Stay safe on Great Lakes beaches this summer – News – Holland … – HollandSentinel.com

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By Jordan.Climie@hollandsentinel.com616-546-4279

With warm weather and sunny skies comes the chance, finally, to head out to one of Michigan's beaches to enjoy the summer. Because of this, however,the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) is urging everyone to learn about safe swimming and the signs of dangerous currents.

On average, more than 10 people die each year because of dangerous currents in the Great Lakes.Dangerous currents develop when winds blow toward the shore, and waves are moderate to high (three feet or higher). The Great Lakes produce structural currents, rip currents, outlet currents, longshore currents and channel currents all of which can cause serious danger to swimmers.

The eastern shore of Lake Michigan has the most current-related incidents of all the Great Lakes, and out of the 514 current-related incidents (rescues and drownings) that occurred on the Great Lakes from 2002-2016, more than 71 percent were on Lake Michigan.

In that time frame, there were three fatalities and 86 rescues at Holland State Park. At Saugatuck Dunes State Park, there were two fatalities and one rescue. At Douglas Beach Park there was one fatality and two rescues.

To check Great Lakes beach hazards, visitweather.gov/greatlakes/beachhazards.

"The education is the key," said Mike Evanoff, statewide parks and recreation safety officer for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources."We have to train and educate visitorsto look to those resources, because that's why theyre developed.

"We can't be there all the time to try to warn people," he continued. We use the flag warning system, of course, but we really need people to do their part."

Evanoff worries that many people don't take the red flags seriously, which warn of dangerous conditions. "We need people to heed that warning," he said. "There's a reason those flags are posted."

He says that many people use the red flag days as a reason to head to the beach, not exercise safety.

"People tend to look at those red flag days as exciting - high waves, they want to jump in the water," he said. "Unfortunately, many people have lost their lives."

MDHHS encourages all residents to remember the following before planning a trip to the beach:

While it is important to avoid currents altogether, it is equally important to know how to survive one.In the event that you find yourself in a rip current, the MDHHS suggests you flip on your back, float to conserve energy, and follow the safest path out of the water which could be along the line of the current until it is less strong, or along the shoreline.

"Were learning more about how dangerous currents form," Evanoff said. "Weve done some work with professionals, people that are really knowledgable on the science of dangerous currents, and weve learned a lot about behavior of dangerous currents. That's helped us plan to more effectively, manage those conditions and help the education of our visitors and employees."

To learn more about drowning risks in natural water settings, visit https://www.cdc.gov/features/dsdrowningrisks/ or the National Weather Service site at http://www.ripcurrents.noaa.gov/ for information about rip currents.

Follow this reporter on Twitter @SentinelJordan.

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3 St. Pete Beaches Reopen After Water Quality Improves – Patch – Patch.com

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3 St. Pete Beaches Reopen After Water Quality Improves - Patch
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St. Pete, FL - Three of four Pinellas County beaches closed earlier in the week due to water quality concerns have reopened for use.
St. Petersburg beaches reopen after water quality improves | WFLA ...WFLA

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Solar astronomy buffs warming up for August eclipse – Anniston Star

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James Ambrister has trained his telescope since he was a seventh-grader on the night-sky, but lately learned to look up during the day at the skys brightest star the sun.

Ambrister and other local astronomy buffs are excited for one of the rarer wonders of the daytime sky: a total solar eclipse that will be visible to much of the U.S. in August.

Ambrister, a member of the Oxford Alabama Solar Astronomy Club, had solar telescopes set up Saturday at Art in the Park in Choccolocco Park in Oxford.

Ambrister said he moved from New Hampshire to Oxford in 2009. He had been a member of New Hampshire Astronomical Society, which visited schools to interest kids in astronomy. Ambrister said he missed that outreach.

When I moved down, I missed that, Ambrister said. I started taking my telescope to Oxford Lake and show people.

Laura Weinkauf, planetarium director at Jacksonville State University, said people can usually see sunspots and solar flares through telescopes.

Sunspots are regions that are cooler than the rest of the sun, Weinkauf said. Solar flares are when the sun sends heated plasma out in one direction or another.

According to Weinkauf, sunspots look like small blemishes on the surface of the sun, but she said its all relative.

The sun is about 6,000 degrees Kelvin, Weinkauf said. The sunspots are cooler at about 4,000 degrees Kelvin, but keep in mind Earth is only 300 degrees Kelvin. Sunspots also look small, but theyre about the size of the Earth.

Ambrister said he is amazed at how many people dont know how big the sun is.

You can fit 109 Earths across the diameter of the sun, Ambrister said. If you opened it up, 1.2 million Earths would fit inside the sun.

Weinkauf said solar telescopes have special lenses on them that filter out sunlight to make it safe.

Its usually a lens you can attach to your telescope that blocks ninety-nine point some large fraction of the sunlight, Weinkauf said. Its so you dont blind yourself like Galileo did.

Ambrister said he has a telescope that is made specifically for looking at the sun and the filtering lenses for another telescope. He said he brought both to the park.

Oxford resident and co-founder of Backyard Weather Kent Shaddix was also at the park. He said he connected with Ambrister through a mutual friend. Shaddix said he and Ambrister decided to do a joint solar astronomy and weather event at the park.

Shaddix said he is excited for the upcoming solar eclipse.

Its gonna be August 21, Shaddix said. Were gonna set up somewhere for that too.

Weinkauf said a solar eclipse happens when the moon passes between the sun and the Earth. She said seeing a solar eclipse is pretty rare. She said the last total solar eclipse that could be seen in North America was in 1972 in northern Alaska.

The place where you can see the eclipse, the pass width, usually ends up to be somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Weinkauf said. We wont get a total eclipse in Anniston, but well get about 95-percent coverage which is still pretty rare.

Ambrister said he wont be in town for the eclipse, but he plans to take his telescopes back to the park on June 18 from 8 a.m. to noon. He said he hopes people will come out to take a look.

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Hubble applauds waltzing dwarfs – Astronomy Now Online

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The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other. Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Bedin et al.

This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other.

The observed system, Luhman 16AB, is only about six light-years away and is the third closest stellar system to Earth after the triple star system Alpha Centauri and Barnards Star. Despite its proximity, Luhman 16AB was only discovered in 2013 by the astronomer Kevin Luhman.

The two brown dwarfs that make up the system, Luhman 16A and Luhman 16B, orbit each other at a distance of only three times the distance between the Earth and the sun, and so these observations are a showcase for Hubbles precision and high resolution.

The astronomers using Hubble to study Luhman 16AB were not only interested in the waltz of the two brown dwarfs, but were also searching for a third, invisible, dancing partner. Earlier observations with the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope indicated the presence of an exoplanet in the system. The team wanted to verify this claim by analyzing the movement of the brown dwarfs in great detail over a long period of time, but the Hubble data showed that the two dwarfs are indeed dancing alone, unperturbed by a massive planetary companion.

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Studying astrophysics: Written in the stars – The Hindu

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Studying astrophysics: Written in the stars
The Hindu
Brian Schmidt, Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University, also happens to be a Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist and cosmologist. He was jointly awarded the prize for physics in 2011 for his discovery that the universe is expanding, at an ...

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Data Scientists use Artificial Intelligence to Predict Suicide Attempts – The Merkle

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There are many different use cases for artificial intelligence, even though most of them have yet to be explored. A Vanderbilt University data scientist has come up with a bold and radical plan to deploy AI as a way to predict suicide. That is a rather remarkable turn of events, as it could yield quite positive results. Giving others a chance to prevent people from committing suicide is invaluable, that much is evident.

On paper, it makes a lot of sense to use artificial intelligence as well as any other form of technology to prevent suicide attempts from happening. Colin Walsh, data scientists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is thinking along the same lines. To be more specific, he feels AI can play a key role in the future of predicting suicide risk and giving loved ones a chance to stop people from ending their life prematurely.

As of right now, Walsh and other scientists have successfully developed a machine-learning algorithm to predict the likelihood of people attempting suicide. As one would expect from such innovative technology, the algorithm is more than capable of accurately predicting these attempts. In fact, some people claim this algorithm is unnervingly accurate, which is both good and bad.

To be put this into numbers people can understand, the algorithm is between 80% and 90% accurate. It is not a bad thing to get some false positives, though, as long as it means the patient will not attempt suicide whatsoever. Failing to predict when someone would effectively attempt suicide is a factor to be a quite concerned about, though the much is evident. These results pertain to the patients likelihood to commit suicide in the next two years.

When reducing the timespan associated with this investigation, the results become a lot more accurate. More specifically, when assessing if a patient is likely to attempt suicide within the next week, the algorithm has a 92% accuracy rate. Do keep in mind all of these results are based on data widely available from hospital admissions, including patients age, gender, medications, and prior diagnoses.

So far, the team has gathered enough data from 5,617 patients to develop this algorithm. A total of 3,250 instances of suicide attempts has been recorded as a result. All of the patients in question were admitted with signs of self-harm, which is a primary indicator of future suicide attempts. Although this is still a relatively small sample size, it also goes to show the algorithm developed by the team of data scientists is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

It is evident artificial intelligence can be a valuable tool when it comes to preventing people from attempting suicide. Although this experiment is still in the early stages of development, it will be interesting to see if and whether researchers can improve upon it moving forward. Interestingly enough, a different algorithm was created to conduct similar tests looking at over 12,000 randomly selected patients with no documented history of self-harm. In this case, the algorithm was even more accurate, which is rather surprising.

Rest assured some people will feel the usage of artificial intelligence is an invasion of privacy, even if it can reduce the number of suicide attempts. There is a lot of data gathered by hospitals, which can be used for this purpose, without having to collect additional information from patients. It will be interesting to see how these algorithms evolve over time, and whether or not artificial intelligence will effectively be used to prevent suicide attempts in the future.

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Adobe CEO Hints at Artificial Intelligence on Photoshop – Fortune

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Age: 54

From: Mumbai

In cloud we trust: CEO since 2007, Shantanu Narayen has overseen a period of explosive growth for the San Jose software company. As Adobe ( adbe ) has embraced a cloud-based subscription model, its stock has been on a tear, up 43% (to $142) since late May, with annual revenues of $5.85 billion.

Foggy bottom: When Narayen became CEO, you could see there were some dark clouds on the horizon, he says. The global financial crisis was just around the corner, and Adobe was not landing new customers as fast as desired. I didnt time that very well, Narayen jokes.

Outside the box: By 2009, Adobe embarked on an ambitious mission to overhaul the way it shipped popular products like Photoshop. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, Narayen says. Adobe switched to a subscription model, opening the door to a new way to deliver software in which customers could more easily receive updates and new features.

Finding Wall Street: Investors were concerned Adobe was spending too much on data centers, but Narayen convinced them it would pay off. I think we did a good job of that, Narayen says. By going to the cloud , Adobe ended up saving money with the switch from one-time licenses to recurring subscriptions. Narayen adds that ditching packaging also helped.

The next frontier: Narayen sees artificial intelligence as a game changer, but he warns, Many companies just say A.I. without understanding how they want to apply it. Adobes A.I. plans start with voice commands. Imagine brightening colors on photos just by speaking.

Double Duty: Adobes board elected Narayen as its chairman this year on top of his CEO duties. Narayen is quick to mention Adobe couldnt be successful without his staffs hard work. But, he says, maybe it is recognition of some of the contributions Ive made in the company.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2017 issue of Fortune with the headline "Flash Forward."

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artificial intelligence: War of the machines: The opportunities in … – Economic Times

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The theatrical release of James Camerons sci-fi film Terminator 2, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg with a computer brain, had a crucial scene deleted. The scene, part of the extended release of the movie, shows young John Connor and his mother opening up the head of the cyborg to switch its computer brain from read only to learning mode. The cyborg (Schwarzenegger) then picks up human values and mannerisms as the movie progresses.

For movie buffs, the deleted scene is worth seeing for special effects and also to catch a glimpse of Linda Hamilton (playing Johns mother Sarah Connor) with her twin sister Leslie playing her image in a mirror. In the theatrical release, where the scene is omitted, the cyborg just tells John that its brain is a neural-net processor, a learning computer, without mentioning any on/off options. That was back in 1991. Today, in 2017, a learning computer is much more of a reality.

While artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) concepts have been around since the 1940s and 1950s (See ABC of AI, ML and Deep Learning), the availability of huge amounts of data is making the difference now. A learning computer does not need to travel back in time like in the movie and many are solving real problems in India. For example, in healthcare, ML is helping oncologists sift through huge amounts of cancer cases and suggesting preferred treatment; in education it is predicting who might drop out of school; and in fashion it is forecasting colours that can dominate the next season. Retail, transportation and financial services have adopted ML in different forms. The learning switch is turned on in India. Every large organisation was sitting on data. The cloud is bringing computing power to it and ML is creating actionable intelligence, says Anil Bhansali, MD, Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd.

Machine vs machine A war of machines scenario seems appropriate to discuss it. Consider this example. In October 2016, K Sandeep Nayak booked three flight tickets for his wife and children to fly to Mangaluru from Mumbai during the Christmas holidays two months later, hoping to get a low fare. He spent Rs 7,500 per ticket. Later, when he decided to join his family for the trip, just a day before the journey on December 25, he could book himself into the same flight at Rs 4,000 only. I wish I could find out if airfare could fall, says Nayak, an executive director with Centrum Broking.

Actually, there is a way.

Today, most airlines follow a sinusoidal graph (S curve) for pricing tickets, often dictated by an algorithm to maximise revenues pushing up prices following buying behaviour.gregator app Ixigo. It can predict whether the price of an air ticket on a particular date is likely to fall. When a customer enters the date of journey, the app predicts, with more than 80 per cent accuracy, how much the airfare may drop for the sector on that date and how the prices could vary over that period. (Ixigo also has a railway app that predicts if a rail ticket on a wait list may get confirmed.)

We have a huge data set created by 4 million active users, 50 million sessions per month, Aloke Bajpai, Ixigo

Ixigos global peer Kayak is one of the pioneers in fare prediction. If airfare prediction seems like a machine-vs-machine scenario, there are more such examples: programmatic advertising algorithms that compete for advertising spots, or algorithmic trading applications that compete to get the best trades in the securities market.

Here is something a little more interesting.

Arya.ai is a Mumbaibased startup, founded by Vinay Kumar and Deekshith Marla, both IIT-Bombay grads. In 2016, Arya.ai was selected by French innovation agency Paris&Co, from 21 global companies, for an international innovation award. Kumar still looks like a college student and moves around Mumbai on his motorbike. One of the current projects that Arya.ai is working on involves creating an ML application for selling securities without letting prices crash. The client, with a mandate to sell a large block of stock or bonds in the market, wants Arya.ai to create an algorithm for selling so that it does not lead to prices of the security dropping.

At the same time, there are ML algorithms as well as human intelligence trying to buy the security at the lowest price possible, says Kumar. Algorithmic trading has been around for a while and brokers with proprietary trading arms often use it to gain a few seconds advantage. Now research is focused on whether an ML layer can be built on top of the algo. Can the machines be allowed to alter the trading algorithm on their own and what will this mean for the securities markets?

Last month, JP Morgan released a report in New York, Big Data and AI Strategies, with the subhead, Machine Learning and Alternative Data Approach to Investing

Written by Marko Kolanovic and Rajesh T Krishnamachari, the report suggests that analysts and market operators need to master ML techniques as usual indicators like company quarterly reports and GDP growth data will soon be predicted early by ML programs. It says that just as machines with ML are able to replace humans for short-term trading decisions, they can also do better than humans in the medium term. Machines have the ability to quickly analyse news feeds and tweets, process earnings statements, scrape websites and trade on these instantaneously. Back in India, here is another scenario. Vertoz is a Mumbai-based programmatic advertising company that works with clients (advertisers) and online media in placing digital advertising, targeting the advertisements and bidding for the best spots.

We need to find which inventory is good for us, says founder Ashish Shah, referring to spots on popular media websites. If we had to do it manually it would be like finding needles in a haystack. Vertozs programs compete with the likes of Google, bidding for top slots in global digital media.

Man Fridays While the buzz on big data analytics came first, the focus on ML has been facilitated by larger players like Google, Intel, Microsoft and Amazon making off-the-shelf modules available in India. But, then, some platforms have been around for decades. Says Shah: Most of our work is based on Java and Python that are 1980s technologies. We have built our layers on top of that.

Ixigos chief technology officer Rajnish Kumar mentions Googles TensorFlow and Amazons AWS Machine Learning as examples of off-the-shelf modules. Microsoft offers its Azure platform for others to create their own ML offerings. A Google spokesperson told ET Magazine that in future it expects to offer non-experts the ability to create and deploy ML modules: At Google, we have applied deep learning models to many applications from image recognition to speech recognition to machine translation. In our approach a controller neural net can propose a child model architecture, which can then be trained and evaluated for quality on a particular task. This is machine to machine learning.

Going forward, we will work on careful analysis and testing of these machine-generated architectures to refine our understanding. If we succeed, we think this can inspire new types of neural nets and make it possible for non-experts to create neural nets tailored to their particular needs, allowing machine learning to have a greater impact on everyone, adds the Google spokesperson. Google offers some simple applications of ML. CESC Ltd, Kolkata-based flagship of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, is using a Google API (application programming interface) which records the reading of the electrical metre when the numbers are read out loud. Instead of keying the reading in or taking a photo of it, the staff can speak into their phone app chaar-shunyo-teen-paanch (4, 0, 3, 5), says Debashis Roy, vice-president (information technology ), CESC Ltd.

Roy says that when the project started, the app showed only 40% accuracy, but it is learning to recognise more and more Bengali dialects as well as Hindi and English. No matter what the dialect of the staff, the reading can be recorded. We will launch it fully when we get to 95% accuracy, says Roy.

Another Google partner is Pune-based Searce, a 12-year-old operation led by founder Hardik Parekh, who finds it convenient to work with Googles APIs as he feels the company almost embodies the open source or democratic spirit. Parekhs ML offering HappierHR tries to automate much of the routine HR operations right from initial interviews of job applicants and induction of new employees to creation of their email ids and leave approvals.

Supervisors also get suggestions to give leave to subordinates on, say, their wedding anniversaries, if there arent any important meetings scheduled for that day,says Parekh. While Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer platforms for others to use, IBM has its own ML suite called Watson, a complete offering at the premium end of the market for end-users. One of the earliest projects IBM took up in India was with Manipal Hospitals in oncology. Manipal was an early adopter: it was globally the second or the third hospital to adopt it, says Prashant Pradhan, chief developer advocate for IBM in India and South Asia.

This is how it works. For a medical board on breast cancer, the Watson program is made a member along with other doctors. Given a specific case, Watson gives its opinion and preferred treatment after going through millions of cases that are loaded on to it. Entire cancer research can run to 50 million pages, and 40,000 papers are added every year.

It is impossible for a doctor to go through all of that. The ratio of cases to oncologists is 16,000:1, adds Pradhan, stressing why ML is a great application to use in cancer treatment. Microsoft, too, has used its ML offerings in Indias healthcare. In Hyderabad, it has helped LV Prasad Eye Institute treat avoidable blindness. A second project it has worked on is helping children who wear glasses.

The work started in India has gone global, and LV Prasad Eye Institute is now part of the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, which includes five other eyecare facilities from across the world. Microsoft has also studied 50,000 students in Class X in Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh to predict which ones may drop out. It allows the schools to send them for counselling.

Machine radiologists and bankers There is enough indication that ML bots or apps can often deliver better results than humans. Last month, IT services giant Wipro said it got productivity of 12,000 people out of 1,800 bots (software programs that perform automated tasks). Automated bots are not quite ML, but are an indicator of what may come. Rizwan Koita, serial entrepreneur and founder CEO of Citius Tech, a healthcare-focused tech company, recalls a conversation with his niece two months ago. She had qualified to pursue a course in radiology or anaesthesiology and was seeking my advice. I had to tell her that in a few years a radiologist may not have a job, says Koita. He argues that a radiologists job is to interpret images. Therefore millions of existing images (X-rays, sonograms, scans) and their interpretations can be fed into an ML algorithm; it may be a matter of time before a machine gives better interpretations than a human radiologist.

From healthcare to fashion. Mumbai-based designer couple Shane and Falguni Peacock have been using IBMs Watson for a couple of months now. The system helps the duo go through designs and silhouettes that have been shown at fashion events across the world over the last decade. They are using Watson for a project that uses international designs in Bollywood. Watson predicts colours that may be in vogue six months from now and warns if certain silhouettes have been overused in the last couple of years.

Watson is able to tell us what colour may be in six months from now, says Shane Peacock

Says Shane: Suppose we want to work on a Mughal theme, we can feed images of Mughal-era paintings, architectures and colours into the system, which is able to turn out its unique prints. It also reproduces Mughal prints created by other human designers, just for comparison. The designer couple have one more exciting project for which they are using Watson. A dress that changes hues according to the time of the day or the mood of the person wearing it. We can use two colours, say black and white. The dress can become fully white or fully black or a combination of black and white. An app on the wearers phone can control it. The change can happen on the go, while the dress is worn. You can get into a car in white and come out in black. In financial services, Kumar of Arya.ai points out that the loan approval process is an area where he sees a lot of human effort being bested by machines. In fact, Arya has implemented a program where an ML app sifts through loan applications.

ICICI Lombard and Birla Sun Life Insurance too have created bots as the first interface with customers Not to be left behind, the Indian IT biggies, TCS, Infosys and Wipro, have their own ML and AI offerings (See Machine Learning in India). Google announced in March that it will mentor half a dozen AI startups. A report by Tracxn, a venture capital research platform, noted that there are at least 300 startups in India using ML and AI technologies. An opportunity also presents a threat. Before ML can replace humans in core functions, it will need humans to create applications. Says Bhansali of Microsoft: These are still early days: technologies are on trial and talent is scarce. Ixigo CEO Aloke Bajpai echoes him when he says there are no trained engineers in AI and ML in India, and his team is entirely trained in-house.

There is definitely a shortage of talent for AI technologies. Only 4 per cent of AI professionals in India have worked on core AI technologies such as deep learning and neural networks, says Akhilesh Tuteja, partner at KPMG. Bridging the gap will be key in turning a potential weakness into a strength.

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Aerospace manufacturer expanding into Wallingford – Meriden Record-Journal

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WALLINGFORD An aerospace manufacturing company plans to open a new facility on Research Parkway.

GKN Aerospace, an international company that produces aerospace components for commercial and military consumers, is opening a new plant in a former warehouse at 14 Research Parkway, a company spokesperson confirmed Friday.

The Wallingford facility will be an extension of the companys existing plant in Cromwell. The company also has locations in Manchester and Newington and is a major supplier to Pratt & Whitney.

From this section: New Ferris wheel, big raffle prize at Wallingford church bazaar

The Research Parkway plant will produce advanced aerospace technology for the commercial and military sectors. The company spokesperson could not provide any more details about the facility or when it will open.

Tim Ryan, the towns Economic Development Specialist, said the new facility will create a sizable number of manufacturing jobs, benefiting the local economy.

I dont think its an understatement to say were thrilled that a company as solid as GKN has chosen Wallingford for its most recent expansion, Ryan said. Economies that create things have a higher level of sustainability in the long run.

GKN Aerospace has over two dozen manufacturing sites in America.

The Wallingford facility will be opened in a warehouse previously used as a paper distribution center by Lindenmeyr Munroe. The property is roughly 70,000 square feet and has an assessed value of $2.8 million.

According to recent building permits, the company spent $15,000 on mechanical equipment and $20,000 on a data room for the Research Parkway facility earlier this year.

The Research Parkway plant will open one mile away from the Bristol Myers Squibbs facility at 5 Research Parkway. Bristol-Myers is leaving Connecticut by 2018 as part of a nationwide restructuring of its operations.

mzabierek@record-journal.com 203-317-2279 Twitter: @MatthewZabierek

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Former Minnesota Vikings RB Adrian Peterson repeating his big claims of longevity, success – Scout

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Adrian Peterson is repeating his legendary big claims of playing for years and setting records to a fresh audience in New Orleans.

Everything old is new again for former Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson.

For those of us familiar with the unrealistic athletic psyche of Peterson, weve heard these refrains before.

My goal is to rush for 2,500 yards.

I can play until Im 40.

I dont pay attention to the outside noise about age.

All of them have been part of the Peterson presentation for the last several years and, to his credit, when people have counted him out prematurely, he has shoved their negativity right down their throats with aggression.

Coming off his Christmas Eve ligament shredding in 2011, the conventional wisdom was that even elite players dont recover from that kind of injury.

Peterson proved them wrong, coming within a couple more carries of setting the all-time single-season rushing record. His detractors had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

When he was shut down in 2014 while litigating child abuse charges, Peterson was again dismissed as never being his dominant self again driven by the 24/7 nature of sports these days with no accountability to defend your short-term hot takes. It can be argued he showed up at Vikings OTAs only after being summarily disrespected by the leagues Top 100 NFL Network projection for players voted on by fellow players that put Peterson behind journeyman RB Justin Forsett.

http://www.scout.com/nfl/vikings/story/1783859-hodges-mismatch-uncertain...

Coincidence? Dont bet on it.

The claims of longevity combined with production have surfaced again.

Its a good number, the 32-year-old Peterson saidwhen asked about playing five more years. Approaching 40.

As he has gotten older and has to work harder behind the scenes to maintain his athletic dominance, Peterson has spit in the eye of Father Time. What has applied to just about everyone else, doesnt apply to A.D.

All Day means all day.

Id be lying to you say it doesnt give you a chip [on your shoulder]. Especially being a competitor," Peterson said, according to the New Orleans Advocate. "Its not my main focus. Its something that drives you a little bit. After 30, because it was the same back then. Oh, hes 30. Then I ended up leading the league in 2015. Same thing the next year. Stuff will continue to repeat itself until I finish.

History will remember Peterson in the conversation as G.O.A.T. among running backs.

As one can presumably think, Paul Bunyan moved on from Minnesota. So did the stories associated with him tall tales that included some truth to them, but legends that are difficult to quantify.

In New Orleans, a city that is no stranger to larger-than-life characters, Petersons predictions and prognoses have found a new audience unfamiliar with the outrageous claims that have become so familiar to Vikings fans.

Welcome to the Big Easy, Adrian, where everything old is suddenly new again.

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Former Minnesota Vikings RB Adrian Peterson repeating his big claims of longevity, success - Scout

Want To Employ Behavioral Science For Good? Here's A Helpful Collection Of Ideas – Fast Company

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By Ben Paynter 3 minute Read

For social entrepreneurs and nonprofits seeking to make a dent in the worlds most vexing problems, figuring when and how to use behavioral science can be its own conundrum. While the field is all about creating simple nudgessubtle design cues (sometimes cascades of them) in products, interventions and even basic paperwork that encourage others to make socially good decisions in their own best interest, its not very user friendly for cause groups that might want to implement some of the techniques.

When the work is done right, more people, say, gain access to financial services that help them automatically save money, court summonses designed to ensure they stay out of jail, and academic encouragement that can boost graduation rates. But the industry as a whole is decentralized and jargon-y. Its hard to translate the mostly academic-speak into useful guidelines for how others in the field might use these ideas.

What weve done is brought out more of the details of each product design, so that somebody somewhere else can copy it. [Photo: Hollygraphic/iStock]Recognizing that, three of the sectors top nonprofit and educational playersIdeas42, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Center for Health Incentives & Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvaniahave joined forces to create a meta-nudge: The Behavioral Evidence Hub, an online public resource to share industry work more widely, and in a way that everyone can understand.

This came about because we started to see certain behavioral innovations that would come up time and again and they were pretty simple to implement, says Piyush Tantia the co-executive director at Ideas42.What weve done is brought out more of the details of each product design, so that somebody somewhere else can copy it.

Of course, the behaviors some groups may seek to modify can be pretty culturally specific. And the approach that aid groups take to do that may depend on how theyre set up to operate. So B-Hub is searchable by issue (criminal justice, environment, social inclusion, etc.), geography (both region or country-specific), and problem type (things like navigating a process or sustaining behaviors and forming habits). Its essentially a decision tree toward various solutions.

For instance, a University of Pennsylvania study about the power of plan-ahead prompts like postcards to increase the number of employees getting flu shots, shows the actual variations that a Midwest utility company mailed out. (Same thing for this text-based medication reminder study by IPA that improved the rate of malaria vaccinations in sub-Saharan Africa.) An Ideas42 effort to keep at-risk freshman enrolled at San Francisco State shows the actual student testimonial video that kicked things off, as well as all the surveys, supportive texts and emails that were used. Its all laid out with catchy charts and graphs, plus theres contact info for the researchers involved.

The site actively solicits other behavioral science practitioners to submit their own studies for review and, perhaps, inclusion. [Photo: Hollygraphic/iStock]Groups who visit the site can also compare their current practices against behaviorally optimized checklists to tweak current letter and email writing campaigns, how they might set up and operate in the field, or how complex multi-step processes actually get executed.

Ideas42, IPA, and CHIBE have also tapped other major field contributors like the Behavioral Insights Group at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the U.K.s Financial Conduct Authority to chip in studies. The repository currently has over 60evidence-driven examples of whats worked, covering things like how to improve college retention, encourage saving, and improve the likelihood of people consistently taking medication or being vaccinated.

Crucially, the database doesnt just link to whats been previously published elsewhereeverything has been painstakingly reformatted to shares costs, challenges, impact, and results, and real-life examples of what the each nudge actually looked like.

So far though, B-Hub has been visited by people in over 90 countries. The site actively solicits other behavioral science practitioners to submit their own studies for review and, perhaps, inclusion.

This is not a static site. Its a growing tool for people, adds Manasee Desai, vice president at Ideas42, who notes that her group is already analyzing how people are engaging and considering ways to boost interactions. (One obvious missing feature? A discussion forum.) It is an innovation, which means theres no way we got it right the first time, adds Tantia.

Ben Paynter is a senior writer at Fast Company covering social impact, the future of philanthropy, and innovative food companies. His work has appeared in Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the New York Times, among other places.

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Want To Employ Behavioral Science For Good? Here's A Helpful Collection Of Ideas - Fast Company

Living long and living well: Is it possible to do both? – Medical Xpress – Medical Xpress

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June 6, 2017 The roundworm, C. elegans, is a popular model in aging research because its short lifespan allows scientists to quickly assess the effects of anti-aging interventions, including genetic manipulation and drug therapies. Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory used C. elegans as a model to identify markers of healthy aging. The study will help scientists assess the tradeoffs between lifespan and health span in humans. Credit: MDI Biological Laboratory

Exactly when does old age begin? Which health markers best predict who will live a long and healthy life versus a life spent in poor health?

Developing metrics to help answer these questions and to understand the tradeoffs between lifespan and health span is the subject of a recent paper by MDI Biological Laboratory scientists in Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, a publication of the Gerontological Society of America.

The authors studied various parameters of health in short-lived strains of the roundworm, C. elegans, with the goal of developing an empirical definition of the onset of old age, and of teasing out which health markers are most predictive of a long and healthy life.

With the development of new genetics tools, scientists are getting closer to developing therapies to extend human lifespan, but the effect of such therapies on health span (the proportion of life spent in good health) is unclear. While it used to be thought that therapies to extend lifespan would also extend health span, new research is showing that may not always be true.

The growing number of anti-aging therapies on the horizon creates a need for the development of new parameters to assess healthy aging. Instead of striving to only to prolong longevity, as has been the case in the past, the use of such tools will allow scientists to focus their efforts on lifespan-enhancing therapies with the greatest positive effects on health.

"All anti-aging interventions aren't created equal," said post-doctoral researcher Jarod Rollins, Ph.D., one of the study's lead investigators. "A recent study in C. elegans found, for instance, that the proportion of life spent in a frail state is longer in long-lived mutants than in wild-type animals. Our research is aimed at developing tools to help scientists assess the effect of lifespan-enhancing interventions on health span."

The molecular mechanisms of aging are a focus of research at the MDI Biological Laboratory, located in Bar Harbor, Maine, which is pioneering new approaches to regenerative medicine focused on the development of drugs to increase healthy lifespan by enhancing the body's innate ability to repair and regenerate lost or damaged tissues and organs.

Rollins works in the laboratory of Aric Rogers, Ph.D., the lead author of the study, in the institution's Kathryn W. Davis Center for Regenerative Biology and Medicine.

C. elegans is a popular model in aging research because its short lifespan of only two to three weeks allows scientists to quickly assess the effects of anti-aging interventions, including genetic manipulation and drug therapies. The tiny, soil-dwelling roundworm also has other advantages for research: it shares many of its genes with humans and its health markers roughly correspond to those in humans.

One marker that the MDI Biological Laboratory scientists found to be predictive of a healthy lifespan in C. elegans was movement speed. Movement speed corresponds to walking speed in humans, which studies have found to be an accurate predictor of longevity. One of the scientists' next steps will be to further develop movement speed as a marker for assessing the effect of anti-aging interventions in C. elegans.

"As science closes in on the mechanisms underlying aging, the tradeoffs between lifespan and health span become a greater cause for concern," said Kevin Strange, Ph.D., president of the MDI Biological Laboratory. "The scientists in the Rogers laboratory are at the forefront of developing metrics to assess the impact of anti-aging interventions on quality of life."

Explore further: Research sheds light on mechanisms underlying aging

More information: Jarod A. Rollins et al. Assessing Health Span in Caenorhabditis elegans: Lessons From Short-Lived Mutants, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A (2017). DOI: 10.1093/gerona/glw248

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Carotid Artery Gives Away Human Biological Age – Bioscience Technology

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Russian researchers have provided a new method of determining human biological age. The group hails from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Clinical Research Center for Gerontology, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and other prestigious research centers. The survey was carried out at the National Research Center for Preventive Medicine, as well as the Center for Gerontology. The article was published in the journal Aging. The researchers emphasize determining biological age will play a major role in the development of anti-aging medicine.

Biological age is a concept used to describe the state of a human organism. An average healthy individual has their biological age no different from their chronological age, i.e., the age on their ID. However, with age, these two indicators are likely to become mismatched due to different reasons: environmental factors, bad habits, manifestations of hereditary diseases, etc. So far, there is no established method of predicting biological age. Both medical and scientific researchers are looking for a marker that could accurately and consistently reflect if not the general state of the body then at least that of its systems.

The study is based on a combination of carotid ultrasound and tonometry data. Using machine learning, a model was developed capable of determining the biological age of healthy men and women with a mean absolute error of 6.9 and 5.9 years, respectively. The test set also included subjects with hypertension and Type 2 diabetes, whose biological age turned out to be, on average, three years greater than their actual age.

"Researchers have been trying to find a means to estimate human biological age for decades. The most accurate of the existing techniques are based on DNA analysis (the so-called "epigenetic clock") and can predict human age with the median error of three years. However, they require expensive equipment and skilled laboratory personnel, which is the reason why they are still not widely used in medical practice. Our method relies on a type of patient-related data any modern health care facility can obtain," says Alexey Moskalev, who heads the Laboratory of the Genetics of Aging and Longevity at MIPT's Center for Living Systems.

In their study, the authors relied on information about the cardiovascular system, namely, a set of predictors, all of which reflect its functioning: minimum middle layer thickness of the carotid artery tissue, pulse wave velocity, carotid artery diameter (the degree of stenosis), and augmentation index (the difference between the second and first pressure peaks in a pulse wave). Individually, all of them are established markers used for diagnosing atherosclerosis, hypertension, calcinosis, diabetes, and other conditions. The choice was made after performing a correlation analysis, which is a technique used to measure the association between variables.

The main result of the study is that a model (a formula) has been developed in which biological age is derived from the four clinical parameters stated above. Coefficients for each of the parameters were calculated using machine learning, namely robust regression. For this study, a total of 303 subjects (199 women and 104 men) were selected, their age varied from 23 to 91. All of them had visited the National Research Center for Preventive Medicine in Moscow, Russia, back in 2012. Robust regression analysis provides an alternative to the least squares method, which we remember well from school. It is essentially an attempt to approximate the observed dependence using a formula. In other words, the method seeks to pick the variables in a formula so as to make sure the resulting curve fits experimental data. There are, however, certain fundamental differences between the two alternatives which make robust regression preferable. Machine learning methods have long been used to evaluate biological age. Recent years have seen a rise in popularity of deep neural networks, which enable researchers to build high-accuracy models. And yet their application is not always justifiable as they, among other things, require a large number of tests and parameters, which is not always feasible in clinical practice.

Alexander Fedintsev, a bioinformatics specialist from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology of RAS, the first author of the article, clarifies: "We used nonlinear robust regression, since it does not rely on a priori assumptions of the distribution of the dependent variable and therefore is robust to outliers. Since the number of factors is limited, the model can be taught using a relatively small amount of data. In addition to being fairly accurate, it also provides an easy interpretation of the results: We can tell for sure how the predicted age will change if the measured parameters are varied. It is worth noting, though, that qualitative data was at the heart of this research. Thanks to a large database with a variety of biomarkers, we managed to select the most important factors, which helped us maintain a low error rate while predicting age despite the fact that we were using a rather simple and compact model."

To test the validity of the new method, the researchers compared their biological age estimates with the data obtained through other techniques for evaluating the state of an organism. Correlation of predicted biological age with Framingham CVD Prediction Scores -- an algorithm which estimates a patient's risk of developing cardiovascular disease and is not based on carotid ultrasound imaging -- exceeded that with chronological age. Also, the method was compared with other data processing techniques: The findings were contrasted with those obtained using the Klemera-Doubal statistical method. Again, correlation with biological age exceeded that with chronological age.

Olga Tkacheva, director of Russian Clinical Research Center for Gerontology, who co-authored the article, comments: "Since we used cardiovascular system as our only source of information, additional research that would consider other factors is necessary to refine biological age estimates. However, recent research has shown that the relationship between the state of blood vessels and biological age appears to be even stronger than between the state of blood vessels and chemical composition of blood."

Considering that according to WHO statistics heart disease is the leading age-related cause of death, it seems only natural to claim that the technique developed by the researchers is an effective means of determining biological age. The possibility of doing it rapidly and accurately is indeed crucial to the success of the battle against aging.

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Carotid Artery Gives Away Human Biological Age - Bioscience Technology

Virtualization admin? Pivot — pivot now — to a cloud computing career – TechTarget

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For those virtualization admins hiding under a virtual rock regarding cloud, I have news for you. Your job isn't safe. No one can put the cloud genie back in the bottle. Cloud computing is here to stay, and virtualization admins need to shift focus to keep up with tomorrow's jobs.

This complimentary guide helps readers determine the pros, cons and key considerations of DevOps by offering up 5 important questions you should be asking in order to create a realistic DevOps assessment.

By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.

You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

The move to cloud is already happening at all levels, from the smallest through to the largest businesses. Cloud and microservices mark a new iteration of change that is as disruptive as the original arrival of virtualization with VMware -- if not more so.

Virtualization has two phases: consolidation and abstraction.

In the beginning, virtualization's goal was more efficient use of underutilized hardware. Rarely do servers consume all the resources allocated to them. Virtualization admins could reclaim these lost resources and vastly reduce wasted capacity.

In phase two, virtualization developed advanced functions such as live storage motion or migration, high availability and fault tolerance. These virtualization capabilities address the issues that arise when several machines share one physical piece of hardware. Automation arrived and made server deployment simple and straightforward.

I argue that this virtualization adoption curve peaked a few years ago -- we are now moving to the next iteration, and you'll need to follow a cloud computing career path to come along.

Even once-conservative technology adopters, such as financial institutions, are jumping on board with the third wave of virtualization.

There is a thirst to cut costs, and automation allows massive cost cuts. There will be job losses. No virtualization admin should think it will never happen to them. You are fooling yourself. Fewer staff means fewer medical plans and pensions to support. It is not hard to see why the cloud appeals to the bottom line.

There will not be enough cloud computing careers to go around based on old virtualization working practices, such as in a phase one scenario.

Consider virtual machine orchestration. In early-phase virtualization environments, VMs still required some level of administration action, such as deployment from a template, to accompany automated steps. Tools such as VMware vRealize Automation or Platform9's managed vSphere stack enable an approved user to request a VM, customized to their specifications, and have it deployed within 10 minutes with no administrator interactions. Larger companies used to have several virtualization admins whose jobs purely entailed VM creation and deployment. Within a year or two, that job role disappeared.

Virtual machines are now moving to cattle status, meaning they're disposable commodities. To scale applications, organizations adopt automation tools that deploy new VMs. It's quicker to deploy another instance of a machine than to troubleshoot a broken one.

DevOps does away with manual work; manual deployment is the exact opposite of how DevOps is supposed to work. A key tenet of DevOps is that tasks performed more than once in the same way should be scripted so the IT platform does the action itself.

There is still time to retool and get on a cloud computing career path. Virtualization admins are luckier than most.

Platform as a service reduces the workload. Workloads that used to be custom-built and based on infrastructure as a service are now provided as a service for consumption by developers and companies. Examples include the larger cloud vendors offering secure and highly available database hosting that organizations consume without any effort to build and manage the underlying database infrastructure. Little to no database admin input required. No server admin required either.

The complexity hasn't gone away -- it has just changed. Management complexity moved from the VMs to orchestration and scaling. Virtualization elements such as high availability and disaster recovery (DR) lost importance, while the IT industry turned its attention to microservices that are scalable, redundant and can be spun up and down at will. Automation means little to no hands-on intervention. For example, you can spin up a cloud infrastructure from a single PowerShell script.

Classic DR locations are now costly relics of waste. Cloud affects virtualization in secondary ways. For example, businesses are used to having one primary data center and one DR setup in another data center. Given a relatively modern application set, the entire company infrastructure can restart in its entirety in the cloud in the event of a disaster. Modern DR management products, such as Zerto and Acronis, eliminate the costly secondary data center, allowing businesses to prepopulate and configure DR setups in the cloud.

This is the reality for virtualization admins, and the only future is in a cloud computing career. Over time, more applications are built cloud-first to save money from the start; the old, immovable on-site applications go the way of pagers and typewriters.

The reality is that most virtualization admin roles as we know them will vastly shrink or become outmoded over the next decade. A virtual data center requires far fewer staff, and with automation and scripting, a single administrator can manage massive numbers of servers.

There is still time to retool and get on a cloud computing career path. Virtualization admins are luckier than most. While the technology itself may change, these administrators have skills that easily translate to the popular cloud and DevOps arena.

This doesn't mean becoming a code guru or programmer, but a virtualization admin will need a deep understanding of architectures and tools such as Docker for containerization, Chef for configuration management and Kubernetes for container orchestration to become a DevOps admin. Learn multiple scripting languages and investigate hyper-converged infrastructure for cloud hosting.

The warning signs are there, fellow admins. It is just a case of doing something about it while you still can.

Help keep an organization on track as a cloud capacity manager

Break down seemingly convoluted DevOps job requirements

DevOps engineers must demonstrate strong communication skills

Set up a DevOps home lab to gain hands-on skills

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Virtualization admin? Pivot -- pivot now -- to a cloud computing career - TechTarget

Solving systems of linear equations with quantum mechanics – Phys.Org

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June 9, 2017 by Lisa Zyga feature (Left) False color photomicrograph and (right) simplified circuit diagram of the superconducting quantum circuit for solving 2 2 linear equations. The method uses four qubits, marked Q1 to Q4, with four corresponding readout resonators, marked R1 to R4. Credit: Zheng et al. 2017 American Physical Society

(Phys.org)Physicists have experimentally demonstrated a purely quantum method for solving systems of linear equations that has the potential to work exponentially faster than the best classical methods. The results show that quantum computing may eventually have far-reaching practical applications, since solving linear systems is commonly done throughout science and engineering.

The physicists, led by Haohua Wang at Zhejiang University and Chao-Yang Lu and Xiaobo Zhu at the University of Science and Technology of China, along with their coauthors from various institutions in China, have published their paper on what they refer to as a "quantum linear solver" in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

"For the first time, we have demonstrated a quantum algorithm for solving systems of linear equations on a superconducting quantum circuit," Lu told Phys.org. "[This is] one of the best solid-state platforms with excellent scalability and remarkable high fidelity."

The quantum algorithm they implemented is called the Harrow, Hassidim, and Lloyd (HHL) algorithm, which was previously shown to have the ability, in principle, to lead to an exponential quantum speedup over classical algorithms. However, so far this has not been experimentally demonstrated.

In the new study, the scientists showed that a superconducting quantum circuit running the HHL algorithm can solve the simplest type of linear system, which has two equations with two variables. The method uses just four qubits: one ancilla qubit (a universal component of most quantum computing systems), and three qubits that correspond to the input vector b and the two solutions represented by the solution vector x in the standard linear system Ax = b, where A is a 2 x 2 matrix.

By performing a series of rotations, swappings of states, and binary conversions, the HHL algorithm determines the solutions to this system, which can then be read out by a quantum nondemolition measurement. The researchers demonstrated the method using 18 different input vectors and the same matrix, generating different solutions for different inputs. As the researchers explain, it is too soon to tell how much faster this quantum method might work since these problems are easily solved by classical methods.

"The whole calculation process takes about one second," Zhu said. "It is hard to directly compare the current version to the classical methods now. In this work, we showed how to solve the simplest 2 x 2 linear system, which can be solved by classical methods in a very short time. The key power of the HHL quantum algorithm is that, when solving an 's-sparse' system matrix of a very large size, it can gain an exponential speed-up compared to the best classical method. Therefore, it would be much more interesting to show such a comparison when the size of the linear equation is scaled to a very large system."

The researchers expect that, in the future, this quantum circuit could be scaled up to solve larger linear systems. They also plan to further improve the system's performance by making some straightforward adjustments to the device fabrication to reduce some of the error in its implementation. In addition, the researchers want to investigate how the circuit could be used to implement other quantum algorithms for a variety of large-scale applications.

"Our future research will focus on improving the hardware performance, including longer coherence times, higher precision logic gates, larger numbers of qubits, lower crosstalk, better readout fidelity, etc.," Wang said. "Based on the improvement of the hardware, we will demonstrate and optimize more quantum algorithms to really show the power of the superconducting quantum processor."

Explore further: Physicists uncover similarities between classical and quantum machine learning

More information: Yarui Zheng et al. "Solving Systems of Linear Equations with a Superconducting Quantum Processor." Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.210504. Also at arXiv:1703.06613 [quant-ph]

2017 Phys.org

(Phys.org)Physicists have found that the structure of certain types of quantum learning algorithms is very similar to their classical counterpartsa finding that will help scientists further develop the quantum versions. ...

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IBM scientists have achieved an important milestone toward creating sophisticated quantum devices that could become a key component of quantum computers. As detailed in the peer-review journal Nano Letters, the scientists ...

(Phys.org) A research team composed of members from China, Singapore and Canada has built a simple quantum computer that has proven a quantum algorithm developed in 2009. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, ...

While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where ...

An international research group led by scientists from the University of Bristol, UK, and the University of Queensland, Australia, has demonstrated a quantum algorithm that performs a true calculation for the first time. ...

(Phys.org)Physicists have experimentally demonstrated a purely quantum method for solving systems of linear equations that has the potential to work exponentially faster than the best classical methods. The results show ...

Flowing particles in liquids act as a filter to suppress long-wavelength waves but allow short-wavelength ones to be supported, according to physicists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

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I don't know why people say there are no quantum computers. And this one executes not a niche function like simulated annealing but the highly applicable system of linear equations. It really is a breakthrough.

Interesting but not much advanced beyond analog computers of the 1970s.

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UW Grad Student from Star Valley Earns Quantum Mechanics Fellowship – SweetwaterNOW.com

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WYOMING A University of Wyoming graduate student has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) fellowship that is taking him to New Zealand this summer to study quantum mechanics.

Josh Heiner, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in UWs Department of Physics and Astronomy, received funding for the research under NSFs East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program, in conjunction with the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Heiner will work with Dr. Joshua Bodyfelt, a research officer with the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study, who earned his bachelors degree in physics from UW in 2003.

I was able to make this contact because (Bodyfelt) is an alumnus who has kept in contact with our department at UW, Heiner says. Basically, he has the expertise and skill set needed to help model an innovative way to understand the interaction of subatomic particles, also known as quantum mechanics.

Heiner works under UW physics Professor David Thayer, who was the first to suggest the innovative nonlinear dynamic modeling of quantum particles.

Heiner will work under Dr. Bodyfelts supervision to seek further insights into the new approach, preliminary results of which were published last month by Heiner and Thayer in the International Journal of Advanced Research in Physical Science. Heiner will have access to a supercomputer at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, for the highly complicated nonlinear computational modeling involved in the research.

Heiner, who is originally from Star Valley, received his bachelors degree from Brigham Young University-Idaho in 2014 and then came to UW to pursue graduate studies.

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UW Grad Student from Star Valley Earns Quantum Mechanics Fellowship - SweetwaterNOW.com

Boy Scout James Comey is no match for Donald Trump – Washington Post

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As it turns out, Donald Trump is the hope-and-change president.

According to James B. Comey, Trump hoped that the then-FBI director would find a way to drop his investigation of ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn and help blow away the cloud concerning the Trump campaigns possible ties to Russia. When Comey didnt, Trump changed Comey right out of a job.

Youre fired, the apprentice-president bravely conveyed to Comey via the very news media he so abhors, except when he doesnt. Was Trumps hope a direction, as Comey testified Thursday that he took it to mean? As in, The Don hopes ol Jimmy does the right thing? Or was it simply hope? As in, good golly, I hope it doesnt rain this weekend?

If one were a young child, one might go for the weather-forecast interpretation because what child wants it to rain on his or her parade? If one were an adult with full knowledge of the presidents pre-political history and the common sense of an investigator, one might reasonably conclude that the hoper in chief was making a strong suggestion, the ignoring of which could have dead-horse-in-your-bed consequences.

Comey, obviously, smelled a dead horse.

In his exchanges with the president, he carefully selected his words and took mental notes, after which he wrote down his recollections.

But Comeys concentration on the presidents hope may have doomed him. Not only did he lose his job, but also his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee seemed weak tea in the broader context of the presidents potential criminality. Expressing hope a word thats open to interpretation and nowhere near evidence of obstruction of justice is clearly not a crime.

In his testimony, Comey further revealed that he personally had leaked his memos, again to the benighted media via a Columbia University law professor and friend. Comey said he was concerned that Trump might lie about their discussions and other details leading up to his firing.

Regarding the two men and whose word to trust, theres no contest. But often what is obviously wrong isnt necessarily illegal. I dont doubt that Trump essentially threatened Comey, because thats what Trump does. (Count his lawsuits if you have a few free months.) Even as Comey testified, the president was regaling the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference with scripture and tough talk: We know how to fight better than anybody and we never, ever give up we are winners and we are going to fight. (Please, please, please read Elmer Gantry.)

During the hearing, several senators pressed Comey about why he didnt ask obvious follow-up questions, as when Trump allegedly said to the director, We had that thing. What thing? Comey also might have queried, Mr. President, what do you mean when you say you hope? Or, as various commentators have suggested, why didnt Comey say, Im sorry, Mr. President, but this is highly inappropriate and Im going to have to excuse myself?

Ask any reporter, whose skills are essentially investigative, and the answer is: You dont ever interrupt when the subject is spilling beans. Remember that Flynn was under investigation at the time, as was Trumps campaign, though apparently not Trump himself. All of this was surely in Comeys mind when Trump allegedly expressed his hope.

In real life, we rely upon our instincts, experience, interpretation of facial expressions and body language, and historical knowledge to make judgments and instruct our words and actions. We do this usually without conscious effort unless were driven by a purpose.

For Comey, what was the higher moral position? To stop the president of the United States from talking or keep the conversation going while you gather your wits and see what else might be forthcoming but could aid in an ongoing investigation? Most likely, Comeys mind was frantically trying to assess the situation and wondering, Lordy, why didnt I wear a wire?

He hinted as much Thursday, albeit with weirdly undermining self-deprecations. Comey said he felt he needed to pay attention and was too stunned to react to the hope comment. Maybe if I were stronger, he said, explaining why he didnt end his conversation with Trump. Please. Whats with the 6-foot-8-inch weakling act from a man routinely praised for his brilliance and integrity? Why telegraph feebleness to Trump, his lawyers and a skeptical public if hes secure in his rectitude?

Presumably, Comey was trying to convey his humility juxtaposed with the steamrolling Trump. What Comey may be constitutionally unable to fully grasp, however, is that integrity is no weapon in a knife fight.

Read more from Kathleen Parkers archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.

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Boy Scout James Comey is no match for Donald Trump - Washington Post

The Worst of Donald Trump’s Toxic Agenda Is Lying in Wait A Major US Crisis Will Unleash It – The Intercept

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During the presidential campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Donald Trumps platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. But in his first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. Fortunately, the response was immediate: the marches and rallies at airports, the impromptu taxi strikes, the lawyers and local politicians intervening, the judges ruling the bans illegal.

The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. Some have even concluded that this early slap down chastened Trump, and that he is now committed to a more reasonable, conventional course.

That is a dangerous illusion.

It is true that many of the more radical items on this administrations wish list have yet to be realized. But make no mistake, the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. And there is one thing that could unleash it all: a large-scale crisis.

Large-scale shocks are frequently harnessed to ram through despised pro-corporate and anti-democratic policies that would never have been feasible in normal times. Its a phenomenon I have previously called the Shock Doctrine, and we have seen it happen again and again over the decades, from Chile in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochets coup to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

And we have seen it happen recently, well before Trump, in U.S. cities including Detroit and Flint, where looming municipal bankruptcy became the pretext for dissolving local democracy and appointing emergency managers who waged war on public services and public education. It is unfolding right now in Puerto Rico, where the ongoing debt crisis has been used to install the unaccountable Financial Oversight and Management Board, an enforcement mechanism for harsh austerity measures, including cuts to pensions and waves of school closures. This tactic is being deployed in Brazil, where the highly questionable impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was followed by the installation of an unelected, zealously pro-business regime that has frozen public spending for the next 20years, imposed punishing austerity, and begun selling off airports, power stations, and other public assets in a frenzy of privatization.

As Milton Friedman wrote long ago, Only a crisis actual or perceived produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. Survivalists stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; these guys stockpile spectacularly anti-democratic ideas.

Now, as many have observed, the pattern is repeating under Trump. On the campaign trail, he did not tell his adoring crowds that he would cut funds for meals-on-wheels, or admit that he was going to try to take health insurance away from millions of Americans, or that he planned to grant every item on Goldman Sachs wish list. He said the very opposite.

Since taking office, however, Donald Trump has never allowed the atmosphere of chaos and crisis to let up. Some of the chaos, like the Russia investigations, has been foisted upon him or is simply the result of incompetence, but much appears to be deliberately created. Either way, while we are distracted by (and addicted to) the Trump Show, clicking on and gasping at marital hand-slaps and mysterious orbs, the quiet, methodical work of redistributing wealth upward proceeds apace.

This is also aided by the sheer velocity of change. Witnessing the tsunami of executive orders during Trumps first 100 days, it rapidly became clear his advisers werefollowing Machiavellis advice in The Prince: Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less. The logic is straightforward enough. People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change. But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and overwhelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine.

But heres the thing. All of this is shock doctrine lite; its the most that Trump can pull off under cover of the shocks he is generating himself. And as much as this needs to be exposed and resisted, we also need to focus on what this administration will do when they have a real external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Maybe a natural disaster like Superstorm Sandy. Or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist attack like the Manchester bombing. Any one such crisis could trigger a very rapid shift in political conditions, making what currently seems unlikely suddenly appear inevitable.

So lets consider a few categories of possible shocks, and how they might be harnessed to start ticking off items on Trumps toxic to-do list.

Police officers join members of the public to view the flowers and messages of support in St. Anns Square in Manchester, England, on May 31, 2017, placed in tribute to the victims of the May 22 terror attack at the Manchester Arena.

Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

Recent terror attacks in London, Manchester, and Paris provide some broad hints about how the administration would try to exploit a large-scale attack that took place on U.S. soil or against U.S. infrastructure abroad. After the horrific Manchester bombing last month, the governing Conservatives launched a fierce campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party for suggesting that the failed war on terror is part of what is fueling such acts, calling any such suggestion monstrous (a clear echo of the with us or with the terrorists rhetoric that descended after September 11, 2001). For his part, Trump rushed to link the attack to the thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries never mind that the bomber, Salman Abedi, was born in the U.K.

Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the Westminster terror attacks in London in March 2017, when a driver plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, deliberately killing four people and injuring dozens more, the Conservative government wasted no time declaring that any expectation of privacy in digital communications was now a threat to national security. Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on the BBC and declared the end-to-end encryption provided by programs like WhatsApp to be completely unacceptable. And she said that they were meeting with the large tech firms to ask them to work with us on providing backdoor access to these platforms. She made an even stronger call to crack down on internet privacy after the London Bridge attack.

More worrying, in 2015, after the coordinated attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, the government of Franois Hollande declared a state of emergency that banned political protests. I was in France a week after those horrific events and it was striking that, although the attackers had targeted a concert, a football stadium, restaurants, and other emblems of daily Parisian life, it was only outdoor political activity that was not permitted. Large concerts, Christmas markets, and sporting events the sorts of places that were likely targets for further attacks were all free to carry on as usual. In the months that followed, the state-of-emergency decree was extended again and again until it had been in place for well over a year. It is currently set to remain in effect until at least July 2017. In France, state-of-emergencyis the new normal.

This took place under a center-left government in a country with a long tradition of disruptive strikes and protests. One would have to be naive to imagine that Donald Trump and Mike Pence wouldnt immediately seize on any attack in the United States to go much further down that same road. In all likelihood they would do it swiftly, by declaring protests and strikes that block roads and airports (the kind that responded to the Muslim travel ban) a threat to national security. Protest organizers would be targeted with surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment.

Indeed we should be prepared for security shocks to be exploited as excuses to increase the rounding up and incarceration of large numbers of people from the communities this administration is already targeting: Latino immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers, climate activists, investigative journalists. Its all possible. And in the name of freeing the hands of law enforcement to fight terrorism, Attorney General Jeff Sessions would have the excuse hed been looking for to do away with federal oversight of state and local police, especially those that have been accused of systemic racial abuses.

And there is no doubt that the president would seize on any domestic terrorist attack to blame the courts. He made this perfectly clear when he tweeted, after his first travel ban was struck down: Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. And on the night of the London Bridge attack, he went even further, tweeting: We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety! In a context of public hysteria and recrimination that would surely follow an attack in the U.S., the kind of courage we witnessed from the courts in response to Trumps travel bans might well be in shorter supply.

This April 7, 2017, photo shows the USS Porter launching a tomahawk missile ata Syrian air base.

Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via AP

The most lethal way that governments overreact to terrorist attacks is by exploiting the atmosphere of fear to embark on a full-blown foreign war (or two). It doesnt necessarily matter if the target has no connection to the original terror attacks. Iraq wasnt responsible for 9/11, and it was invaded anyway.

Trumps likeliest targets are mostly in the Middle East, and they include (but are by no means limited to) Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and, most perilously, Iran. And then, of course, theres North Korea, where Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has declared that all options are on the table, pointedly refusing to rule out a pre-emptive military strike.

There are many reasons why people around Trump, particularly those who came straight from the defense sector, might decide that further military escalation is in order. Trumps April 2017 missile strike on Syria ordered without congressional approval and therefore illegal according to some experts won him the most positive news coverage of his presidency. His inner circle, meanwhile, immediately pointed to the attacks as proof that there was nothing untoward going on between the White House and Russia.

But theres another, less discussed reason why this administration might rush to exploit a security crisis to start a new war or escalate an ongoing conflict: There is no faster or more effective way to drive up the price of oil, especially if the violence interferes with the supply of oilto the world market This would be great news for oil giants like Exxon Mobil, which have seen their profits drop dramatically as a result of the depressed price of oil and Exxon, of course, is fortunate enough to have its former CEO, Tillerson, currently serving as secretary of state. (Not only was Tillerson at Exxon for 41years, his entire working life, but Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay him a retirement package worth a staggering $180 million.)

Other than Exxon, perhaps the only entity that would have more to gain from an oil price hike fueled by global instability is Vladimir Putins Russia, a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the worlds leading exporter of natural gas, and thesecond-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia). When the price was high, this was great news for Putin: Prior to 2014, fully 50 percent of Russias budget revenues came from oil and gas.

But when prices plummeted, the government was suddenly short hundreds of billions of dollars, an economic catastrophe with tremendous human costs. According to the World Bank, in 2015 real wages fell in Russia by nearly 10 percent; the Russian ruble depreciated by close to 40 percent; and the population of people classified as poor increased from 3 million to over 19 million. Putin plays the strongman, but this economic crisis makes him vulnerable at home.

Weve also heard a lot about that massive deal between Exxon Mobil and the Russian state oil company Rosneft to drill for oil in the Arctic (Putin bragged that it was worth half a trillion dollars). That deal was derailed by U.S. sanctions against Russia and despite the posturing on both sides over Syria, it is still entirely possible that Trump will decide to lift the sanctions and clear the way for that deal to go ahead, which would quickly boost Exxon Mobils flagging fortunes.

But even if the sanctions are lifted, there is another factor standing in the way of the project moving forward: the depressed price of oil. Tillerson made the deal with Rosneft in 2011, when the price of oil was soaring at around $110 a barrel. Their first commitment was to explore for oil in the sea north of Siberia, under tough-to-extract, icy conditions. The break-even price for Arctic drilling is estimated to be around $100 a barrel, if not more. So even if sanctions are lifted under Trump, it wont make sense for Exxon and Rosneft to move ahead with their project unless oil prices are high enough. Which is yet another reason why parties might embrace the kind of instability that would send oil prices shooting back up.

If the price of oil rises to $80 or more a barrel, then the scramble to dig up and burn the dirtiest fossil fuels, including those under melting ice, will be back on. A price rebound would unleash a global frenzy in new high-risk, high-carbon fossil fuel extraction, from the Arctic to the tar sands. And if that is allowed to happen, it really would rob us of our last chance of averting catastrophic climate change.

So, in a very real sense, preventing war and averting climate chaos are one and the same fight.

A screen displays financial dataon Jan. 22, 2008.

Photo: Cate Gillon/Getty Images

A centerpiece of Trumps economic project so far has been a flurry of financial deregulation that makes economic shocks and disasters distinctly more likely. Trump has announced plans to dismantle Dodd-Frank, the most substantive piece of legislation introduced after the 2008 banking collapse. Dodd-Frank wasnt tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.

Trump and his team are not unaware of this, they are simply unconcerned the profits from those market bubbles are too tantalizing. Besides, they know that since the banks were never broken up, they are still too big to fail, which means that if it all comes crashing down, they will be bailed out again, just like in 2008. (In fact, Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the specific part of Dodd-Frank designed to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the bill for another such bailout an ominous sign, especially with so many former Goldman executives making White House policy.)

Some members of the administration surely also see a few coveted policy options opening up in the wake of a good market shock or two. During the campaign, Trump courted voters by promising not to touch Social Security or Medicare. But that may well be untenable, given the deep tax cuts on the way (and the fictional math beneath the claims that they will pay for themselves). His proposed budget already begins the attack on Social Security and an economic crisis would give Trump a handy excuse to abandon those promises altogether. In the midst of a moment being sold to the public as economic Armageddon, Betsy DeVos might even have a shot at realizing her dream of replacing public schools with a system based on vouchers and charters.

Trumps gang has a long wish list of policies that do not lend themselves to normal times. In the early days of the new administration, for instance, Mike Pence met with Wisconsin Gov.Scott Walker to hear how the governor had managed to strip public sector unions of their right to collective bargaining in 2011. (Hint: He used the cover of the states fiscal crisis, prompting New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to declare that in Wisconsin the shock doctrine is on full display.)

Taken together, the picture is clear. We will very likely not see this administrations full economic barbarism in the first year. That will only reveal itself later, after the inevitable budget crises and market shocks kick in. Then, in the name of rescuing the government and perhaps the entire economy, the White House will start checking off the more challenging items on the corporate wish list.

Cattle menacedby a wildfire near Protection, Kansas, on March, 7, 2017.

Photo: Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle/TNS/Getty Images

Just as Trumps national security and economic policies are sure to generate and deepen crises, the administrations moves to ramp up fossil fuel production, dismantle large parts of the countrys environmental laws, and trash the Paris climate accord all pave the way for more large-scale industrial accidents not to mention future climate disasters. There is a lag time of about a decade between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the full resulting warming, so the very worst climatic effects of the administrations policies wont likely be felt until theyre out of office.

That said, weve already locked in so much warming that no president can complete a term without facing major weather-related disasters. In fact, Trump wasnt even two months on the job before he was confronted with overwhelming wildfires on the Great Plains, which led to so many cattle deaths that one rancher described the event as our Hurricane Katrina.

Trump showed no great interest in the fires, not even sparing them a tweet. But when the first superstorm hits a coast, we should expect a very different reaction from a president who knows the value of oceanfront property, has open contempt for the poor, and has only ever been interested in building for the 1percent. The worry, of course, is a repeat of Katrinas attacks on public housing and public schools, as well as the contractor free for all that followed the disaster, especially given thecentral roleplayed by Mike Pence in shaping post-Katrina policy.

The biggest Trump-era escalation, however, will most likely be indisaster responseservices marketed specifically toward thewealthy. When I was writing The Shock Doctrine, this industry was still in its infancy, and several early companies didnt make it. I wrote, for instance, about a short-lived airline called Help Jet, based in Trumps beloved West Palm Beach. While it lasted, Help Jet offered an array of gold-plated rescue services in exchange for a membership fee.

When a hurricane was on its way, Help Jet dispatched limousines to pick up members, booked them into five-star golf resorts and spas somewhere safe, then whisked them away on private jets. No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first-class experience that turns a problem into a vacation, read the companys marketing materials. Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems Help Jet, far from misjudging the market for these services, was simply ahead of its time. These days, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there.

What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina.

And this two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a concierge service to their exclusive clients: When wildfires threaten their mansions, the companies dispatch teams of private firefighters to coat them in re-retardant. The public sphere, meanwhile, is left to further decay.

California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when theyre on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when theyre back at camp. By some estimates, California saves a billion dollars a year through this program a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.

Migrants and refugees gather close to a border crossing near the Greek village of Idomeni, on March 5, 2016, where thousands of people wait to enterMacedonia.

Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administrations determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.

So far, much of the discussion around Trumps environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: What everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that cant be replaced with a new mansion on higher ground.

This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their own minds) liberates the richnot only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability. What we are hurtling toward is a world demarcated into fortified Green Zones for the super-rich, Red Zones for everyone else and black sites for whoever doesnt cooperate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing, quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade deals, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change.

In fact, if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth. It takes very little to push these regions into drought and famine, which frequently acts as an accelerant to conflict, which of course drives migration.

And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the other, which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones in places like Yemen and Somalia, is now being trained on the people in the boats casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. This is the context in which well over 13,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores since 2014, many of them children, toddlers, and babies. It is the context in which the Australian government has sought to normalize the incarceration of refugees in island detention camps on Nauru and Manus, under conditions that numerous humanitarian organizations have described as tantamount to torture. This is also the context in which the massive, recently demolished migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed the jungle an echo of the way Katrinas abandoned people were categorized in right-wing media as animals.

The dramatic rise in right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and straight-up white supremacy over the past decade cannot be pried apart from these larger geopolitical and ecological trends. The only way to justify such barbaric forms of exclusion is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether its Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and bad hombres, and Syrian refugees as closet terrorists, or prominent Conservative Canadian politician Kellie Leitch proposing that immigrants be screened for Canadian values, or successive Australian prime ministers justifying those sinister island detention camps as a humanitarian alternative to death at sea.

This is what global destabilization looks like in societies that have never redressed their foundational crimes countries that have insisted slavery and indigenous land theft were just glitches in otherwise proud histories. After all, there is little more Green Zone/Red Zone than the economy of the slave plantation of cotillions in the masters house steps away from torture in the fields, all of it taking place on the violently stolen indigenous land on which North Americas wealth was built. And now the same theories of racial hierarchy that justified those violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are surging to the surface as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He wont be the last.

Residents of the Mangueira favela community, foreground, watch fireworks explode over Maracana stadium during opening ceremonies for the 2016 Olympic Games on Aug. 5, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro.

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

It seems relevant that the walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from The Hunger Games, with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to Elysium, with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. Its a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world cleanand a chosen few selected to begin again. Its the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story in which we come together in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them.

Because the point of all that dystopian art was never to act as a temporal GPS, showing us where we are inevitably headed. The point was to warn us, to wake us so that, seeing where this perilous road leads, we can decide to swerve.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. So said Thomas Paine many years ago, neatly summarizing the dream of escaping the past that is at the heart of both the colonial project and the American Dream. The truth, however, is that we donothave this godlike power of reinvention, nor did we ever. We must live with the messes and mistakes we have made, as well as within the limits of what our planet can sustain.

But we do have it in our power to change ourselves, to attempt to right past wrongs, and to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share. Its this work that is the bedrock of shock resistance.

Adapted from the new book by Naomi Klein,No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trumps Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, to be published by Haymarket Books on June 13. http://www.noisnotenough.org

Top photo: Firefighters from across Kansas and Oklahoma battle a wildfire near Protection, Kansas, on March 6, 2017.

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Political violence is a symptom of an ailing democracy. By that standard, America is not well. Donald Trump and the Republican Party injected it with poison. During the 2016 presidential campaign Trump appeared to threaten Hillary Clinton and his other opponents with violence even suggesting that his followers could use Second Amendment solutions to remove her from office if she won the presidency. Trump also encouraged his supporters to physically assault protesters and promised to pay their medical bills if they did so.

As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Trumps eventual victoryunleashed a wave of hate crimes across the United States targeting Muslims, Jews and people of color. White supremacists have taken a cue from Trumps naked embrace of racism and bigotry and have killed at least four people since the election in November.

There have been violent clashes between Trump supporters and those who believe that he and his movement are fascists and represent a grave threat to American democracy and freedom. In keeping with his plutocratic authoritarianism, Trump has targeted journalists and the news media as traitors and enemies of the American people. Two weeks ago Greg Gianforte, a Republican congressional candidate in Montana, physically assaulted a reporter from The Guardian. Such violence did not appear to hurt his support among voters; Gianforte went on to win that states special election.

In many ways, Donald Trumps embrace of political violence is a reflection of his personal values. Trump proudly proclaimed that he could shoot a person in the middle of the street and still beelected. In 1989 he took out full-page ads in several New York newspapers calling for the death penaltyfor the Central Park Five, a group of young black and Latino men accused of an infamous rape. After being convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, all five men were later found innocent. Trump has refused to apologize for wrongly calling for their deaths. Trump has also embraced President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines,who has conducted a campaign of state-sponsored murder against drug dealers and drug users.

Donald Trump has been accused of sexually predatory conduct and has bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, an action he boasted he could get away with because of his fame and money.

What role does political violence play in Donald Trumps appeal to his voters? How is it related to his authoritarian politics? What does Trumps embrace of violence reveal about his masculinity? What does the future hold for a nation where political violence is becoming increasingly acceptable?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert on the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Ben-Ghiat is completing a forthcoming book on authoritarianism and political strongmen and has written extensively about Trumps rise to power and the dangers to American democracy he represents.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A longer version can be heard onmy podcast, available on SalonsFeatured Audiopage.

How do you think Donald Trump rose to power? Was this something out of left field?

There are times in history where someone comes out of the blue who coalesces the forces of discontent and anxiety and hope. This kind of leader usually comes from outside traditional politics and knows how to be all things to all people. Then theres the charisma. Because the kind of attachment that Trumps followers form is based not on a party or a principle because Trump is not very dedicated to the Republican Party its based on an emotional bond. These men appear and theyre a kind of savior with this rhetoric of I will fix it. I will care for you. This has happened before in history and now in the United States with Donald Trump, we have an opportunity to analyze this in real time.

Hes really an expert in manipulating emotions. On a basic level his supporters are in love with him. He is their avatar. Do you think thats a reach?

No, I do not think that it is a reach. Im a historian of visual propaganda. When I look at a tape of a rally, I look for postures. I look for the T-shirts, and its quite extraordinary. Trump is a type of literal political strongman for his people. He appears as John Wayne. He appears as a bodybuilder, like a Schwarzenegger-type. At his rallies, people love to play with cardboard cutouts of his head.

In addition, Trump uses his body to convey a sense of heroic masculinity to other men. For example, he had a type of death match handshake with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is a handsome, younger man. Trump is always trying to best the other man. To do this he engages in a type of ritual humiliation of all men who want to be around him. This is a kind of bullying that I call the culture of threat.

What Trump is doing is telling a story. Its an extension of 1980s Reagan-era action movies. But we also have to call out the target of the violence. It is not white folks. Trump is signaling that he can enact violence against black and brown people and get away with it.

Trump is also using the genre of theWestern. When youre shooting someone in the street, its the showdown and Trump towers above in his fortress. A lot of his rhetoric of being threatened, being victimized its a morality play. The thing that is extraordinary is that the more familiar morality play and showdown dated back to the Cold War, where it was clear that Russia was the Evil Empire, according to Ronald Reagan.

Here we have a profound shift: Who is the evil person above all? The person of color in his own country. Then there is also a profound distrust or disdain for liberal democracy. At the local level, [Trumps] the avenger. Hes the person who sits with a gun in his hand and Fifth Avenue is his street. At the national level, he plays the cowboy whos going to defend our nation, except the joke is that hes a vessel of Vladimir Putin.

How do we locate Donald Trump relative to toxic white masculinity, authoritarianism and fascism?

Its a big question. I do not call Donald Trump a fascist because I want to respect the fact that historically under fascism you ended up with a one-party state. I think its important to respect that difference, in part . . . to show how things have changed.

However, today you do not need to have a dictatorship or a one-party state in order to accomplish your goals. You can take a democracy and change it through expansions of executive power and other repressions until you have the same effect on the subject population and a quasi-rubber-stamp parliament, without declaring a dictatorship.

Now with Trump, he uses fascist tactics. One of them is the testing of the population, the media and the elites at the beginning. This is so key. There are many things Trump does that are fascistic without having to become a one-party state dictator.

What would be a better word to describe him: a plutocratic authoritarian, an American fascist, something else?

Hes an authoritarian.

How is Trump similar or different to other authoritarians you have studied?

The classic dictators were usually very concerned with race. A lot of what Trump is doing is trying to turn the clock back on demographic change. Theres this panic around the world today about what I would label as mobile populations. These are refugees, people who are supposedly going to invade our borders. This explains the fixation with walls and controlling space.

How do we make sense of the connections between emotion and authoritarianism, either culturally or personally?

The whole spectacle of fascist aesthetics is designed to desensitize you. We still see that today, after 80 years. We havent progressed much from this. Think about it:If you live in a place where there are informers everywhere, you start to self-censor. This could be self-censorship if youre a journalist or if youre an ordinary citizen. You have to live in a kind of shut-down manner unless youre going to become what used to be called a dissident. Theres a sense of disaffection in America which Trump has been able to exploit.

Michael Moore in his movie TrumpLand called a certain type of white male, such as Newt Gingrich, for example, the dying dinosaurs. These are a group of people who suspect especially if they read the Census that by 2042 America will be a minority majority country. This is fundamental to Trumpism and to his supporters. Theyre in a panic about this. The dying dinosaur is also the man who can sexually harass women without any consequences.

That gets us to political correctness. When Trump says, Im not politically correct, hes really saying, Now you can do what you want. You can be self-actualized.

Thats right. Again it goes back to the point of how fake news is an alternate reality that people are very invested in. This is their certainty. Its a certainty that goes with their emotional state. Once people make these bonds of attachment with this kind of charismatic ruler, its hard to break them.

Lets consider Greg Gianforte in Montana. It was clear he was going to win anyway even though he had assaulted a journalist. There are a whole lot of Republican voters who are excited and titillated by violence and wanted to support Gianforte.

Greg Gianforte becomes a masculine hero. He becomes the heartland versus the elite, even though hes a wealthy businessman. Again this is suspending a lot of reality for this narrative to work. I think that right now with all the Russia investigations and Fox News imploding, the right-wing public is looking for heroes and heroes who first, of course, are also victims.

Somehow, as often happens, this assaulter becomes a victim, which is how he tried to spin it in his statement. He becomes a victim of the media. Then we go back to the media being vultures. Trump openly admires violent people. He himself says violent things. This becomes internalized and legitimated or rather was already internalized by people like Gianforte.

The SPLC has documented a huge increase in hate crimes since Trumps campaign began in 2016. There have also been the recent white supremacist murders in Maryland and Portland as well.

What happens is that the bar for behavior shifts. You can become used to seeing violence, but its also that doing violence becomes more acceptable. We think of normalization in a bureaucratic way. We decide to accept these institutions and these things which we thought were rogue before. Normalization is a form of decriminalization. Its when Trump can say, Ill shoot someone and he does not get booted out as a candidate. He wins. You decided to accept what used to be considered lawless. Theres trickle-down violence, just as theres trickle-down racism. Trump sets the tone.

How do you think America will be changed by Donald Trumps presidency? Are these changes permanent and irrevocable? Or are they temporary?

If Mike Pence becomes president, all of the social-racial agenda will likely continue because thats why he was put there. Pence is the mainstream Republican, for a party which has moved significantly to the right. That will go on and it will be a fight to preserve reproductive and other civil rights.

To end on something positive, theres been an undeniable, enormous resurgence of activism and also patriotism. Ultimately, I think that its doubtful that Trump is preparing the way for an even more hard-line authoritarian.

What do you think history can teach us? What sort of leverage can historians provide for us in this moment?

Thats a great question. We are living through one of these rare times in life when events are outstripping our capacity to understand them. First, it was the shock of the election. People were depressed. They didnt know what to do. Then the blitzkrieg of all the travel bans and all of the shocking events that Trump engineered. People feel very disconcerted and frightened. History is useful because youre able to step back and see patterns: This has happened before, and this is how it was defeated. This is what we have to look for.

Im not sure that people learn from the past even if its presented to them because I feel that the temptations that someone like Trump represents are only combated by looking within ourselves. The attraction is the attraction of power and to be more specific, an attraction to white male power. This proves very seductive to many. The attraction of wealth, of glamour, all these things go into why Trump has been successful as an image-maker and why he was able to be accepted as our protector.

Until those internal things are settled, its hard to say that just because I tell you he looks like Mussolini, youre going to say, Forget that. I dont like him anymore. Historians are able to look back and also to the future. I for one am glad that Ive been able to write and give comfort to people.

The rest is here:

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Donald Trump looks like Mussolini but can be overcome - Salon