scientists could start to unveil the mysteries that lie beyond the event horizon.

The theory of how black holes, and therefore singularities, are possible, is not that hard to conceptualize. When a particular star becomes to approach a certain point of its mass, it creates a force of gravity that is so strong that the star collapses into itself. This breaking point is called the Chandrasekhar limit. This limit is exactly 1,39 solar masses, which means mass that is 1,39 times bigger than the mass of our own Sun. When a star collapses, nothing, not even light, can escape it. When that happens, we are talking about something called the event horizon.

There are two distinct types of singularities that exist if the event horizon covers them. The first one is known as Curvature singularity. It got its name because of what happens inside the black hole. At the very center, a black hole holds up enormous amounts of mass. Because of this, gravity becomes infinite, which leads to the, also infinite, curving of space-time.

The other type that goes by Conical singularity happens when the singularity reaches a point where all the variables are finite. In this scenario, the space-time is not infinite, but it looks more like a cone, with the Conical singularity at its very top.

Another type of singularity is the one that does not depend on it being covered up by the event horizon. In this case, we are talking about Naked singularity. The Naked singularity does not stay hidden behind the event horizon. In theory, this type of singularity existed before the Big Bang.

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The World’s First Open-Source Nuclear Reactor Blueprint Is Coming Online – Singularity Hub

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Nuclear powers role in combating climate change is a contentious topic, but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur thinks he can sway the debate by releasing open-source designs for a small-scale reactor that could be built in two years for just $300 million.

The argument for making nuclear power part of our response to climate change is compelling: the fuel is abundant, it releases no greenhouse gas emissions during operations, and its capable of producing huge amounts of energy.

But safety concerns, cost, and the question of what to do with the radioactive waste produced mean its failed to capture the zeitgeist.

Bret Kugelmass wants to change that. After selling his drone company Airphrame in 2017 he decided to take on climate change, founding a non-profit research organization called the Energy Impact Center (EIC). And pretty quickly, he came to the conclusion that nuclear power is the way forward.

To advance his vision, last week EIC launched the OPEN100 project, which Kugelmass says will provide open-source blueprints for the design, construction, and financing of a 100-megawatt nuclear reactor. He claims the reactor can be built for $300 million in less than two years, significantly decreasing the per-kilowatt cost of nuclear power.

Nuclear power isnt just part of the solution to addressing climate change; it is the solution, Kugelmass said in a press release. OPEN100 will radically change the way we deploy nuclear power plants going forward, offering a substantially less expensive and less complicated solution.

The logic behind the idea is that the biggest barrier to the widespread use of nuclear is the cost of building reactors, which most experts would agree is a major problem for the industry. Kugelmass thinks thats because weve been focused on large, overly complicated reactors that take far too long to build. His solution is to go back to tried and tested pressurized water reactors from the previous century, and bring their cost down even further through standardization and a focus on speedy construction.

The path to this conclusion was a review of the nuclear industry by EIC staff involving 1,500 interviews with experts in everything from technology to economics and policy. The team used this analysis to put together an open-source template for designing and constructing a nuclear power plant.

Kugelmass isnt the only one convinced that shrinking reactors is the way to revive interest in nuclear power. Several companies are developing small modular reactors that promise to be both cheaper and safer. NuScale in the US is close to deploying its first plant, and Rolls-Royce in the UK and the Chinese and Russian governments are also working on designs.

But there are still plenty of unresolved questions. Any claims about how quickly and cheaply a reactor can be built should be taken with a grain of salt in an industry where costly overruns are the norm. At present, OPEN100s blueprints consist of simple 3D shells of components like reactor vessels or turbines, without any detail on how they workthough the organizations website says more detailed models will be released in the coming months.

Theres also widespread skepticism about how transformative the shift to smaller reactors would be, with many experts saying they face the same cost and safety concerns as their larger cousins. Kugelmass is bullish on the safety front, telling POWER that the low number of casualties from the Fukushima nuclear disaster showed that nuclear plants have similar risks of accidents as any other industrial plant, with similarly mild consequences.

But safety concerns dont only revolve around the risk of meltdown. All nuclear plants create large amounts of long-life radioactive waste that no country has yet worked out how to deal with. And regardless of what the facts are, public opinion is broadly unwelcoming to new nuclear development; the HBO series Chernobyl didnt help.

However, the costs of renewable energy are plummeting and advances in utility-scale energy storage are beginning to provide solutions to the intermittency of wind and sun. If these trends continue, they could call into question the rationale for a major investment in new nuclear technologythough by some estimates, even if the solar and wind intermittency problem is solved and battery storage capacity improves, solely relying on these sources wont be enough to meet future energy needs.

This doesnt seem to deter Kugelmass, though. To coincide with the launch of OPEN100 he also launched a for-profit EIC spin-off called Last Energy that will seek to connect private investors with opportunities to develop new nuclear projects around the world. We could soon be finding out whether open-source nuclear power has any legs.

Image Credit: Open100

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AI Is an Energy-Guzzler. We Need to Re-Think Its Design, and Soon – Singularity Hub

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There is a saying that has emerged among the tech set in recent years: AI is the new electricity. The platitude refers to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence for driving advances in everything from transportation to predicting the weather.

Of course, the computers and data centers that support AIs complex algorithms are very much dependent on electricity. While that may seem pretty obvious, it may be surprising to learn that AI can be extremely power-hungry, especially when it comes to training the models that enable machines to recognize your face in a photo or for Alexa to understand a voice command.

The scale of the problem is difficult to measure, but there have been some attempts to put hard numbers on the environmental cost.

For instance, one paper published on the open-access repository arXiv claimed that the carbon emissions for training a basic natural language processing (NLP) modelalgorithms that process and understand language-based dataare equal to the CO2 produced by the average American lifestyle over two years. A more robust model required the equivalent of about 17 years worth of emissions.

The authors noted that about a decade ago, NLP models could do the job on a regular commercial laptop. Today, much more sophisticated AI models use specialized hardware like graphics processing units, or GPUs, a chip technology popularized by Nvidia for gaming that also proved capable of supporting computing tasks for AI.

OpenAI, a nonprofit research organization co-founded by tech prophet and profiteer Elon Musk, said that the computing power used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time since 2012. Thats about the time that GPUs started making their way into AI computing systems.

While GPUs from Nvidia remain the gold standard in AI hardware today, a number of startups have emerged to challenge the companys industry dominance. Many are building chipsets designed to work more like the human brain, an area thats been dubbed neuromorphic computing.

One of the leading companies in this arena is Graphcore, a UK startup that has raised more than $450 million and boasts a valuation of $1.95 billion. The companys version of the GPU is an IPU, which stands for intelligence processing unit.

To build a computer brain more akin to a human one, the big brains at Graphcore are bypassing the precise but time-consuming number-crunching typical of a conventional microprocessor with one thats content to get by on less precise arithmetic.

The results are essentially the same, but IPUs get the job done much quicker. Graphcore claimed it was able to train the popular BERT NLP model in just 56 hours, while tripling throughput and reducing latency by 20 percent.

An article in Bloomberg compared the approach to the human brain shifting from calculating the exact GPS coordinates of a restaurant to just remembering its name and neighborhood.

Graphcores hardware architecture also features more built-in memory processing, boosting efficiency because theres less need to send as much data back and forth between chips. Thats similar to an approach adopted by a team of researchers in Italy that recently published a paper about a new computing circuit.

The novel circuit uses a device called a memristor that can execute a mathematical function known as a regression in just one operation. The approach attempts to mimic the human brain by processing data directly within the memory.

Daniele Ielmini at Politecnico di Milano, co-author of the Science Advances paper, told Singularity Hub that the main advantage of in-memory computing is the lack of any data movement, which is the main bottleneck of conventional digital computers, as well as the parallel processing of data that enables the intimate interactions among various currents and voltages within the memory array.

Ielmini explained that in-memory computing can have a tremendous impact on energy efficiency of AI, as it can accelerate very advanced tasks by physical computation within the memory circuit. He added that such radical ideas in hardware design will be needed in order to make a quantum leap in energy efficiency and time.

The emphasis on designing more efficient chip architecture might suggest that AIs power hunger is essentially a hardware problem. Thats not the case, Ielmini noted.

We believe that significant progress could be made by similar breakthroughs at the algorithm and dataset levels, he said.

Hes not the only one.

One of the key research areas at Qualcomms AI research lab is energy efficiency. Max Welling, vice president of Qualcomm Technology R&D division, has written about the need for more power-efficient algorithms. He has gone so far as to suggest that AI algorithms will be measured by the amount of intelligence they provide per joule.

One emerging area being studied, Welling wrote, is the use of Bayesian deep learning for deep neural networks.

Its all pretty heady stuff and easily the subject of a PhD thesis. The main thing to understand in this context is that Bayesian deep learning is another attempt to mimic how the brain processes information by introducing random values into the neural network. A benefit of Bayesian deep learning is that it compresses and quantifies data in order to reduce the complexity of a neural network. In turn, that reduces the number of steps required to recognize a dog as a dogand the energy required to get the right result.

A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has previously demonstrated another way to improve AI energy efficiency by converting deep learning neural networks into whats called a spiking neural network. The researchers spiked their deep spiking neural network (DSNN) by introducing a stochastic process that adds random values like Bayesian deep learning.

The DSNN actually imitates the way neurons interact with synapses, which send signals between brain cells. Individual spikes in the network indicate where to perform computations, lowering energy consumption because it disregards unnecessary computations.

The system is being used by cancer researchers to scan millions of clinical reports to unearth insights on causes and treatments of the disease.

Helping battle cancer is only one of many rewards we may reap from artificial intelligence in the future, as long as the benefits of those algorithms outweigh the costs of using them.

Making AI more energy-efficient is an overarching objective that spans the fields of algorithms, systems, architecture, circuits, and devices, Ielmini said.

Image Credit: analogicus from Pixabay

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AI Is an Energy-Guzzler. We Need to Re-Think Its Design, and Soon - Singularity Hub

Neri Oxman grows tools for the future at new MoMA retrospective – The Architect’s Newspaper

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A pioneer in materials, objects, and construction, Neri Oxman is showing work from her 20-year career as an architect, designer, and inventor at the Neri Oxman:Material Ecology exhibition currently on view until May 20 at New York Citys Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Curated by Paola Antonelli with help from curatorial assistant Anna Burckhardt, Oxmans work on display explores the intersection of the science of materials, digital fabrication, and organic design in pieces both extruded from and infused with the wisdom of nature. This is Oxmans seventh exhibition at MoMA, andMaterial Ecology is a magnifying glass for the vibrant microstructures that give shape to the world.

My team and I stand in the crossroads, challenging some of the processes that designers face at the intersection of biology and technology, nature and culture, Oxman said during a media preview of the show on February 20. There will come a moment where we will find material singularity [a state in which we cannot differentiate between what is man-made and what is grown]was this made, was this built, or was it grown? And does it matter?

As a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and founder and director of The Mediated Matter Group, Oxman observes naturally occurring structures, such as birch tree bark and crustacean shells, and routines, such assilkworm behavior, and presses them forward toward innovative building materials.

We envision these different objects that are processes and materials as tools for the future, Antonelli said. As tools for architects, designers, artists to make in a different way together with nature.

The exhibition includes demonstrations of what these processes could ultimately lead to one day, with tables arranged to resemble Oxmans lab, videos displaying the projects progressions, and the artifacts themselves. The works are categorized into Infusions and Extrusions:

Infusions

Totems is a series of 3D-printed photopolymer resin infused in melanin. The three 5 7/8 x 5 7/8 x 19 5/16 blocks are set within black columns, suggesting a future as a compressive building material. They stand in front of a rendering of an illuminated structure in Cape Town, South Africa, that employs Totems as walls.

Totems, 2018. Melanins are a group of pigments ranging in color from yellow to brown. The term melanin often refers to eumelanin, a particular type that is brown-black in color. However, other types, such as pheomelanin (yellow-red in color), also exist. This library represents the diversity of melanin, and includes constituent components of the reaction as well as melanin-containing natural materials, such as feathers and cuttlefish ink. (Courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group)

A collection of contemporary interpretations of ritualistic death masks made from photopolymer, Vespers are infused with natural minerals and bacteria. The 15 futuristic masks range from the size of a human head to nearly twice that and were created with spatial mapping algorithms. Some seem to be almost coral-like metallic kaleidoscopes, while others resemble opals with frozen whisps of color.

Vespers,2018. Series 1, Mask 5, front view. Designed for The New Ancient Collection. Curated and 3-D printed by Stratasys. (Yoram Reshef)

Imaginary Beingsare multicolored photopolymer interpretations of body armor inspired by Luis Borgess Libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967), which described 120 mythical animals from folklore. The creations range from protective helmets to breastplates resembling crystalline dragonfly wings.

Extrusions

Glass,pseudo-cylindrical printed structures, were created with The Mediated Matter Groups 2015 invention G3DP, or Glass 3D Printer. The exhibition includes smaller samples, roughly 8 inches in diameter as shown below, and larger columns of printed glass, reaching almost 10 feet high.

Glass I. 2015. (Courtesy The Mediated Matter Group)

As the focal point of the exhibition, Silk Pavilion IIis a suspended structure of water-soluble mesh stretched across an aluminum framework covered in silk spun by 17,532 silkworms. The twisted gossamer cylinder stretches almost 20 feet, nearly doubling the size of theSilk Pavilion I dome constructed at the MIT Media Lab in 2013. Through 3-inch-square studies (exhibited beneath the pavilion), Oxman and her team were able to pinpoint the geometrical situations in which silkworms spin flat sheets as opposed to three-dimensional cocoons, enabling the researchers to design a structure that could be spun by the silkworms themselves, rather than a machine that uses the silk. This discovery allowed for a fabrication process that works in harmony with nature rather than in dominance over it.

Silk Pavilion,2013. A Bombyx mori silkworm deposits silk fiber on a digitally fabricated scaffolding structure. (Courtesy The Mediated Matter Group)

Aguahoja I is a collection of objects printed from biopolymers, including wood-pulp cellulose, apple pectin, calcium carbonate, acetic acid, vegetable glycerin, and chitosan. The installation stretches across the wall of the gallery and consists of a library of fabricated pieces designed to be compatible with nature. The water-based objects are designed to decay over time, serving as a temporary alternative to plastics.

Aguahoja I. 2018. The Aguahoja Artifacts Display: A catalog of material experiments spanning four years of research shows the range of aesthetics and behaviors we have been able to elicit in medium-to-large-scale prints via performative geometric toolpaths, generative design, bio-composite distributions, and variable fabrication parameters. (Courtesy The Mediated Matter Group)

Oxman and her research team at the Mediated Matter Group operate through what they call the Krebs Cycle of Creativity, which is a framework that considers the domains for art, science, engineering, and design as synergetic forms of thinking and making in which the input from one becomes the output of another, as defined in the exhibitions catalog, designed by Irma Boom.

The input for science is information. Science converts information into knowledge. Engineering then takes knowledge and translates it to utility. Design then takes utility and places it in a cultural context, Oxman explained. Then art takes all things designed around us in the built environment and questions the perception of the world.

Funded by Allianz, MoMAs partner for design and innovation, Material Ecology embodies Oxmans Krebs Cycle with artifacts that are more grown than made, through a process called templating. The researchers and designers at the Mediated Matter Group used environmental, geometrical, chemical, and genetic influences to manipulate materials.

They are singular materials that differentiate their properties locally to accommodate for environmental and structural strengths, Oxman said. They are not made of parts. They are wholes that are bigger than the sum of their parts.

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At Celine, Hedi Does Hedi | Fashion Show Review, Ready-to-Wear Autumn 2020 | BoF – The Business of Fashion

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PARIS, France Hedi Slimane is exactly where he was again. This season, Celine did not progress, showing the courage and the narrowness of the creative directors vision. Hedi does Hedi. In this sense, Slimane is brave: he believes is his ideas, no matter what. This season he moved a bit further into the Sixties and Seventies, but the root references did not change. And they are as literal as ever, from beatniks to bohemian ladies in capes or pleated silk dresses and large brim hats. There was strictness here, some sparkle there, a lot of velvet, unisex everything bags included and jewellery developed with the acclaimed French artist Cesar. But ultimately it was endless dj vu.

Sure, the tailoring was mean, and one has to commend the designer for sticking to his guns. But in a time of plurality, it was astonishing how much Slimane insists on singularity. His fashion calls for a specific body type, a specific attitude. You either like it or not, tertium non datur. The fact is, that skinny maudit thing does not look that cool anymore. It looks dated, in fact, like Slimane is trying too hard to deliver his ideal of what a youngster might like. This ultimate lack of coolness might actually be a kiss of death. Perhaps, its time to move on or not give a damn and stay singularly still.

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At Celine, Hedi Does Hedi | Fashion Show Review, Ready-to-Wear Autumn 2020 | BoF - The Business of Fashion