zV6[ GD=&e5I$d8-[Nj XHA}-jyU=z>&lz7d}M$f3~xuullZ:m;3r?uKNSZ~.ZLlk0^KVX=[z{ESW9&P7u2uVLp`Y./YLN#Co1tndO!Ced_ srM9U{>:_&;4Pwsso O{Q$:CvO,N]O,~:Wsw,wI"cAo?;c-q5X=s%4F={t54co8Wq1{-Swx6tx7n@4A#Ze{*tm_Np/k"B9Cw1+'=Yn;u1elb8Ceb 1.bv@}GCuiUe/sRLu4r#P_I~^qv8UYxCAZ] n>j_~r<5KBD}!9tV)LI_\dE[pK1,kWF`%/m/&j_<{y~6V[s%VOnaN6_WRsGt=/W>$s=3m0A&^/kCCG#?yd]WnAn:v46NK?1a^+hb1?ks?+I_jy:?{}<12Fj*YU%{.Z[L OM0@%[M|L QnM [?y &7#k>]]nXuH,R]6a3tUCx sEhi.hM=CBGh1?0ja,Cl"gcN"]+8l/`cws!4 #zZiPum ` fasL,eo*{YAKdEV]Xix=#PJ3JrA?uCl%cM(| ]:Yj4 Bw&kBi{ l{n}slN;lwfvn~=kvm(vZA||r5r[m=nN0"p!.Q=9hEj:-f+p%:O"H)b`tf:;/4U?%6[k wS"HFF4_,NaNEn RAQ: fFNjCfsfs2(=FjeQzalkN4j5>vgF"[9o?]]pa#=.l5`x6! % 3xD-%9z8IsV>M)>KU?kA %) y.L;BlIR&o]gNLl:va=5zsu"^>m0 -Ti%0mtHSQ]B%HPaKRzb?PSvJ%aY_lx".+N5 :MzGXvKbtUeKfB:*E7gu3gd+jH1?UM,3Y$.V,Ky'v& ^D0:a~j?.ut[q 5u.%]zyXapX_qK+kD;wdXkZgZF UTk~ <0sRg4$#va{`gZ"X VV!4X}tbOpe HthDp0)@sr+ JAU64xLj a%+:EOO{znSDwLO}Qyz8XCJ^>&!M~Y(R-h.@|(3xTP+l+"R$O`O;1sj=yD'&>HMGfZzDqx {*!}r= ;!S <$*Y0r^4t+a:'(4~tsC nuZ68&5T ?+%bW6x6Ay v`Lf Y3XX-p8z /R87}:Dz^GP:>y0x"D8jrd!A; ')|:f5=nDbne fE"cA*TdSkk uMiq(n)u9;Saghu3._NSt~V4G9!e}>~`9b@",9FL5R*;^FON 1s$Nl.Na8jhJ$C@3d60<*zN)&M7 D:(A3,k&G)/L='L W0qFeJU' QV@:_D1 Idy)x2bTgkas;Xe9rM6L{C0* ZA#=T>&C/O=2Man==Z=z)n?E]8?8wkpS7Cq.xq6(_CEru@8t"3*UZVlgXucUzyiSCt{,W YdZ;KgU>3G*d E (+X27bN//,`I6 c .NQx%Lg5^ [ #-AfS*""hT`|:L@>Kjti@m4@r%mF$G@1"O,+c'^@91Yu!(g9d_Srx{C{`,m8#8vp#3+l["9! x$"9ROfKWc(qg3qG9zo a|fA_&KA h/~6m23pjckGdbSdU2E8qDA#c69CsRL15`Kpj1]. 3LrTG0oSCC&I!fcHgErdv:)R=.)X6L O`"S]j2& wlp=O8GB='$TR_+2$`QE%3TJB+GEQ >(Az4M+;iA B1HE~@(@js(Ke*?n[Nk|+~oGd1:Kr^$;#(]-&e)1wuO! A%qSp2S_(A-!$bff0lXYJ,qN$rSC9Gr`gPJ;UK46LwTi((H>D)"|/tW/0lq2YLvz7<|3!3P(5&rly3mW&R!:"{+vvL^ yU>(1(jG@W@a8("`Z<K%g:z~PkMy Go here to read the rest: Artificial intelligence genius Andrew Ng has another AI project in the ... - Digital Trends
Companies use AI to Find Human Employees to Work with Artificial Intelligence – TrendinTech
Lately, it seems that more and more jobs that used to be performed by humans are being taken over by one form or another of artificial intelligence, or AI. But, despite all jokes made to the contrary, there is still a need for real actual human beings, say experts. You just need to have what is required to work with a machine that thinks. Machines augmented with AI have long been replacing human workers on assembly lines, factory floors, and in manual labor. Most recently they are being added to jobs that usually were thought to require the judgment and intuition of a person, in fields like finance, law, and medicine.
But humans have not been made obsolete yet. There remain plenty of jobs for those who develop, program, manage, and market AI to work alongside it or improve its operation. As an exercise in irony, recruiters are now using AI to find employees with the correct qualifications and intelligence for these slots.
However, as job descriptions have gone from traditional roles like chief clerk to modern titles like chief digital officer the attributes for job seekers have changed too, though employers and employees alike are having difficulties effectively specifying what they are.
Most people will tell you that to work in AI you need traits like a growth mindset, you need to be adaptable and have an owner mentality those are the buzzwords. The reality is that the job itself has to be properly defined, says Caitlin MacGregor, CEO, and co-founder of Plum, an Ontario-based online recruiter.
Plum matches prospective employees with possible employers by using a specialized algorithm based on their surveys. Like a dating app but for job opportunities rather than your love-life. But, Macgregor goes on to say, no ones quite sure what to make of these opportunities in the new economy.
They default to questions like where people went to school, what degrees they have, how many years theyve worked, what titles theyve had. Those markers never really were able to predict success; in this digital age, we need to be really clear what does, she says.
We know based on 30 years of research that intelligence is the number one predictor of performance, across all roles and all industries. We need to be measuring for intelligence before we even pick up a rsum, instead of waiting until someone has been three months on the job, Ms. MacGregor adds.
At the same time, the qualities that usually accompany intelligence, like adaptability and flexibility, are desired as well, according to Marlina Kinnersly, CEO, and co-founder of Fortay.co, an AI-based hiring site similar to Plum.
You want them to be able to think fast and learn on their feet, she says.
The Toronto-based firm looks for workers who will be a good culture fit or team alignment for the corporation but also thinks independently enough to add new perspectives to the company, says Kinnersly.
However, the search isnt on until the company can truly describe what their corporate culture is. Thats their baseline to find the right candidates, she says.
In a paper for Brookings Institute, Christian Bodewig, a World Bank executive, reveals a few qualifications for employees working along AI should have. Amongst these skills, he lists cognitive skills in numeracy and literacy, creative critical thinking, and advanced problem solving, as well as contentiousness and whatever technical skills required for the specific job as all being important.
In contrast, Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, says employers want someone who will get up, dress up, show up, shut up, and never give up.
Potential employees should acquire these skills as early as possible, according to Bodewig because the window for building cognitive skills closes with late adolescence.
Overall, in this new AI dominated employment market, an intelligent, independent thinker, and team player needs more than he has in the past to procure job security. Math skills help, according to Henry Kim, an associate professor of operations management and information system from Schulich School of Business at Torontos York University. A point he is always reminding his 11-year-old daughter too:
She loves Anne of Green Gables, so when she grows up, she wants to run a caf in Prince Edward Island where Anne is set. I told her that that is actually a job that AI robots cant do, so she should go for it, Dr. Kim explains.
But you have to make money to open that caf. Which means youll need a good-paying job in a workforce of the future, where a lot of the well-paying white-collar jobs we have today will not exist. However, there will definitely be well-paying jobs in the future for programming and working with AI robots.
So, I tell her do your math homework.
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Artificial Intelligence: Here are the different avatars of AI at the centre of innovation – Financial Express
Future store is one such example of how with AI, running a retail store is childs play.
At the annual Futiju Forum, held in Tokyo recently, technologylargely artificial intelligence (AI) including machine learningwas at the centre of all innovation, with the aim of helping solve everyday problems. Future store is one such example of how with AI, running a retail store is childs play. In a future store, a robot roams inside a shop. Through the use of AI, it collects a combination of various types of data for analysis, including product shelf video data, point-of-sale (POS), and shelf arrangement data. Based on the collected data, the robot suggests which products are to be displayed on shelves and at what time.
This is enabled by sending real-time product shelf condition data to the shop staff and therefore, improving operational efficiency in the store. Another example is its work for the Instruments and Electronics (Shanghai) Associates Group (INESA), a state-owned firm in China that provides smart city solutions.
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Fujitsu created a smart factory for its subsidiary INESA Display Materials. It built an intelligent system to handle data collection on production, quality, efficiency, cost control and reduction in energy consumption, besides storage, processing and visualisation to enable fast access and analysis of information in mass production operations as well as energy monitoring. In our production environment, there are numerous data sources that provide information on processes, equipment and environmental factors, which can directly affect the quality of our product, said Wei Fengrong, director, information, INESA Display Materials Co.
Another technology which has started making waves is an interface device called Ontenna. The device, worn atop the users hair, helps deaf people to perceive rhythms, patterns, and volumes of sounds through their hair as it conveys the characteristics of sounds using vibration and light.
The reporter was in Japan at theinvitation of Fujitsu.
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Artificial Intelligence-proof your career – Livemint
Intelligent machines are taking over thousands of jobs, and being qualified is no longer enough to keep your job. Earlier this year, consulting firm McKinsey and Co. released a study that said 51% of all jobs could be automated in the next 20 years. Even specialized professions like medicine, law and banking are feeling the heat of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A few months ago, investment bank JP Morgan made the news by introducing intelligent machines to review financial deals that once kept employees busy for thousands of hours. Diagnostics and other decision-making skills previously thought of as the exclusive preserve of human beings, will soon be better handled by machines.
But Garry Kasparov has a different take on the issue. On 11 May 1997, Russian chess grandmaster Kasparov became the first world champion to be defeated by a machine. Yet in his new book Deep Thinking: Where Artificial Intelligence Ends And Human Creativity Begins, he is optimistic about the future of people with skills even as he concedes the inevitability of intelligent machines becoming more prominent. The sensation of being challenged, surpassed and possibly replaced by automaton, or an invisible algorithm, is becoming a standard part of our society, he writes. So while smarter computers are one key to success, doing a smarter job of humans and machines working together is far more important.
Is it possible to beat this threat of being displaced? Theres ample research and books on the subject, and here are some of the things they suggest you could do to robot-proof your career.
Build empathy
Employers want people who are empathetic and collaborative, who can guide relationships and work in teams. Because empathy is something that even intelligent machines are incapable of. Recognizing the importance of this skill is Geoff Colvin in his book Humans Are Underrated : What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will. The critical 21st century skill is empathy: we empathize to survive, he says, pointing to the healthcare profession. So while machines may be superior with diagnostics, a patient still needs to have a conversation with an expert. An empathetic doctor can help the patient deal with his condition better and recover faster. This, in turn, leads to lower healthcare costs and fewer lawsuits, says Colvin.
Empathy is a skill that can be developed through learning how to study the thoughts and feelings of others, and then responding appropriately. This involves inviting people to speak about their worries and concerns, hearing them out and then reassuring them, says Colvin.
Be a good communicator
A skill like communication is less easy to automate, says Anu Madgavkar, partner with McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of McKinsey and Co., Mumbai. Intelligent machines cannot communicate the way human beings do. So people with better communication skills will be harder to replace with AI. The bigger message for professionals is that they should learn to communicate in a more compelling way, learn to work in teams, to excel at social interactions, says Madgavkar.
Become a lifelong learner
Previously in history, even in the 20th century, life was divided into two main parts: in the first part, you mostly learned, acquired knowledge and skills, and built yourself a personal and a professional identity. In the second part, you mostly made use of those skills and those identities. The pace of change in the 21st century will be such that most of what you learn as a teenager will be completely irrelevant by the time youre 40, says Yuval Noah Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow, in a February interview with Time magazine, where he emphasized the necessity of life-long learning.
The good news is that anytime, anywhere learning is a reality now. For instance, if you want to do a project on design thinking, you can go immediately to the massive open online courses at online platforms like edX and Coursera and do a course on it, says Vijay Thadani, co-founder, NIIT.
Get those number skills
Digital literacy should be taken as seriously as language literacy, says Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, in an Infosys commissioned study on how to amplify human potential. The most important academic subjects that decision-makers see as focus areas for future generations are computer sciences, business and management and mathematics, says the study, which looked at the skills professionals need to acquire to integrate AI in a positive way into organizations and society.
Be constructive
Many perceive AI as a threat. Prominent among them are entrepreneur Elon Musk (our biggest existential threat) and scientist Stephen Hawking (the development of full AI could spell the end of the human race). From elevator operators to bank tellers and airplane pilots, history is full of examples of how technology has made jobs redundant.
But technology has also made life safer, easier and better. Its better to accept AI as a part of development, and look at the avenues it opens up rather than see the situation as man versus machine, says Kasparov.
Start to look at tasks hard to mechanizeanything that involves human creative energy, from photography and theatre, to baking, art, running, cooking classes, teachinganything thats not linear, says Mumbai-based Gurprriet Siingh, senior client partner at consulting firm Korn Ferry Hay Group. He says skills like empathy, creativity, flexibility and the ability to communicate can never be automated, and so education today should emphasize development of those skills.
Many of the most promising jobs today didnt even exist 20 years ago, says Kasparov, pointing to the demand for talent in new professions like app designers, 3D print engineers, drone pilots, social media managers and genetic counsellors. This is a trend that will accelerate as technology continues to create different professions .
Learn to work with machines
The future of increased productivity and business success isnt men or machines. Its both, argue Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby in their book Only Humans Need Apply. Augment your skills, learn to work with machines, they say. The doctor who relies on diagnostic software, the lawyer who relies on research machines, the logistics manager who works with drones or the customer service manager who works with a chatbot, all of these professionals will be able to work better by complementing their human skills of empathy, of communication and creativity with machine intelligence. As the McKinsey report states, Humans will still be needed in the workforce; the total productivity gains we estimate will only come if people work alongside machines.
At wealth management firm ORO Wealth, for instance, the role of human portfolio advisers who work with intelligent machines is important. Even though the investment recommendations are machine-based, we need humans beings to work alongside. Because only a human adviser can empathize, can sense hesitation or lack of enthusiasm for a particular investment on the clients part. In which case they will go back to the machine-based algorithm, which will recommend alternative products, says Mumbai-based Vijay Kuppa, co-founder of ORO Wealth.
The skill and flexibility to work with a machine will help the workforce to become more productive. As Kasparov puts it, Smart machines will free us all...taking over the more menial aspects of cognition and elevating our mental lives towards creativity, curiosity, beauty and joy. These are what truly make us human, not any particular activity or skill like swinging a hammeror even playing chess.
First Published: Sun, Jun 25 2017. 03 47 PM IST
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Aerospace companies find engineers on the racetrack – Virgin Islands Daily News
Over the past decade, entrepreneurial space companies in Southern California have set their sights on such goals as launching small satellites, carrying space tourists and colonizing Mars.
As they hire young engineers, those companies and more-traditional aerospace giants are finding talent in an unlikely place: a college race-car competition.
This week, 100 university teams will bring their prototype race cars to the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) competition in Lincoln, Neb., where they will be judged on design, manufacturing, performance and business logic.
The aerospace leaders who help judge the contest say its also an opportunity to hear students explain design and production decisions, present their business cases and adapt on the fly.
Race cars and rockets are pretty similar, said Bill Riley, a Formula SAE alumnus from Cornell and competition judge who is now a senior director of design reliability and vehicle analysis at SpaceX. Its lightweight, efficient, elegant engineering. Those basic principles are the same, no matter what youre designing.
SpaceX has had fantastic success recruiting new hires and interns from Formula SAE teams, and from sister competition Baja SAE, which focuses on building an off-road vehicle, and other hands-on engineering competitions, said Brian Bjelde, the Hawthorne companys vice president of human resources.
Of the 700 students who intern at SpaceX each year, 50 or 60 come from Formula SAE. And as of three years ago, about 50 percent of the companys 300-person structures team had worked on some sort of project-based design team in college.
For any candidate, the ones that are most successful at SpaceX have a combination of passion, drive and talent, Bjelde said. And to me, (Formula SAE) plays into the passion piece.
Aaron Cassebeer experienced the highs and lows of competition firsthand 10 years ago as captain of a Lehigh University team that won several design awards at competitions. But when a hose came loose and spilled oil into the cars chassis, a few drips landed on the track and the Lehigh team was disqualified.
It ended well for Cassebeer, though. His work with light, composite materials eventually impressed Scaled Composites, a cutting-edge Mojave aerospace firm. That led to a nine-year career where, among other things, he designed flight controls for an early version of the space plane that Virgin Galactic aims to use to fly tourists to space.
The type of work I did happens to fit in really well with what Scaled Composites doesdesign and prototype, over and over again, Cassebeer said.
The basis of the Formula SAE competition is that a fictional manufacturing company contracts teams to build a prototype race car that is low-cost, high-performance, easy to maintain and reliable.
Industry judges question students on the design process, scrutinize their cost sheets and inspect the vehicles to make sure they are technically sound. The internal combustion engine car competition is the most popular, though an electric vehicle contest was added in 2013.
Race cars that pass technical inspections get the green light to hit the course for performance trials, testing things such as maneuverability, acceleration and endurance.
During the endurance test, two people drive the car around a course marked by traffic cones for a little more than 13 miles, which can take about half an hour and involves a driver switch. Many teams have a hard time finding a large, open space for testing, meaning the endurance test could be one of the few times the car runs that long without breaks.
The great thing about (Formula SAE) is its a full production cycle, said Dolly Singh, SpaceXs former head of talent acquisition who is now chief executive of high-heel designer Thesis Couture. These kids build the car from scratch. They have to test in a high-pressure situation and see how it performs.
Preparing for the competition gives students a taste of the grind that goes into meeting real-world project deadlines.
David Hernandez, a student at California Polytechnic State University, laughed when asked how many hours he and other members of the Cal Poly Pomona Formula SAE team have spent working on their car.
Last night, I left early, and that was at 10 p.m., said Hernandez, a fourth-year aerospace engineering student.
Cal Poly Pomona has done well in the competition. Last year, the teams sleek, green vehicle with an aerodynamic wing placed third overall in Lincoln, the highest of any California team there.
The teams 2014 car is encased in glass at the front of the engineering school along with a number of trophies. That car placed fourth in Lincoln and ninth in an international Formula SAE competition.
Hernandez applied his software knowledge, acquired through classes and Formula SAE, to his internship last summer at Raytheon. He uses the same software to analyze data points from the teams car.
There are very few times you feel as passionate about the same thing, Hernandez said of the groups camaraderie. Theres nothing better than this.
Scaled Composites, which is now part of Northrop Grumman Corp., has mentored a handful of Southern California teams and recruited students in their shops for full-time jobs or internships. Several of the companys engineers have also volunteered to offer feedback ahead of the competitions.
Scaled Composites is particularly interested in students who work on design and analysis.
We do look for engineers that are hands-on, said Kelsey Gould, executive assistant to the companys vice president of engineering. Theyre really committed to figuring things out on their own.
As the competition nears, pressure mounts.
Each Saturday for the last few months, about 30 members of the University of California, Los Angeles Formula SAE team pumped up the music in their ground-floor shop on campus and worked almost all day on their car. Thats in addition to the hours they spend there in between classes.
The UCLA team has already made several changes to avoid challenges it ran into last year, when it finished 59th out of 80 teams. A new, tunable muffler has been added that should help the team pass a sound requirement during the technical inspection. Last year, UCLA just barely passed that test by using a special exhaust plug and two mufflers packed with steel wool to deaden the sound.
Students on the team get greater hands-on engineering experience than they might in academic classes, said Owen Hemminger, a mechanical engineering student and financial director of UCLAs team.
Everyone learns how to use engineering software and do machining in school, but not to the depth we use it, he said.
Dan Rivin said his experience making steering wheels and drivers seats for UCLAs cars prepared him for an internship at Northrop Grumman, where he worked with composites.
Last fall, the materials engineering student, who graduated this spring, gave a Northrop recruiter a tour of UCLAs Formula SAE shop. Later, the recruiter asked Rivin for a resume. After several interviews, he was offered a full-time job with the aerospace giant and will start at the end of this month.
He said his work with Formula SAE came up in a number of interviews. Hes convinced it got him onto recruiters radar screens.
This is very unique in the way that youre involved in the entire process, he said. No ones holding your hand through the whole thing.
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Aerospace companies find engineers on the racetrack - Virgin Islands Daily News
Liebherr-Aerospace Receives Airbus Helicopters Supplier Awards – AviationPros.com
June 2017 Airbus Helicopters has presented Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS for the third time in a row with the Award Best Performer 2016 - Silver in Customer Support & Services and Liebherr-Aerospace Lindenberg GmbH with the Award Best Improver 2016 - Bronze in Industrial Performance.
Liebherr-Aerospace has received two Supplier Awards from Airbus Helicopters during a ceremony at their plant in Dugny near Le Bourget, Paris (France) on June 20th, 2017.
In their speeches, Josef Gropper, Managing Director & COO Production, Purchasing and Asset Investments at Liebherr-Aerospace & Transportation Systems SAS, and Jean-Luc Maigne, Managing Director of Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS, thanked Airbus Helicopters for the recognition of the effort and commitment as well as the level of performance achieved by the teams of Liebherr-Aerospace.
These awards are encouraging Liebherr-Aerospace to keep on further improving the companies performance and to continue the partnership approach with Airbus Helicopters for these improvement initiatives.
Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS, Liebherrs center of competence for air management systems and Liebherr-Aerospace Lindenberg GmbH, Liebherrs center of competence for flight control and actuation systems, landing gears, gears, gearboxes and electronics, develop, manufacture, supply and provide customer services for various systems and components to almost all programs of Airbus Helicopters.
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Liebherr-Aerospace Receives Airbus Helicopters Supplier Awards - AviationPros.com
5 Indians set to fly to prestigious aerospace univ in France – Outlook India
By Kunal Dutt
New Delhi, Jun 25 When 22-year-old engineering student Arti Kalra from Punjab learnt about her selection to a prestigious aerospace university in France, she felt like "crashing through the windows and flying in the air".
She is among the five bright engineering students who have been selected under the ISAE-MBDA Programme of Excellence to follow a two-year master's course at the prestigious Institut Sup'erieur de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE), situated in Toulouse in southern France, also known for its fine vineyards.
"I was at my hostel room when the final results came out. I felt the adrenaline rush and thought wings had grown on my shoulders. It was nothing short of a dream coming true. And I felt a strong urge to just fly out in the air," Arti told PTI.
Arti, who is on the cusp of graduation from PEC University at Chandigarh with a bachelor's degree in aerospace, says, "earning these wings" is also a fulfilment of a long-cherished dream of her late father.
She and her college mate Rashika Jain, and three young men from south India, riding on full-scholarship, are slated to fly in August to Toulouse, home of aviation behemoth airbus and several other aerospace companies and research centres.
Ishaan Prakash, 22, pursuing his Bachelors degree in aerospace from SRM University in Chennai, says he took up aerospace, inspired by NASA's 'Curiosity' Rover mission.
"Since childhood, I have been fascinated with space exploration and aeronautics. So, this scholarship means a lot. I will make my country and parents proud. I want to study further and go into research after this programme, so probably I will do a PhD too," he said.
Ishaan, whose father works in a US-based technology major, and the other four students, were on cloud nine during a felicitation function held recently for them at the French embassy here.
Kartik Venkatraman and Sagar Shenoy Manikar from the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology at Bengaluru, both in early 20s, have also started learning French to make the most of their stay in the European country.
"I have just started with my 'bonjour' (hello) and 'au reviour' (good bye) but Sagar has already done a preliminary level of learning. We are having a lot of fun learning a foreign language, and it also helping us prepare to live in a foreign country," says Kartik, beaming with confidence.
All five students have an impressive academic track records, he says, adding, besides, grades, the selection criteria also included assessment of the nature of projects we had done during our college days.
Girls like Arti and Rashika feel their achievement would also give wings to the imagination of millions of girls in India, as much as about equality.
"My father never treated me any different than my younger brother. And, I want to tell the world also that girls can do anything, so don't judge us, dont's discriminate against us. And, we will make you all proud," says Arti, who hails from the town of khanna in ludhiana.
In December 2013, MBDA had signed a sponsorship agreement with the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation and ISAE, thereby setting up the annual Indian scholarship programme.
MBDA is a defence major based near Paris that is a partner in the fully-sponsored programme that has already selected over 20 Indian students since its inception in 2013.
"We began the first scholarship in 2014 and that batch graduated in 2016. Since 2014, 23 students have been selected in three different batches. And, now we have five this year," MBDA India Head Loic Piedevache told PTI.
"The performance of Indian students has been very good and therefore the programme has been extended to three more years till 2020," he said.
The number of Indian students studying in France is steadily increasing and the French government has set a target of having 10,000 of them per year by 2020, according to Deputy Chief of Mission at its embassy in India Claire Thuaudet.
"There are several recreational clubs in Toulouse, including a wine-tasting club. And, we are looking forward to these five bright students joining the university there," Piedevache said.
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5 Indians set to fly to prestigious aerospace univ in France - Outlook India
Genetic Engineering May Make Algae a Real Biofuel Contender for the Future – The News Wheel
Added on June 23, 2017 The News Wheel algae , biofuel , corn , Exxon , Green driving , renewable energy source , soybeans
So far the biofuel game has belonged to two cropscorn and soybeans. But, a third organism is ready to play. Kind of.
According to Bloomberg writer Jennifer A Dlouhy, after eight years of painstaking work, researches from J. Craig Venters Synthetic Genomics in collaboration with Exxon (a relationship which started in 2009) may have finally found a way to turn algae into a viable biofuel source.
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Algae, which has been on scientists radars for a long time now as a biofuel candidate traditionally lack enough oils and fats that a viable biofuel source requires; corn and soybeans have whats needed, but algae is a more sustainable option because it can grow in salt water and thrive under harsh environmental conditions.And the oil contained in algae potentially could be processed in conventional refineries, according to Dlouhy.
Through advanced cell engineering, the team from J. Craig Venters Synthetic Genomics has reported that they were able to more than double the fatty lipids insidea strain of algae, reports Dlouhy.
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After depriving algae of nitrogen, the scientists were able to pinpoint the single gene tasked with monitoring the amount of oil the algae produces.
Using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, the researchers were able to winnow a list of about 20 candidates to a single regulator they call it ZnCys and then to modulate its expression, according to Dlouhy.
The advanced cell engineering increased the typical oil production of algae10 to 15 percentto over 40 percent, reports Dlouhy.
Although this is a critical breakthrough and a much needed step in the evolution of algae into a viable biofuel source, commercialization of this kind of modified algae is decades away, according to Dlouhy.
News Source: Bloomberg
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Genetic Engineering May Make Algae a Real Biofuel Contender for the Future - The News Wheel
Cryotherapy: Is it the coolest thing in sports medicine? – San Francisco Chronicle
I am standing inside an upright tank, my head sticking out the top. Im wearing skivvies, booties and glovies. A dry-ice-like fog of liquid nitrogen wafts, swirling under my chin. The temperature is quickly dropping, on its way to a brisk 190 degrees below zero.
Questions arise in my mind. Will I survive the full three minutes, or will I tap out? The tank has an escape door, but what if it freezes shut? Was there a fur-lined cup they forgot to have me put on? Im trying to keep a stiff (but not frozen) upper lip, I dont want to become known as the guy who put the cry in cryotherapy.
Here we go, says Amanda, the cryo tank operator, cheerfully. Gleefully? Three minutes!
I wonder if thats what they said to Ted Williams, whose head is cryogenically frozen in a tank in Arizona. What if my family learned I have a terminal disease, but they dont want to tell me, and this is their way of tricking me into being frozen until a cure is found?
They say the Kentucky Derby is the most exciting two minutes in sports. Cryotherapy, at least the first time, is the most exciting three minutes.
Am I overdramatizing? Probably.
Whole-body cryotherapy (WBC) is increasingly popular and, as far as my research shows, without serious risk. Athletes love the treatments. Warriors Stephen Curry, Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston get tanked. Several As are users, and Jalen Richard, the Raiders second-year running back and kick returner, told me that roughly one-third of the Raiders use WBC. The Raiders as a team have open accounts at several Bay Area cryo studios.
WBC is not new. It was developed more than 30 years ago by a Japanese fellow seeking an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. In recent years it has become a full-blown fad in sports, for elite athletes and weekend warriors.
In theory, WBC works like an ice bath, but (some say) better. Three minutes in the cryo tank knocks down inflammation and speeds healing of sore muscles and assorted injuries.
Commercial cryo spas, along with touting the anti-inflammation aspect, claim user benefits such as weight loss, skin and hair rejuvenation, anti-aging, sleep enhancement, metabolism boost and a natural buzz.
These spas claim that rather than freezing your assets off, you will freeze your liabilities off.
Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler tries the latest in sports health therapy at a Bay Area cryotherapy treatment center.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler tries the latest in sports health therapy at a Bay Area cryotherapy treatment center.
Cryotherapy: Is it the coolest thing in sports medicine?
Maybe, maybe not. The website Skeptoid said in 2014, P.T. Barnum would be proud of cryosauna and cryotherapy. Save your money.
The same website did allow that WBC, in treating sore muscles and inflammation, is at least as effective as ice baths and cold-water swims, albeit more expensive. Are the skeptics too skeptical? The jury is out. The FDA does not endorse or monitor WBC.
But what many athletes believe they find in cryotherapy is a safe, fast and effective treatment for pain and inflammation. If ice bags strapped to knees are effective post-workout treatment, why not a super-duper-cold dry-ice-down quickie for the whole body?
When I go in now and Im real sore, theres definitely a soothing feeling, said Richard, who gets his cryo on several times a week. Its more soothing and relaxing to me than it is freezing cold, like ice baths are.
Richard can recite the alleged scientific theory behind cryo. Basically, the intense cold tricks your brain into survival mode. Heavier blood flow is directed to the bodys core, sending extra oxygen and nutrients to the brain and other organs. Once you escape uh, emerge from the cryo tank, the blood immediately starts returning to the skin and extremities, accelerating (allegedly) cell renewal in the skin.
The process also (allegedly) releases endorphins, boosting your mood.
When I get out of there, Richard said, within a couple of minutes I start feeling great, like Im brand new all over again.
For the sake of journalism, I decided to give it a whirl. My wife had been gifted a three-week course by a co-worker, and she passed it along to me. I went nearly every day. Im probably not a good guinea pig, since Im not a stressed and battered athlete. I do have rheumatoid arthritis, but its controlled by meds, so if cryo did help knock down my RA, I wouldnt really feel it.
Still, lets see what its all about. By coincidence, for a week before the first treatment, I suffered a bout of sciatica, a nerve condition that made it painful to sit in a car or at a desk.
There is a fear factor call it trepidation as I approach my first treatment. Later, Richard told me he was nervous the first time, too. I dont want to chicken out. When you soak a sore foot or ankle in ice water, the cold can be intense and painful. What if its like that over my whole body, and I wimp out?
Inside the storefront studio in Walnut Creek I am instructed to step into a dressing room, strip down to undershorts, put on gloves and rubber booties, and a robe. Then I step into the cryo chamber, hand Amanda my robe, and she cranks up her high-tech ice-cream churn.
It is cold almost instantly. But at no point is there a painful, whimper-inducing shock, like a plunge into a cold ocean. Its minus-190 or so, but hey, its a dry cold.
Amanda engages me in small talk, which definitely helps. Then, Halfway there, doing OK?
Diversion is the key. I try to come up with a Cryotherapy All-Star team. I get George Iceman Gervin, Red The Wheaton Iceman Grange, the old Pirates infielder Gene Freese, Vida Blue, Larry Burright, Stone Cold Steve Austin, J.T. Snow, Cool Papa Bell and Chili Davis.
Every 20 seconds or so Amanda instructs me to take a quarter turn. To get a nice, even blue skin tone, I guess.
The last minute is the coldest, but my overcoming-childish-fear endorphins are kicking in and I know Ill make it.
All done, Amanda says, hitting the kill switch. The robe goes back on, I step out, Amanda shoots a laser at my leg to register skin temp.
Am I now desperate to sprint to the nearest hot tub, sauna or hot-chocolate dispenser? No, once out of the tank, I feel fine. No lingering cold.
What about the cryo-buzz from that endorphin stampede? Again, Im probably the wrong guy. I dont get endorphin rushes from exercise. But now I do feel energetic and wide awake.
Driving home, I notice that I am sitting with little discomfort. About a week later the sciatica symptoms are gone. Coincidence? I dont know.
Within a few days I work up to Level 3, Ted Williams neighborhood. Richard told me that he not only does Level 3 but that he also jacks the temp even lower by having the attendant pre-cool the chamber. I did that once, and it got my attention. The last 30 seconds, I went to my Lamaze breathing.
Does cryotherapy work? Is it a miracle cure? Other than the sciatica relief, I seemed to feel a little less creaky in the joints, and a bit energized after the sessions. If not miraculously healed, I felt way cooler.
Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler
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Cryotherapy: Is it the coolest thing in sports medicine? - San Francisco Chronicle
Survey: businesses ramp up spending on cloud computing DC … – DC Velocity
Home > Technology > Survey: businesses ramp up spending on cloud computing
Technology June 23, 2017
Security fears ease, but cloud costs can climb fast with increased usage.
By DC Velocity Staff
Businesses are spending more on cloud computing as improved technology eases concerns about security, but users must guard against overspending, according to an IT industry survey released Wednesday.
Nearly 70 percent of U.S. businesses surveyed by Clutch, a Washington-based business-to-business (B2B) ratings and reviews firm, said they plan to increase spending on cloud computing in 2017. One in five of those businesses report their cloud computing spending this year will likely increase by more than 30 percent, according to the study, "How Businesses Use Cloud Computing: 2017 Survey."
Companies are migrating their software applications and databases from on-premise servers to cloud platforms in large part because they are gaining confidence in cloud security, the survey showed. The top five benefits of using the cloud, ranked according to how often they were cited by respondents, were:
1. Security (mentioned by 45 percent of respondents) 2. Increased efficiency (41 percent) 3. Data space (40 percent) 4. Flexibility (33 percent) 5. Scalability (28 percent)
This attitude is a shift from past years.
"Early on, there was a lot of concern from people with respect to moving workloads to the cloud because of security reasons," Jeremy Przygode, CEO of California-based managed service provider (MSP) Stratalux Inc., said in a statement. "Only the most basic of security features were built into the cloud. It really didn't have a lot of the feature sets and functionality that you can find today."
In today's world, however, the cloud is often considered a more secure option than on-premise deployments, whether measured by physical security (protecting physical assets at a geographic location), infrastructure security (ensuring security patches are updated as soon as possible), or data and access security (such as encrypting data and controlling user privileges), the report found.
The only caveat is that end users must follow the same practices that they apply for on-premise software use, the report said. These include maintaining office security strategies such as encrypting data and databases; ensuring that users' privileges are correct; and deploying features such as cybersecurity scanners that monitor for threat scenarios, Clutch found.
"Cloud is the new normal," Przygode said. "When businesses need to evaluate new solutions, or need to do a hardware refresh on existing solutions... [c]loud is the go-to solution to figure out how to do that."
As users become more comfortable with cloud security, however, they are finding a new concernhigher costs. The survey found that the largest percentage of businesses listed "increased cost" as a challenge they had encountered with their cloud provider in the past year, suggesting the increased spending may not always be intentional or wanted in some cases, Clutch said.
Those spikes in cloud computing costs are triggered when businesses buy space on cloud platforms at initial costs that can be as low as fractions of a cent per hour for a given amount of storage. If usage surges, those prices can jump up dramatically, Clutch warns.
"Cloud computing is a dual-edged sword," Przygode said. "It's great because you can quickly provision equipment or resources in the cloud by simply pushing a button. That's the agility. However, the other edge of that sword is, because it's so easy, people tend to fire stuff up and forget about it."
The best solution to control cloud computing price fluctuations and stay within budget is to exercise strict monitoring over usage time, and use proper governance over contract rates, the survey found.
The Clutch survey included 283 IT professionals at businesses across the U.S. that use a cloud computing service. Of those businesses, 58 percent had 11 to 1,000 employees, while 42 percent had more than 1,001 employees. The majority (65 percent) of respondents were male, and three-quarters of the respondent pool were 25 to 44 years old.
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Survey: businesses ramp up spending on cloud computing DC ... - DC Velocity
The Quantum Computer Factory That’s Taking on Google and IBM … – WIRED
A few yards from the stockpile of La Croix in the warehouse space behind startup Rigetti Computing s offices in Fremont, California, sits a machine like a steampunk illustration made real. Its steel chambers are studded with bolts, handles, and circular ports. But this monster is powered by electricity, not coal, and evaporates aluminum, not waterit makes superconducting electronics. Rigetti is using the machine and millions of dollars worth of other equipment housed here in hermetically sealed glass lab spaces to try and build a new kind of super-powerful computer that runs on quantum physics.
Its hardly alone in such an undertaking, though it is the underdog: Rigetti is racing against similar projects at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel. Every Bay Area startup will tell you it is doing something momentously difficult, but Rigetti is biting off more than most it's working on quantum computing. All venture-backed startups face the challenge of building a business, but this one has to do it by making progress on one of tech's thorniest problems.
An 8-qubit quantum processor built by Rigetti Computing.
RIGETTI COMPUTING
Rigetti, which has 80 employees, has raised nearly $70 million to develop quantum computers, which by encoding data into the physics apparent only at tiny scales should offer a, well, quantum leap in computing power . This is going to be a very large industryevery major organization in the world will have to have a strategy for how to use this technology, says Chad Rigetti, the companys founder. The strapping 38-year-old physics PhD worked on quantum hardware at Yale and IBM before founding his own company in 2013 and taking it through the Y Combinator incubator better known for software startups like Dropbox.
No company is yet very close to offering up a quantum computer ready to do useful work existing computers can't. But Google has pledged to commercialize the technology within five years. IBM offers a cloud platform intended as a warmup for a future commercial service that lets developers and researchers play with a prototype chip located in Big Blues labs. After a few years of mostly staying quiet, Rigetti is now entering the fray. The company on Tuesday launched its own cloud platform, called Forest, where developers can write code for simulated quantum computers, and some partners get to access the startup's existing quantum hardware. Rigetti gave WIRED a peek at the new manufacturing facility in Fremontgrandly dubbed Fab-1that just started making chips for testing at the company's headquarters in Berkeley.
The startup's founder, who has a rare fluency in both quantum information theory and Silicon Valley business-speak, says that being smaller than its giant competitors gives his company an advantage. Were pursuing this long-term objective with the urgency and product clarity of a startup, says Rigetti. That's something that large corporations arent culturally matched to do. The urgency is existential: Google's effort is a hunt for a new line of business; Rigetti's a quest to have one at all.
A silicon wafer of future quantum processors.
RIGETTI COMPUTING
At very small scales, different rules to those of our everyday reality become apparent. Particles can pull weird tricks, like kinda, sorta, doing two different things at the same time. Many millions are being sunk into quantum computing R&D because information encoded into quantum effects can do weird things, too. For certain problems, that should allow a quantum chip the size of your palm to provide more computing power than a team of giant supercomputers. Rigettilike Google, IBM, and Intelpreaches the idea that this advance will bring about a wild new phase of the cloud computing revolution. Data centers stuffed with quantum processors will be rented out to companies freed to design chemical processes and drugs more quickly, or deploy powerful new forms of machine learning.
But for now, the quantum computing chips in existence are too small to do things conventional computers can't. IBM recently announced one with 16 qubitsthe components needed to build a quantum computerand Google is gunning for around 50 qubits this year. Rigetti has made chips with 8 qubits; it says the new fab will speed up the experimentation needed to increase that number. No one knows for sure, but its estimated youd need hundreds of qubits or more to do useful work on chemistry problems, which seem to be the lowest-hanging fruit for quantum computers.
Rigettis new cloud platform, Forest, is supposed to put the time it will take to get to that point to good use. The idea is to prime the pump, getting coders to practice writing programs for quantum processors now so they're ready to release killer apps when the technology becomes practical. Forest is designed to support programs that use a quantum processor to give new powers to conventional software, a bit like a computer might have a graphics card, a hybrid model Rigetti claims will be vital to making the technology practical. The platform allows coders to write quantum algorithms for a simulation of a quantum chip with 36 qubits. Select partners can access Rigetti's early quantum chips through Forest today, similar to how IBM has put its own quantum chips online.
All that might sound like Apple deciding to open the App Store before the iPhone even existed, but Rigetti argues that with a technology this different, people will need plenty of time to adjust. Building a community of people who understand and know how to use the hardware is just as important as the hardware itself to have a successful product, says Andrew Bestwick, the company's director of engineering.
Quantum equipment at Rigetti Computings Berkeley, California, office.
RIGETTI COMPUTING
Rigetti will need time, more money, and some hard science to get to that successful product. There has been a genuine acceleration of progress on quantum hardware recently, says Michael Biercuk , a professor who works on quantum computing at the University of Sydney, and previously advised DARPA on the technology. But theres still a lot to be figured out. The entry of commercial players and startups has not changed the fundamental challenges in the field, he says. One of the most difficult is getting qubits to work reliably when packed together into larger groups, says Biercuk. Quantum states are very delicate, and making qubits less flaky at holding onto information they encode is a major preoccupation for researchers in the field.
Despite all the confident talk of products and future customers, Rigettis founder doesnt dodge when asked about the challenges. No-ones built this technology before and so as a field, and community, and company we just don't know how long things are going to take, he says.
Vijay Pande, a general partner with venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz who led the firms investment in Rigetti, says he isnt worried. He sees the startup bringing in some revenue even before its chips are ready to do real work, because some organizations and companies will pay to access them for R&D purposes. Rigetti is already talking to NASA, which believes quantum computers could help plan missions more efficiently, for example. And besides, this startup isn't held to the same standards as one building a consumer mobile app. This is old school, classic venture capital, with a high upside, says Pande. Its part of Silicon Valleys own laws of physics. When theres a really big potential payoff dangling somewhere up ahead, different rules apply.
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The Quantum Computer Factory That's Taking on Google and IBM ... - WIRED
USC to lead project to build super-speedy quantum computers – USC News
USC has been selected to lead a consortium of universities and private companies to build quantum computers that are at least 10,000 times faster than the best state-of-the-art classical computers.
USC will lead the effort among various universities and private contractors to design, build and test 100 qubit quantum machines. Such high-powered machines could help facilitate the solution of some of the most difficult optimization problems such as machine learning for image recognition, resolving scheduling conflicts in events with many participants, as well as sampling for improved prediction of random events. Pending continued success, theIntelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)contract is worth up to $45 million in funding.
The effort includes the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and the Center for Quantum Computing at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the Viterbi School. Quantum computing expert Daniel Lidar, director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology and the Viterbi Professor of Engineering, will serve as the principal investigator of the multi-institutional effort and Professor Stephen Crago of the Information Sciences Institute will serve as the program/technical manager.
This project has the potential to reshape the landscape of quantum computing.
Daniel Lidar
This project has the potential to reshape the landscape of quantum computing, and I could not have asked for a better team to pursue this exciting goal, Lidar said.
Prem Natarajan, the Michael Keston Executive Director of the Information Sciences Institute, said IARPAs Quantum Enhanced Optimization programpromises to propel the U.S. into a clear leadership position in the worldwide race to develop a quantum computer at scale.
Other institutions participating in the five-year research initiative are: theMassachusetts Institute of Technology; Caltech; Harvard University; University of California, Berkeley; University College London; University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; Saarland University, Saarland, Germany; Tokyo Institute of Technology; Lockheed Martin; and Northrop Grumman. MIT Lincoln Labs will provide government furnished capability, while NASA Ames and Texas A&M University will serve as government test and evaluation teams.
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USC to lead project to build super-speedy quantum computers - USC News
Atomic imperfections move quantum communication network closer … – Phys.Org
June 23, 2017 Single spins in silicon carbide absorb and emit single photons based on the state of their spin. Credit: Prof. David Awschalom
An international team led by the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering has discovered how to manipulate a weird quantum interface between light and matter in silicon carbide along wavelengths used in telecommunications.
The work advances the possibility of applying quantum mechanical principles to existing optical fiber networks for secure communications and geographically distributed quantum computation. Prof. David Awschalom and his 13 co-authors announced their discovery in the June 23 issue of Physical Review X.
"Silicon carbide is currently used to build a wide variety of classical electronic devices today," said Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at UChicago and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "All of the processing protocols are in place to fabricate small quantum devices out of this material. These results offer a pathway for bringing quantum physics into the technological world."
The findings are partly based on theoretical models of the materials performed by Awschalom's co-authors at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Another research group in Sweden's Linkping University grew much of the silicon carbide material that Awschalom's team tested in experiments at UChicago. And another team at the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology in Japan helped the UChicago researchers make quantum defects in the materials by irradiating them with electron beams.
Quantum mechanics govern the behavior of matter at the atomic and subatomic levels in exotic and counterintuitive ways as compared to the everyday world of classical physics. The new discovery hinges on a quantum interface within atomic-scale defects in silicon carbide that generates the fragile property of entanglement, one of the strangest phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics.
Entanglement means that two particles can be so inextricably connected that the state of one particle can instantly influence the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are.
"This non-intuitive nature of quantum mechanics might be exploited to ensure that communications between two parties are not intercepted or altered," Awschalom said.
Exploiting quantum mechanics
The findings enhance the once-unexpected opportunity to create and control quantum states in materials that already have technological applications, Awschalom noted. Pursuing the scientific and technological potential of such advances will become the focus of the newly announced Chicago Quantum Exchange, which Awschalom will direct.
An especially intriguing aspect of the new paper was that silicon carbide semiconductor defects have a natural affinity for moving information between light and spin (a magnetic property of electrons). "A key unknown has always been whether we could find a way to convert their quantum states to light," said David Christle, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago and lead author of the work. "We knew a light-matter interface should exist, but we might have been unlucky and found it to be intrinsically unsuitable for generating entanglement. We were very fortuitous in that the optical transitions and the process that converts the spin to light is of very high quality."
The defect is a missing atom that causes nearby atoms in the material to rearrange their electrons. The missing atom, or the defect itself, creates an electronic state that researchers control with a tunable infrared laser.
"What quality basically means is: How many photons can you get before you've destroyed the quantum state of the spin?" said Abram Falk, a researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Resarch Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., who is familiar with the work but not a co-author on the paper.
The UChicago researchers found that they could potentially generate up to 10,000 photons, or packets of light, before they destroyed the spin state. "That would be a world record in terms of what you could do with one of these types of defect states," Falk added.
Awschalom's team was able to turn the quantum state of information from single electron spins in commercial wafers of silicon carbide into light and read it out with an efficiency of approximately 95 percent.
Millisecond coherence
The duration of the spin statecalled coherencethat Awschalom's team achieved was a millisecond. Not much by clock standards, but quite a lot in the realm of quantum states, in which multiple calculations can be carried out in a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second.
The feat opens up new possibilities in silicon carbide because its nanoscale defects are a leading platform for new technologies that seek to use quantum mechanical properties for quantum information processing, sensing magnetic and electric fields and temperature with nanoscale resolution, and secure communications using light.
"There's about a billion-dollar industry of power electronics built on silicon carbide," Falk said. "Following this work, there's an opportunity to build a platform for quantum communication that leverages these very advanced classical devices in the semiconductor industry," he said.
Most researchers studying defects for quantum applications have focused on an atomic defect in diamond, which has become a popular visible-light testbed for these technologies.
"Diamond has been this huge industry of quantum control work," Falk noted. Dozens of research groups across the country have spent more than a decade perfecting the material to achieve standards that Awschalom's group has mastered in silicon carbide after only a few years of investigation.
Silicon carbide versatility
"There are many different forms of silicon carbide, and some of them are commonly used today in electronics and optoelectronics," Awschalom said. "Quantum states are present in all forms of silicon carbide that we've explored. This bodes well for introducing quantum mechanical effects into both electronic and optical technologies."
Researchers now are beginning to wonder if this type of physics also may work in other materials, Falk noted.
"Moreover, can we rationally design a defect that has the properties we want, not just stumble into one?" he asked.
Defects are the key.
"For decades the electronics industry has come up with a myriad of tricks to remove all the defects from their devices because defects often cause problems in conventional electronics," Awschalom explained. "Ironically, we're putting the defects back in for quantum systems."
Explore further: Exceptionally robust quantum states found in industrially important semiconductor
More information: "Isolated Spin Qubuits in SiC with a High-Fidelity Infrared Spin-to-Photon Interface," Physical Review X (2017). journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.7.021046
Harnessing solid-state quantum bits, or qubits, is a key step toward the mass production of electronic devices based on quantum information science and technology. However, realizing a robust qubit with a long lifetime is ...
A discovery by physicists at UC Santa Barbara may earn silicon carbide -- a semiconductor commonly used by the electronics industry -- a role at the center of a new generation of information technologies designed to exploit ...
Quantum computersa possible future technology that would revolutionize computing by harnessing the bizarre properties of quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits are the quantum analogue to the classical computer bits "0" and "1." ...
An electronics technology that uses the "spin" - or magnetization - of atomic nuclei to store and process information promises huge gains in performance over today's electron-based devices. But getting there is proving challenging.
For 60 years computers have become smaller, faster and cheaper. But engineers are approaching the limits of how small they can make silicon transistors and how quickly they can push electricity through devices to create digital ...
Entanglement is one of the strangest phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics, the theory that underlies most of modern physics. It says that two particles can be so inextricably connected that the state of one particle can ...
(Phys.org)In the late 1800s when scientists were still trying to figure out what exactly atoms are, one of the leading theories, proposed by Lord Kelvin, was that atoms are knots of swirling vortices in the aether. Although ...
An international team led by the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering has discovered how to manipulate a weird quantum interface between light and matter in silicon carbide along wavelengths used in ...
New research by physicists at the University of Chicago settles a longstanding disagreement over the formation of exotic quantum particles known as Efimov molecules.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory discovered that they could functionalize magnetic materials through a thoroughly unlikely method, by adding amounts of the virtually non-magnetic element scandium ...
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated a new mobile, ground-based system that could scan and map atmospheric gas plumes over kilometer ...
In experiments at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists were able to see the first step of a process that protects a DNA building block called thymine from sun damage: When it's hit with ...
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How many times is Phys.org going to repeat this fallacy ?
The distance of this influence is definitely limited by decoherence, i.e. the tendency of vacuum fluctuations (which manifest itself like the CMB radiation and thermal noise) to disrupt the entangled state (i.e. to desynchronize pilot waves of entangled objects). Inside the diamond or silicon carbide (which is similar to diamond in many extents) the strength of bonds between atoms is so high, that the effects of thermal vibrations are diminished, which makes these materials perspective systems for storage of spin and another states of atoms. I just don't think, that these states are quantized, because they require many quanta of energy (more than 10.000 photons) for switching their spin state. IMO they're rather close to classical systems of storage information within laser pulses, like the layers of dyes etc.. The another question whether the speed of this influence is infinite is also disputable, despite that we have indicia, in pure quantum system it gets actually superluminal.
Entanglement is two photons created at the source with opposite spins which sum to zero. There is no such thing as spooky action at a distance, full stop.
Math can only describe observations of reality, statements describing false or non existent observations can only be described as click bait 🙂
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Atomic imperfections move quantum communication network closer ... - Phys.Org
Donald Trump: Latest News & Photos – NY Daily News
Donald Trump is a reality TV star and billionaire business magnate who won the 2016 election to become the President of the United States.
Trump surprised political analysts sincehe entered the race in June 2015all the way until his win overHillary Clintonon Election Night. His bombastic style and relentless attacks onPresident Obamaattracted wide appeal among conservative voters.
However, Trump has also generated constant controversy from comments he's made aboutpeople with disabilities, women and ethnic groups. On the day of his announcement, he stereotyped illegalimmigrants from Mexico as criminals and rapists. Since then,comments about Muslims,Sen. John McCainandFox News host Megyn Kellyhave sparked intense backlash, but not slowed his campaign momentum.
Prior to running for president, Trump was known for his flamboyant real estate projects around the world, many of them bearing his name. His business empire has also includedgolf courses, casinos, clothing lines and theMiss USA/Miss Universe beauty pageants. For over a decade, he was also on TV as the host and producer ofNBC reality show The Apprentice.
Trump, who was previous married toIvana Trumpand Marla Maples, is currently married to the former Melania Knauss. He is the father to Donald Jr.,Ivanka,Eric, Tiffany and Barron Trump.
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Donald Trump Said Saudi Arabia Was Behind 9/11. Now Hes …
Does Donald Trumphave even an ounce of shame?
As a presidential candidate, he spent much of the election campaign needling, critiquing, denouncing, and even threatening the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yet as president, he is making his first foreign visit this weekend to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Even by Trumpian standards, the volte-face is brazen. In his first few months in power, we have witnessed the trademark Trump Turnabout on issues ranging from NATO to China to the Export-Import Bank. We have listened to him go from praising Bashar al-Assad and rebuking Janet Yellen on the campaign trail, to praising Yellen and rebuking Assad in office. Last October, he saidthat then-FBI DirectorJames Comey had guts for doing the right thing; last week, he sacked Comey and called him a showboat and a grandstander.
Trump, to put it mildly, is no stranger to the shameless U-turn. Still, the Trump Turnabout on Saudi Arabia one of Americas closest allies since President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard the USS Murphy in 1945 is a true sight to behold. This weekend, Trump will arrive in Saudi Arabia for a bilateral summit with King Salman as well as a series of meetings with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
There will be handshakes, hugs, and smiles galore. We will be expected to forget how Trump blasted the Saudi royals for being freeloaders and threatened them with an economic boycott. Speaking to the New York Times last year, Trump claimed that, without U.S. support and protection, Saudi Arabia wouldnt exist for very long. The real problem, he continued, was that the Saudis are a money machine and yet they dont reimburse us the way we should be reimbursed. Asked if he would be willing to stop buying oil from the Saudis if they refused to pull their weight, Trump responded: Oh yeah, sure. I would do that.
We will be also expected to ignore the fact that Trump slammed the Saudi government for executing homosexuals and treating women horribly. In the third presidential debate last October, Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for taking $25 million from the Saudis, from people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly and yet you take their money.
Perhaps above all else, we will be expected to brush under the carpet the fact that, twice in a single day, Trump accused Saudi Arabia of being behind the 9/11 attacks. Who blew up the World Trade Center? Trump asked his pals at Fox and Friends on the morning of February 17, 2016. It wasnt the Iraqis, it was Saudi take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.
At a campaign event in South Carolina later that day, he again cited secret papers that could prove it was the Saudis who were in fact responsible for the attacks on 9/11. It wasnt the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find its the Saudis, OK?
(To be fair to Trump, far more credible and better-informed figures have come to a similar conclusion: I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia, wrote former Florida Sen.Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Senate intelligence committees inquiry into 9/11, in an affidavit in 2012.)
Donald Trump walks from a campaign stop Feb. 17, 2016, in Bluffton, S.C. At the event, he cited secret papers that could prove it was the Saudis who were responsible for the attacks on 9/11.
Photo: Matt Rourke/AP
Whether or not the Saudi government played a role in the 9/11 attacks and we may never know for a leading U.S. presidential candidate to claim that they did, not once but twice, had to be seen to be believed. And yet, astonishingly, a little over a year later, it is to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that Trump has chosen to make his maiden foreign voyage rather than to Canada or Mexico, as every president since Ronald Reagan has.
Will Trump return from his Saudi jaunt with a big fat check? His much-hyped reimbursement? Will he dare raise the issue of gay rights while in Riyadh? Or womens rights? Will he manage to bring back a Saudi royal or two in handcuffs for their (alleged) role in the 9/11 attacks?Please. There are greater odds of the American president coming back as a proud convert to Islam.
Hypocrisy is not the exclusive preserve of Trump or the United States, of course. Saudi Arabia sees itself as the the birthplace of Islam, ruled by a king who styles himself custodian of the two holy mosques. Yet this coming weekend, the Saudi government will offer a warm and lavish welcome to a president who has said Islam hates us and wanted to ban all of the worlds 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the United States. The Saudi position on the latest iteration of the Trump travel ban, targeted at 170 million-odd Muslims? A sovereign decision aimed, apparently, at preventing terrorists from entering the United States of America and made by a true friend of Muslims.
On Sunday, the fawning Saudis will offer a platform to the worlds most famous Islamophobe, to give a speech on Islam in the birthplace of Islam. AndTrump will likely take the opportunity to decry radical Islamic terrorism while visiting a country thathas perhaps done more than any other to incite, fund, and fuel it.
Hypocrisy unites them both. So too does their fear and loathing of the Iranians the Saudis are busying dropping bombs and backing militants to push back Iranian influence in Yemen and Syria. The Trump administration, filled with Iran hawks, is on the verge of inking a series of arms deals with Riyadh worth more than $100 billion.
To be clear: Trumps U-turn on Saudi Arabia has little to do with being moderated by the realities of high office or swayed by the Beltways foreign policy elites. Despite his bombastic campaign rhetoric, he never planned to go after the Saudis in office even after publicly accusing them of murdering 3,000 Americans. Early on in the campaign, in 2015, a senior Arab diplomat told me, on condition of anonymity, that Trump had informed most of the Gulf governments, in private, that his anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric was all for the campaign and that it would be business as usual once he was elected (or, for that matter, defeated).
As ever, for Trump, it is always, above all else, about the bottom line his bottom line. The Saudi-bashing Trump sold an entire floor of the Trump World Tower to the Saudis for $4.5 million in 2001. And would it surprise you to discover that Trump also registered eight companies tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia inthe midst of his Saudi-bashing presidential campaign?
Of course not. Business is business. Trump is Trump. You might be repulsed by his deceitfulness but you have to admire his chutzpah.
Top photo: A view aboard an American warship at Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt conferred with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in 1945.
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Donald Skunks the Democrats – New York Times
The 43-year-old Ryan, who failed to unseat Pelosi as House minority leader last year, says that the Democrats brand is toxic, and in some places worse than Trumps. Which is beyond pathetic.
The Republicans have a wildly unpopular, unstable and untruthful president, and a Congress that veers between doing nothing and spitting out vicious bills, while the Democratic base is on fire and appalled millennials are racing away from Trump. Yet Democrats are stuck in loser gear.
Trumps fatal flaw is that he cannot drag himself away from the mirror. But Democrats cannot bear to look in the mirror and admit what is wrong.
We congenitally believe that our motives are pure and our goals are right, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, told me. Therefore, we should win by default. But, he added dryly: Youve got to run a good campaign. In elections, politics matter. Oooh, what a surprise.
As Ryan sighs: If you dont win, you dont have power, and you cant help on any of these issues we care about.
Democrats cling to an idyllic version of a new progressive America where everyone tools around in electric cars, serenely uses gender-neutral bathrooms and happily searches the web for the best Obamacare options. In the Democrats vision, people are doing great and getting along. It is the opposite of Trumps dark diorama of carnage and dystopia but just as false a picture of America.
With Jon Ossoff, as with Hillary Clinton, the game plan was surfing contempt for Trump and counting on the elusive Obama coalition. Heavy Hollywood involvement is not necessarily a positive in Georgia, though. Alyssa Milano drove voters to the polls but couldnt bewitch the Republicans. And not living in the district is bad anywhere.
Democrats are going to have to come up with something for people to be for, rather than just counting on Trump to implode. (Which he will.) The party still seems flummoxed that there are big swaths of the country where Democrats once roamed that now regard the Democratic brand as garbage and its long-in-the-tooth leadership as overstaying its welcome. The vibe is suffocating. Wheres the fresh talent?
In a new piece in The Atlantic, Emanuel and Bruce Reed who engineered their partys last takeover of Congress in 2006, the first since 1994 argue that Democrats need to channel their anger and make 2018 a referendum on Trumps record, not his impeachment.
In dwindling swing districts, Emanuel told me, Democrats need to choose candidates who are pro-middle class, not merely pro-poor.
They cant just waltz in and win seats held by Republicans. And they cant go full Bernie. They have to drum up suburban candidates who reflect their districts, Emanuel says, noting that they wrenched back control of Congress by recruiting a football player in North Carolina, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania and a sheriff in Indiana.
Its shocking that Hillary couldnt be bothered to come up with an economic message or any rationale other than Its My Turn. Hillary never got a real message out, Michael Bloomberg, who eviscerated Trump at Hillarys convention, told Anderson Cooper. It was Dont vote for that guy and the gender issue. Whereas Donald had us saying Make America Great Again.
Ryan says Democrats need to stop microtargeting. They talked to a black person about voting rights, a brown person about immigration, a gay about gay rights, a woman about choice and on and on, slicing up the electorate, he said. But they forgot that first and foremost, people have to pay their mortgages and get affordable health care.
He also urged his fellow Democrats to stop obsessing about Trump and Russia and start obsessing on globalization, automation and wage stagnation.
The crazy thing is that theres a great opportunity here, because neither party has figured out how to thrive in the new economy, he said.
Carrier and Boeing, where Trump visited to boast about saving jobs, announced layoffs last week, and Ford is shifting some production to China. And news flash for Donald: King Coal has been dethroned.
Trump leveraged his wealth to convince working-class people that he could deal with these changes, Ryan said. But just saying, The Chinese rent from me, doesnt mean hes figured this stuff out.
Trump may be nuts enough to blow up the world. But the Democrats are nuts if they think his crazy is enough to save them.
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The Untold Story of How Gary Cohn Fell for Donald Trump – Vanity Fair
ALL THAT GLITTERS President Trump is briefed on a military strike on Syria, at Mar-a-Lago, April 6. Among his advisers present, nearly one-third are Goldman Sachs alums (circled).
Photograph from the White House/CNP/SIPA USA.
One photograph makes it abundantly clear just how present a small group of Goldman Sachs alumni has become in Donald Trumps White House. From April 6, it shows a stone-faced Trump and his advisers in a sensitive, compartmented information facility at Mar-a-Lago, just after the president had given the order to launch cruise missiles at a Syrian-government airbase. In the closely cropped picture, released by Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Twitter, 14 men and one woman are crowded tightly around a small table, their eyes glued to a closed-circuit-television screen. Three of the people in the pictureGary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council and Trumps chief economic adviser; Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; and Dina Powell, a deputy national-security adviserare former Goldman Sachs partners, one of the most coveted perches on Wall Street. A fourth, Steve Bannon, Trumps chief strategist, was a Goldman Sachs vice president in the late 1980s, before he left the firm to start his own investment-banking business.
I find it validating, says Lloyd Blankfein, Goldmans chairman and C.E.O., from his Battery Park City, Manhattan, office, 41 floors above the Hudson River, that as he was looking for good people it happens that a lot of them had Goldman Sachs affiliations. It makes me feel good that he sees in those people the same thing I see in those people.
That Trump would turn to Goldman Sachs to fill some of the most important positions in his fledgling administration is rich with irony. For years, Trump and Goldman practiced mutual disdain. Trump was the poster child of the kind of client that Goldman, which has always prided itself on superb risk management, warned its bankers to avoid. At least four of Trumps hotel and casino businesses have ended up in bankruptcy court, costing creditors and shareholders billions of dollars in losses. For this reason and others, Goldman determined never to do business with Trump and conveyed that message to its new recruits. Sources at Goldman now deny he was unwelcome at the firm, but more than one former Goldman banker has told me that its true, and Goldman has never underwritten a single stock or bond offering for a Trump majority-owned business or real-estate project or lent him any money.
Goldman also avoided Trump politically. It is no secret that Cohn, when he was Goldmans president and C.O.O., and Blankfein were Democratsalthough neither man was particularly enamored of President Obama and his antiWall Street rhetoric. Famously, Goldman paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 to appear at three non-taxing question-and-answer sessions during 2013, less than two years before she declared her candidacy for president. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Goldman employees and affiliated pacs donated less than $5,000 to Trump during the 2016 election cycle. By contrast, Clinton received more than $340,000 from them.
During the campaign, Trump was not shy about returning the love. He criticized his political opponents mercilessly for their ties to Goldman Sachs. During a rally in February 2016, when he was still trying to fend off Senator Ted Cruz, whose wife, Heidi, is a managing director at the bank, Trump said, I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton. As the presidential campaign was coming to a close, Trump ran a television ad featuring Blankfein (along with billionaire businessman George Soros) as one of Wall Streets arch-villains, responsible for sending U.S. jobs overseas and closing U.S. factories.
Yet, after his surprise victory, last November, Trump did a 180-degree turn on Goldman Sachs. Perhaps he decided that, after a long and divisive campaign, he had to show the capital markets that he wasnt a total lunatic, especially when in the early-morning hours of November 9 the futures market plunged some 1,000 points. What better way to reassure Wall Street that he wasnt completely bonkers than to hire Goldman Sachss best and brightest? And, even better, he could make them kiss his ring and show them whos boss. At the infamous June 12 Cabinet meeting Mnuchin fell right in line with the other sycophants in the room praising Trump. There was nothing rehearsed about that, Mnuchin says. I mean, it was, basically: the vice president started it, and I think it was how everybody felt in the room. He dismisses the widespread charges of fawning at that Cabinet meeting: What criticism? I mostly list that in the fake news.
Whatever Trumps convoluted logic for going Goldman, it confounded Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of Wall Streets bad behavior leading up to the financial crisis and since. Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp, she says. Then he put enough Goldman bankers on his team to open a branch office of Goldman in the White House. The more Warren thinks about it, the more exasperated she gets. Donald Trump ran on not Goldman Sachs running this economy. If there was a single economic idea that was consistent in his campaign, it was that Goldman Sachs should not run Americas economy. Then he got elected, put in a Goldman team, and handed them the keys.
If Trumps about-face was surprising, you also have to wonder why Gary Cohn, a lifelong Democrat, left Goldman to accept Trumps offer. The conventional wisdom is that Cohn, 56, grew tired of waiting for Blankfein to retire from the C.E.O. post at Goldman and leapt at the chance to serve his country in such a crucial role. Becoming the director of the National Economic Council gave Cohn a graceful exit from Goldman and allowed him to follow in the footsteps of two illustrious Goldman senior partners: Robert Rubin and Stephen Friedman. (Leaving also allowed Cohn the not insignificant economic benefit of being able to convert his roughly $250 million of Goldman Sachs stock into Treasury securities on a tax-deferred basis. In 2016, Goldman paid Cohn $20 million and then vested his restricted stock after he left for Washington.)
There is another version of Cohns decision to leave Goldman that is slightly more complicated. In September 2015, Blankfein announced the shocking news that he had lymphoma. He had been C.E.O. for nearly a decade and had successfully steered Goldman through both the 2008 financial crisis and the reputational abyss that followed, when the firm became the symbol of Wall Street greed and arrogance.
While Blankfein was recuperating, Cohn seemed to delight in the attention and adulation he received when he filled in for his boss on earnings calls, industry presentations, and media events, such as The New York Timess DealBook Conference. Thats when, some say, he became overconfident and decided to inquire of several of his fellow board members about becoming C.E.O., even as Blankfein was responding well to his chemotherapy treatments. Gary made a play to replace Lloyd, according to a former Goldman partner. It didnt work. The board was noncommittal to Cohn, he continues. Theres a lot of loyalty to Lloyd on the board.
I think Gary had been getting frustrated in the sense of Will I ever be in a position to lead? says a longtime Goldman partner. And I think the conclusion was Well, not now, buddy. He then started looking at Wait a minutetheres other opportunities here to do things.
The board consensus was that Cohn wasnt well rounded enough to lead the firm. Wed talk about how wed crossed the Rubicon and he wouldnt know what we were talking about, says a former Goldman board member. But he was unusually bright, knew markets, had huge character, and was straightforward. If you think Im blunt, hes right from the brain to the mouth.
But the man who had made any number of successful bets as a Goldman trader had miscalculated. That quickly proved to be an untenable situation for both Cohn and Blankfein.
A source close to the situation describes what happened at Goldman differently. The honest-to-goodness story is: did Gary have lunch with Bayo [Adebayo Ogunlesi], Goldmans lead director, once or twice? Absolutely. Did he ever make a power play to become C.E.O.? He absolutely did not. He met with Bayo and said, Look, is the board comfortable with Lloyd staying on? Bayo said, Yeah. Gary said, Well, look, thats great. I know where I am. Im not in any hurry and Im not threatening, but we should all be on the same page that Ive been president and chief operating officer for 10 years. Gary gets a lot of phone calls for opportunities. He told Bayo he was going to start listening when his phone rang.
The timing was perfect for Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law, to pounce. He approached Cohn, supposedly at the suggestion of mutual friends. Jared Kushner has always been a little starstruck with Goldman Sachs people, says a former Goldman partner who knows him well. Hes always liked that sort of promotional edginess that Goldman Sachs has had, and hes always liked the reputation that Goldman Sachs has the best people, quote unquote, the smartest, savviest people. The idea, by the way, that Jared was suddenly in a position where he actually had the power to call on and hire and lure a number of people like that to the bench side, if you will, was a very, very intoxicating, enticing, and really kind of exciting thing to him, the former partner continues. This was an incredibly sort of convenient and opportune kind of thing that came along for Gary becausewhether he was going to Washington or notGary was out.
Cohn was the quintessential Goldman executive, with a well-known backstory: a middle-class striver from the heartland who came to the firm and succeeded wildly. From a suburb of Cleveland, the dyslexic grandson of Jewish immigrants, he was pressured by his father to get a job he didnt want, in the home-products division of U.S. Steel.
On a business trip to New York he visited the comexthe Commodity Exchange Inc., as it used to be knownin Lower Manhattan and eventually talked his way into a job trading options. In 1990 he joined the J. Aron division of Goldman, rising through the ranks, along with his mentor, Blankfein. When C.E.O. Hank Paulson became Treasury secretary, in 2006, Blankfein succeeded him, choosing Cohn to be his deputy.
I think people respected Gary completely, says Robert Steel, a former Goldman partner, Treasury official, and New York City deputy mayor who is now the C.E.O. of Perella Weinberg, the boutique investment bank. I dont think theres any issue of him being a jerk or a bad guy or anything like that. Hes very generous. Hes raised a lot of money for N.Y.U. hospital. He has nice kids, one wife. Hes not obnoxious. He looks you in the eye. Ive never heard him say a single thing derogatory about anybody . . . . Hes never read a five-page memo in his life, but when he asks you to describe something to him he pays incredible attention and remembers every word.
I think Mnuchins homework is being checked by Gary Cohn, says a former Goldman partner.
Adds John F. W. Rogers, Goldmans longtime consigliere, If you went and talked to most of the bankers at the firm, they would say Gary was a guy whod go anywhere, anytime, if we asked him to. He was always engaging, and he always brought an interesting market perspective to the dialogue of the problem of the client. He also was an exceptional listener and would look for those common points of moving the conversation forward.
A former Goldman partner, who still speaks occasionally to Cohn, thinks hes already made a huge difference in the White House. Trump likes alpha males that either have been in the military and have been in battle or alpha males that have made a lot of money, he says. Trump likes to say, Thats my Goldman Sachs president over there, Thats my Exxon C.E.O. over there, you know, Thats my general over there. The partner says that, by working closely with Ivanka Trump, Kushner, and Dina Powell, Cohn has tempered the reactionary influence of people around the president (such as Peter Navarro, head of the National Trade Council, and Steve Bannon, the chief strategist with white-nationalist leanings), and he is dedicated to making sure the U.S. doesnt start any ridiculous trade wars or do something crazy on health care. Im not going to let it happen, the former partner says Cohn told him.
But he also may be starting to hedge his bets. Trump has asked Cohn to head up the search for a replacement for Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen, when her term expires early next year. She may yet get reappointed, but there has also been speculation that Cohn himself wants the job, which would insulate him, and his reputation, from the ongoing Trump scandals. Crazier things have happened: Once upon a time Dick Cheney led the search for George W. Bushs vice president and then took the job himself.
Like Cohn, Steve Mnuchin became a Goldman partner in 1994 and made his first fortune, said to be around $100 million, when Goldman went public, five years later. (Fortune puts Mnuchins current net worth at close to $500 million, based on his disclosure forms.) But thats pretty much where the similarities between Mnuchin and Cohn end. Mnuchin is Goldman royalty, which is far from the norm at a firm that takes pride in hiring the ambitious sons and daughters of the middle class and molding them in the Goldman Way. Steves father, Robert Mnuchin, was a Yale graduate and a longtime Goldman partner, a member of the management committee, and the head of institutional equity trading. In his 17 years at Goldman Sachs, his son had a variety of jobs. At his peak he ran Goldmans mortgage-backed securities division, as a protg of Mike Mortara, an exSalomon Brothers trader who became a Goldman legend. Mortara co-headed the fixed-income division with Blankfein. They hated one another, the former partner says. In 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, Paulson decided he needed to separate them. He moved Mortara out of fixed-income to run something called GS Ventures, a short-lived venture-capital fund. Mnuchin followed his rabbi there, but in November 2000, Mortara died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, at the age of 51.
Mnuchin left Goldman two years later, in 2002, convinced that, with the ascension of Blankfein, his days at the firm were numbered. He went to work briefly with his former Yale roommate Eddie Lampert, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, who invited him onto the board of directors of Sears Holdings, the parent company of both Sears and Kmart, Lamperts ill-fatedand ongoingretail venture. (Mnuchin resigned his board seat before he was confirmed as Treasury secretary.) In 2004, he started Dune Capital Management with financial backing from George Soros.
At Dune Capital, Mnuchin wasnt afraid of taking big risks. He formed RatPac-Dune Entertainment, a film-financing company, with Hollywood producer Brett Ratner and investor James Packer. They have had some successes, including The Lego Movie, American Sniper, and, most recently, Wonder Woman, and their share of bombs, including Pan and In the Heart of the Sea. Now hes making movies, says a former Goldman partner, who knew him when. [Now] hes going around with . . . Trump-like guys, which is really different than [who he was], which was a bit socially awkward, very smart, really into teamwork. I would have sworn he was a Democrata liberal Democrat.
In 2014, Mnuchins fund invested a reported $80 million in a small Hollywood studio, Relativity Media. For a time, he was co-chairman of Relativitys board, having been personally recruited to it by the studios founder, Ryan Kavanaugh. Mnuchin and other Wall Street investors were assuming Relativity would eventually go public, and theyd all cash in. Instead, in 2015, it filed for bankruptcy, and Mnuchin lost his $80 million investment. But he enjoyed the Hollywood social scene; he recently married the Scottish actress Louise Linton, 18 years his junior. It is Mnuchins third marriage; he has three children from his second marriage.
Mnuchin also built a real-estate business at Dune, which invested in two Trump projects: the Trump International Hotel Waikiki and the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. In November 2008, a day before a $330 million payment was due on the $640 million Chicago-tower construction loan, Trump sued his lenders, including Dune Capital. Incredibly, Trump claimed that his lenders had precipitated the 2008 financial crisis and therefore he shouldnt have to repay the loan, which had been provided by a syndicate led by Deutsche Bank. The lawsuit between Trump and his Chicago creditors was later settled, and the building was completed. But Trump ended up losing his $40 million of equity in the building. I like to think of Chicago as something that I got built, that is a great monument, he once told me. I always say it was better for the people of Chicago than it was for Donald Trump.
Mnuchins biggest score by far came when he led a group of investors, including Soros, billionaire hedge-fund manager John Paulson, and computer billionaire Michael Dell, in the 2009 acquisition of IndyMac, a failed California-based bank that had made too many risky mortgages in the years leading up to the financial crisis. With the help of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which agreed to cover a portion of any future loan losses, Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac for $1.55 billion and renamed it OneWest.
In 2014, CIT Group, a large financial institution then run by former Goldman partner John Thain, bought OneWest for $3.4 billion in cash and CIT stock. While its not known publicly exactly how much Mnuchin made from the deal, his 1.2 percent stake in CIT was at one time worth around $100 million.
OneWest generated plenty of controversy when Mnuchin owned it, including claims that the bank ruthlessly foreclosed on individual homeowners for tiny infractions. In 2011 the Office of Thrift Supervision issued a consent order after its review of OneWest uncovered unsafe and unsound practices. California housing advocacy groups have also filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging that OneWest discriminated in its lending practices against African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
Mnuchin says he has known Trump for about 15 years and met with him several times during the primaries, when he was funding the entire primary himself, and then, when it got to the point that it was clear that he was going to win the nomination, he reached out to me and asked me to work for him being the finance chairman. I was also a senior economic adviser on the campaign.
In May, Mnuchin went toe-to-toe with Senator Warren during a public hearing over the topic of whether the Trump administration would make good on backing a return to a form of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial banking from investment banking to prevent risky bets being made with depositors money. Cohn had led her and other senators to believe during an early-April closed-door meeting of the Senate Banking Committee that the Trump administration would support a reinstatement of the law. Now Mnuchin was hedging. It was quite the show, which ended with Warren concluding, So, let me get this straight. Youre saying youre in favor of Glass-Steagall, which breaks apart the two arms of banking . . . except you dont want to break apart the two parts of banking. This is like something straight out of George Orwell.
A former Goldman colleague says of Mnuchin, If you look at him and you study him, hes not a charismatic guy that will inspire you, [but] he is a very confident person. . . . If the shit were hitting the fan or something like that, Id rather have Hank [Paulson] there, but . . . I will not be surprised if Mnuchin does a very good job with all the limits that surround somebody in a role like that.
Others disagree. Hes in way over his head, says one Washington insider. Another former Goldman partner adds, I think his homework is being checked by Gary.
Theres clearly friction between Cohn and Mnuchin. The Washington insider says that Mnuchin seems insecure in his role, is not a team player, and has so far not hired the best possible team at Treasury. Mnuchin dismisses such criticisms. I was at Goldman for almost 18 years, he says. I oversaw various trading desks, I oversaw the technology division, so I had both operational as well as trading and risk-management expertise. I then started my own investment business; Ive been a regional banker for the last eight years, so Ive had firsthand experience on what it is to grow a regional bank, what it is to deal with regulators and interact with lots of small and medium-sized companies. So, I really see this as: my different jobs in my career were preparing me for the different parts of the Treasury job.
As for his hires at Treasury, Id say weve probably interviewed 300 or 400 people for these jobswe have every single one of the jobs filled. So whats holding back the process is these jobs require security clearances. . . . I think these comments that we havent filled jobs is ridiculous. We can get back to you with the facts, but I think weve filled jobs faster than the previous administration.
Mnuchin and Cohn found themselves on the defensive over the bizarre rollout of Trumps much-anticipated tax-reform plan. In late April, Trump visited the Treasury. Steven didnt want anyone else over there, if you notice, the Washington insider says. He wanted the whole thing to himself because it was his moment of glory. Suddenly, and without warning, Trump announced that the tax-reform plan would be forthcoming the following week. Cohn and Mnuchin, who had been working on the assumption that any such announcement was months away, were shocked, and were left scrambling to put something together over the weekend. This resulted in an embarrassing, one-page, detail-free proposal, presented at an April 26 press conference. Steven didnt manage [Trump], the insider concludes. Mnuchin responds, That couldnt be farther from the truth, okay? The facts are: I worked on a tax plan with the president for the last year. I started coming in, in January, and meeting with the House and the Senate and speaking to the leadership on tax reform, so weve been working on this since January. We have over 100 people in the Treasury working on it. [Tax reform] hasnt been done in 30 years.
In the White House, Steve Bannon is not considered part of the Goldman team. He was at Goldman, in the mergers-and-acquisitions department, but for only four years, in the late 1980s. I dont think Bannon has jack shit of a Goldman Sachs pedigree, a former Goldman partner says. But what was unusual about him, recalls another partner who knew him at the firm, was he was a huge patriot and kept thinking the country was going to hell. . . . He was really concerned about the United States of America. But I was never quite sure what he thought was wrong with it. . . . He was never able to articulate it in a way that I understood.
Dina Habib Powells Goldman pedigree also sets some teeth on edge at the firm. But shes beloved among the occupants of the top executive suites. Blankfein says he told Trump about her: Youre going to find shes going to be a very big, positive surprise to you. Youre going to find out that you end up counting on her for much more than you could imagine.
And indeed shortly after Powell joined the administration to work with Ivanka Trump on womens economic-empowerment issues, H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, plucked her to work with him as one of his deputies. Vogue recently called her Trumps right-hand woman.
Its a trajectory that leaves many current and former Goldman rank-and-file bankers scratching their heads. Powell, one Goldman executive tells me, was always thought of around the firm as content lite, when it came to knowledge about finance, which is about as brutal an observation as can be made about someone at Goldman, where intellect and revenue generation are prized above all else.
The most remarkable thing about Dina Powell is that she can manage up better than anybody Ive ever seen in my entire life, says one of her former Goldman colleagues. I believe managing up is when you are able to get the people whom you work for to think you are unbelievably good and competent at what you do.
Adds another former Goldman partner, Her gift is that shes incredibly politically astute. She is an incredible worker of people and relationships, and she is that type of person where, if you come into the room and Dina wants to make you feel like youre important or whatever, you are going to feel it. She is very effective at that, and the exterior package is really well put together. So she plays the part extremely well, and she knows the game in Washington.
Like Cohns, Powells narrative is classic Goldman, only more exotic. She was born in Cairo, and her father was a captain in the Egyptian Army. In 1977 the Habibs moved to Dallas to join grandparents who had already settled there. Her parents believed that she and her sister would have a much better chance of achieving their potential in the United States (another daughter was born in the U.S.). Their message was simple: We left our homeland and all our everything behind so that you and your sisters can achieve your potentialas long as youre a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. Settling in was difficult. Her father drove a bus, owned a convenience store, and eventually became a small real-estate entrepreneur. Her mother was a social worker.
After she graduated from the University of Texas, in 1995, she got into law school but instead took an internship working for Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. senator from Texas. Her parents were horrified. They wanted her to be a lawyer and thought she was ruining her life. She worked for Hutchison for one year and then spent the next four years working for Dick Armey, then the Republican majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. Armey later said something about Powell that many men echo: We immediately recognized her brains and her ability, and then her charm, and finally, I think somebody noticed she was gorgeous, too.
After George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election, Powell joined the White House and eventually became an assistant to Bush for presidential personnel, with responsibility to find and hire people to fill many of the empty White House positions. She later was promoted to become a deputy undersecretary of state, working closely with Karen Hughes, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. She traveled around the world with Hughes and later with Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, who has said she found Powell to be indispensable.
Powells role in Republican politics in Washington brought her to the attention of John F. W. Rogers, the longtime Goldman partner who had worked for both Ronald Reagan and James Baker. He hired her in 2007 as a managing director. Three years latermuch to the surprise of many people at GoldmanPowell was made a partner. Rogers cites her intuition and creativity as reasons she did so well at Goldman. We had this idea of what we wanted to pursuea belief that womens empowerment was going to be an emerging thematic issue, he says. We had ideas, but we didnt have the execution. And one of the things that I found with her, she grabs hold and she executes.
But there was plenty of resentment inside Goldman toward her and envy of her meteoric rise. If there was ever a character tailor-made for Dina Powells charms and abilities, it was John F. W. Rogers, says someone who knows them both well. She knows how to play that guy . . . a combination of actual smarts, charm, flirtation, compliments, loyalty, all those things.... She was the apple of his eye at Goldman.
Anne Black, now the president of Goldman Sachs Gives (a philanthropic fund for Goldmans current and former senior employees), worked nearly nine years for Powell. She was really a steadfast champion for me and others of us on the team, who were all promoted thanks to her, she says. She elevated my game, inspired me to be creative and bold, and expected us to show results.A former Goldman partner who knows Powell well insists she played a substantive role at the firm and was a champion for the women who worked for her. All six of her senior leadership team members were with her most of her 10-year tenure, this person says. She fought hard to ensure that each one was promoted several times.
Rogers understands the envy. She wasnt in the revenue-producing area of the firm, so maybe some people here were jealous of her accomplishments, he says. But Ill say I know a lot of other people apply standards to her that they never would apply to a man. Thats just a fact.
At Goldman, Powell held several jobs: president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation (Rogers is its chairman) and overseeing the firms 10,000 Women program, which provides capital and training to women entrepreneurs, and its 10,000 Small Businesses program. Powell was also head of Goldmans Impact Investing Business, which makes loans to, and equity investments in, underserved communities in the U.S. Over a 13-month period ending in January, Goldman paid her around $6 million in compensation (the figure includes annual bonuses for two years), according to her White House disclosure forms.
Her fans at Goldman say she was worth every penny. Alison Mass, a Goldman investment-banking partner, with whom she worked closely, says, She got stuff done. She was great at executing. We were at a point where the partnership really valued what she did. Shes a great networker. Shes got one of those attractive personalities.
Days after the election, Powell got a call from Ivanka, who was mapping out her agenda in Washington, focusing primarily on womens empowerment issues. She called Powell, at Goldman, to find out what had accounted for the success of the 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses programs. Powell impressed Ivanka, who offered her a job. After Trumps inauguration, Powell became a senior counselor to the president for entrepreneurship, small-business growth, and the empowerment of women. That didnt last long. In March, soon after he replaced Michael Flynn as national-security adviser, McMaster asked her to join him as one of his deputies. She leapt at the chance. (Some 20 percent of her time is still spent on her initial White House job.) Some say she did so because she feared it would become obvious that she had little understanding of finance and economics; others say her language skills (she is fluent in Arabic) and previous experience in Washington made her a natural fit for the job, because it requires bringing together a disparate group of government officials to get things done.
Powells fingerprints were all over Trumps May trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel. She spent months helping to plan it and working across various government agencies to make sure it came off without too many hitches. The consensus seems to be it was the most successful part of Trumps first overseas venture. Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for the bureau of Near East affairs, went on the overseas trip with Powell. He says she was extremely influential and active on the trip and deserves much of the credit for making the Mideast part a historic success.
Jones says people at Goldman are mistaken if they question her qualifications for her position on the National Security Council. These are people who dont know Washington, he says. Thats the dichotomy between New York and Washington. I cant speak to her banking prowess, but in Washington its not just about deals. Its about relationships. Its about politics. Its about fostering policy. Its about bringing people along. Thats a different set of skills. Shes not only qualified, shes the most qualified person in that group of people.
The Washington insider also praises the job shes doing in the White House. Shes the best politician Ive ever met in my life, he says. She can work an organization better than anyone Ive ever seen. . . . Unlike the rest of us, she has prior White House experience, and she really knows how this place works. . . . Shes been able to use that to a huge advantage in here of working the system.
While the Washington insider says that Trump listens to Powell, it seems she has little influence over him on Middle East policy, even though she probably understands its intricacies as well as anyone in the Cabinet.
A Middle East specialist calls Trumps Middle East policy in general an unprecedented disaster. Whereas previous U.S. presidents have played a delicate game of appeasing the Saudis, while letting them know we wont support parts of their agenda not in our national interest, Trump has unbalanced the region by essentially tweeting them unconditional support for anything they want to dothe blockade of Qatar and roiling the Russians with further involvement against Assad in Syria, for instance.
Which brings us to the larger question: How successful is the Goldman troika at influencing the president? Recent signs have not been as encouraging as many people have hoped. Cohn and Powell (along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Javanka) urged Trump to keep the nation a signatory to the Paris climate agreement. They lobbied the president, but their sound reasoning was overwhelmed by the illogical arguments made by Bannon and the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, who together persuaded him to stick with his campaign promise to abandon the accord.
The crucial question confronting Cohn, Mnuchin, and Powellwhether they choose to acknowledge it or notis if their association with Trump and his administration will forever tarnish the reputations they have worked so hard to build, mostly by affiliation with Goldman Sachs. And given how closely the three Goldman partners have come to be linked with Trump, it might not be great for Goldman eithera fact that Blankfein seems to have intuited. In his first-ever tweet, on June 1, after Trump trashed the Paris accord, Blankfein wrote, Todays decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.s leadership position in the world.
Link:
The Untold Story of How Gary Cohn Fell for Donald Trump - Vanity Fair
The Kremlin’s Election Meddling Is Paying Off – The Atlantic
Fifty-four years ago this month, former President John F. Kennedy delivered the Strategy of Peace, a powerful address that captured Americas indispensable leadership at the height of the Cold War. Kennedy knew that our country could not guard against the Soviet Union alone, for he believed that genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts.
Incredibly, the man who now leads the United States seems to find himself locked in an alarming and perilous embrace with the Russian government. These ties threaten to weaken a system of alliances that have held Russiaand countless other threats to the international communityat bay since the conclusion of the Second World War.
Watergate Lawyer: I Witnessed Nixon's Downfalland I've Got a Warning for Trump
In his Senate testimony two weeks ago, former FBI Director James Comey affirmed a disturbing suspicion: that Donald Trump first undermined Comey, by leaning on him to drop his investigation of former National Security-Adviser Michael Flynn, and then removed him from his post. Since then, events have escalated at a dizzying pace: Trump accused Comey of lying under oath about their interactions earlier this year, even as he cheered Comeys public assertion that the president wasnt under FBI investigation. Soon, reports emerged that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating obstruction-of-justice allegations against the presidentrevelations Trump was none too happy about. And all the while, rumors have continued to swirl that Trump may fire both Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whos overseeing the special counsel inquiry.
But Trumps reckless handling of these events should not distract from a startling reality: As the president faces accusations of colluding with the Russians during last years campaign, his policies in office have aligned almost perfectly with the Kremlins goals. If Moscow wanted its interference in Americas election to yield dividends, it could hardly have hoped for more.
Just as importantly, while Trump has expressed concern over the cloud the Russia investigation generated, he has seemed indifferent overall to Russias direct attempts to interfere with the American democratic process. According to Comeys testimony, Trump never asked him about the meddling, or how to prevent similar interference in the future. Not once.
Trump himself has seemingly courted the favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin since the 2016 presidential campaign. Hes repeatedly praised Putins leadership, refused to condemn Russian efforts to disrupt the U.S. system of free elections, and openly encouraged Russian hacking of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Fridays explosive report from The Washington Post confirmed that Putin was deeply and directly involved in an operation to hurt Clintons candidacy and help elect Trump.
Whats more, in every way he can, Trump has deferred to Russia on matters of foreign policy. After Russian forces deployed their hacking tools during the recent French presidential election, Trump invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the White House and failed to repudiate the attack against a vital American ally. Instead, during his meeting with Lavrov, Trump divulged highly sensitive classified information provided by Israel, another crucial U.S. partner. (That May 10 meeting also came a day after Trump removed Comey, who was leading the inquiries into collusion; Trump told the Russians that the directors dismissal had alleviated great pressure on him.) Even more recently, the Trump administration has reportedly taken steps to return two diplomatic compounds that former President Barack Obama stripped from Russia following its actions during last years election.
To make matters worse, Trump has done far more than just extend open arms toward the Russian government. He wavered on the United States commitment to defend its fellow members of NATO; his aides have reportedly tried to undermine the European Union; and he himself has alienated key partners by lashing out at individual leaders and pulling out of the Paris Agreement.
When Americans step back and consider this stunning series of actions, they should be left with unsettling questions: What are Donald Trumps reasons for doing this? What exactly does he have to hide?
In the Strategy of Peace, Kennedy described his belief that peace must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. We must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together.
Today, it is the responsibility of this generation of Americans to help preserve international peace, to honor the allies who have stood by their side for decades, and to maintain the United States place as the leader of the free world.
The American system of checks and balances is only as strong as the leaders who have the character and courage to enforce them. Unless they denounce and punish any attempt to interfere with the special counsels investigation, demand accountability from the administration, and put their duty to their country over their duty to any political party, those checks and balances wont protect Americas democracy.
Read more:
The Kremlin's Election Meddling Is Paying Off - The Atlantic
Stephen Colbert Tweets at Donald Trump and Mulls 2020 Run – TIME
While in Russia, Stephen Colbert sent a tweet to President Donald Trump and announced he was considering a White House run.
"I am here to announce that I am considering a run for President in 2020, and I thought it would be better to cut out the middle man and just tell the Russians myself," Colbert said on the Russian late-night show Evening Urgant on Friday.
As the American TV host continued poking fun at allegations that President Trump's campaign may have colluded with Russia , Colbert added, "If anyone would like to work on my campaign, in an unofficial capacity, please just let me know."
Russian host Ivan Urgant joined in on the fun saying, "Its a pleasure to drink with the future U.S. President. To you, Stephen. I wish you luck. We will do everything we can so you become President."
Colbert tweeted a picture of himself in Russia to the President Thursday with the caption, "Don't worry, Mr. President. I'm in Russia. If the 'tapes' exist , I'll bring you back a copy!"
See the original post here:
Stephen Colbert Tweets at Donald Trump and Mulls 2020 Run - TIME
‘Julius Caesar’ Star Considered The Play To Be Donald Trump ‘Resistance’ – HuffPost
The New York Public Theaters presentation of William Shakespeares 400-year-old play, Julius Caesar was embroiled in controversy this month, with protests over a choice to costume the titular character as President Donald Trump. This wardrobe decision was controversial because senators plot to stab Caesar to death in the play.
Now that this run of Julius Caesar has come to an end, actor Corey Stoll has written a piece for Vulture about what it was like to star in the play. Stoll had the role of Marcus Brutus, a reluctant assassin of Caesar.
Although the play is explicitly about the pitfalls of assassination, Stoll wrote that following through with the play amid the protest eventually felt like a contribution to the resistance. These days, that term is loaded to evoke the phrase #resist which refers to a rallying cry against Trump.
The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling, wrote Stoll in the piece that was published Friday. At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance.
Watch video of two protestors disrupting a performance:
Stoll, who memorably played an eventually murdered politician in the first season of House of Cards, said that he had no idea this production would portray Trump so explicitly before signing on to the role.
Stoll was frustrated by the choice at first, as he feared involving Trump would overshadow the rest of the performance.
A passage from Stolls piece:
When I signed on to play the reluctant assassin Marcus Brutus in this production, I didnt know Caesar would be an explicit avatar for President Trump. I suspected that an American audience in 2017 might see aspects of him in the character, a democratically elected leader with autocratic tendencies. I did not think anyone would see it as an endorsement of violence against him. The play makes it clear that Caesars murder, which occurs midway through the play, is ruinous for Brutus and his co-conspirators, and for democracy itself ...
After four weeks in the rehearsal room, we moved to the theater and I saw Caesars Trump-like costume and wig for the first time. I was disappointed by the literal design choice. I had little fear of offending people, but I worried that the nuanced character work we had done in the rehearsal room would get lost in what could seem like a Saturday Night Live skit. I was right and wrong.
chudakov2 via Getty Images
After the presidents eldest child,Donald Trump Jr., blamed this production for the actions of the gunman who fired on a baseball team made up of Republican congressmen, Stoll began to fear for his own life.
Like most Americans, I was saddened and horrified, but when the presidents son and others blamed us for the violence, I became scared, wrote Stoll.
The production was plagued with disruptions from protestors, but fortunately had none that caused physically critical harm.
Read the whole piece at Vulture.
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'Julius Caesar' Star Considered The Play To Be Donald Trump 'Resistance' - HuffPost