Book Review: ‘Astrophysics for People in a Hurry’ – Dan’s Papers

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Scientists are confidently predicting that the two stars of binary system KIC 9832227, about 1,800 light years away in the northern wing of the Cygnus constellation, will collide with each other sometime between 2021 and 2023, creating a spectacular astronomical eventa red nova, the brightest star in the night sky, visible on earth even without a telescope. Theres no denying itits science. The good thing about science, says astrophysicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, StarTalk podcaster and East Hampton resident Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is that its true whether or not you believe it. Ameerr, right on!

Dr. Tysons new book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Norton, $18.95),gives us as many reasons to believe as there are stars in the sky, which is to say, a near infinite number. Tysons grasp on this tricky subject is masterly; his ability to communicate his subject matter, second to none; his delivery and style, disarmingly simple and accessible; hes also funny in that dad-humor kind of way, as in Einstein was a badass. Sure, there will be instances of head scratching as you try to untangle the difference between a quark and photon, or to decipher just how small a trillionth of a second is. But we cant all be astrophysicists.

At times, through no fault of his own, Tyson makes us consider our insignificance in the 14,000,000,000-year history of our cosmos. Consider this doozy: Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have selfannihilated, leaving a cosmos full of photons and nothing else. Essentially, if conditions were only slightly different in the very first second after the big bang, there would be absolutely nothinga universe without galaxies, stars, earth, or even Dans Papers. Can you imagine!? As Tyson admits later, the utter scale of the universe and the topics he discusses in Astrophysics is a depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me. If youre susceptible to the former feeling, perhaps, after finishing Astrophysics, youll be feeling more like Dr. Tysonabuzz with all the possibilities of the universe.

Not to worry though. Were just as often made to celebrate the idea that despite all the odds against it, lifeyou, me, usnot only exists, but has thrived and evolved until the point that we can look up at the night sky and at least try to understand it. And as any science documentary watcher already knows, Tyson has a unique and infectious way of simplifying such mind numbingly complex issues and ideas in such fluid, easy-to-comprehend ways that youll be explaining the origins of the universe and dark energy to friends and family in no time. Astrophysics is no different.

So who might this slim volume be perfect for? Just about anyone. Curious to start understanding how the universe works? Go buy this book. Are you a science teacher looking for ways to better explain the most complex astrophysical phenomena to students or casual inquisitors? Go buy this book. Are you a budding young scientist whose curiosity is as boundless as the cosmos? Go buy this book. Does a loved one, despite your best efforts to convince them otherwise and scientific proof to the contrary, still believe humans and dinosaurs cohabited earth? Go buy them this book.

It may not be the perfect sunny-day beach read, though maybe it iswe dont know your life. At the very least, a good reader could make a serious dent in this relatively short book on a Jitney or LIRR ride to or from Manhattan. Better yet, get yourself a book light, head down to the nearest beach after sunset and dive in to Astrophysics.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is available at local bookstores.

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Book Review: 'Astrophysics for People in a Hurry' - Dan's Papers

LIGO’s Latest Black-Hole Merger Confirms Einstein, Challenges Astrophysics – Scientific American

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Some three billion years ago, when Earth was a sprightly ocean world dotted with protocontinents and inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, a pair of black holes spiraled together and collided in a far-off region of the universe, leaving behind a single black hole some 50 times heavier than our sun. Emitting no light, the entire affair should have remained forever lost to the void.

Instead, the invisible violence of the pairs final moments and ultimate merging was so great that it shook the fabric of reality itself, sending gravitational wavesripples in spacetimepropagating outward at the speed of light. In the early morning hours of January 4, 2017, those waves washed over our modern Earth and into the most precise scientific instrument ever built, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). There the waves shifted the positions of vacuum-insulated, laser-bathed mirrors by less than the radius of a single subatomic particle. Traveling at light-speed, the waves first perturbed LIGO mirrors set up in Hanford, Wash., before passing through a second set of mirrors in Livingston, La., some three milliseconds later. Synced together from each stations moving mirrors and converted to audible frequencies, the cosmos-quaking gravitational waves sounded like a single, soft chirp. Analyzing it, researchers are teasing out remarkable and otherwise-inaccessible details about the hidden lives of black holes. Announced Thursday by members of the LIGO team, the findings are described in Physical Review Letters.

As inconceivable as it may seem, tuning in to such chirps is now becoming routine. First predicted by Einstein more than a century ago as a consequence of his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves were long thought to be beyond observational reachif not entirely nonexistent. But the chirp from January 4, dubbed GW170104, is actually LIGOs third and farthest-reaching detection of gravitational waves, coming from somewhere about 3 billion light-years away. It follows earlier chirps from two other events detected separately in late 2015 that each occurred closer by, yet still more than a billion light-years distant.

Other cosmic phenomena such as supernovae in the Milky Way and colliding neutron stars in our galactic neighborhood should also produce detectable gravitational waves, each with their own accompanying revolutionary insights, but so far all three of LIGOs detections have been death-rattles from merging pairs of black holes in remote stretches of the universe.

For the time being, thousands of scientists around the world are making the most of LIGOs limited view and the projects three confirmed detections. Whereas the loudness of each chirp has clearly conveyed each events distance from us, LIGOs twin stations can at present only vaguely constrain their celestial sources, which may lie anywhere within huge swaths of the heavens containing thousands upon thousands of large galaxies. So thirsty are theorists for new insights into black holes and relativistic processes that, with each LIGO detection, observational astronomers have leapt into action to target those enormous patches of sky, hoping to see some afterglow or other emission of electromagnetic radiationeven though by definition the resulting larger black hole should emit no light.

Fortunately, even without light the mergers gravitational waves reveal much. LIGO team members have already used the billionlight-year intergalactic traverses of the first two chirps to look for signs of dispersion in the propagation of gravitational wavesa phenomenon analogous to how rays of light traveling through a prism disperse based on their wavelength to form rainbows. According to Einsteins theory of general relativity, gravitational waves should experience no dispersion at alland any deviation from that prediction would suggest Einsteins relativistic reckoning of the universe is somehow incorrect, potentially pointing the way to new breakthroughs in physics. Signs of any dispersion should have been obvious in LIGOs third event, GW170104, because its gravitational waves traveled across three billion light-years, rather than the one billion of LIGOs previous two events. But when researchers looked, they saw no gravitational rainbows. We made very careful measurement of that effect, said LIGO team member Bangalore Sathyaprakashof The Pennsylvania State University and Cardiff University. But we did not discover any dispersion, once again failing to prove that Einstein was wrong.

Using that same measurement, researchers also honed in on the mass of the graviton, the hypothetical particle that mediates the force of gravity. Basically we are testing general relativity in a new regime, says Laura Cadonati, a physicist at Georgia Institute of Technology and LIGOs deputy spokesperson. The fact that this event is twice as far as the previous two gives us a longer baseline to test the dispersion relation, and as a result we now have a limit on the mass of the graviton that is 30 percent tighter than the one we previously set. One could say we are putting general relativity to a tighter and tighter testit is still holding, but with more signals we may find something that does not quite agree.

Although LIGOs latest event may be a brick in the towering edifice of Einsteins general relativity, it is also restructuring the foundations of our understanding of black holes. Before LIGOs detections, astronomers only had definitive observations of two varieties of black holes: ones that form from stars that were thought to top out around 20 solar masses; and, at the cores of large galaxies, supermassive black holes of still-uncertain provenance containing millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. Both are thought to be important for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies, and thus to some degree important for the formation and evolution of everything galaxies containincluding stars, planets and people. Most of the black holes in LIGOs mergers have been middleweights, being heavier than that 20solar mass limit but much lighter than the supermassive variety, raising questions about their origins and relationship to the two well-studied populations of black holes.

The prevailing explanation for LIGOs bulky black holes is that they form from very massive stars that are also quite pristine, composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium with scarcely any heavier elements at all. Most stars of such immensity would have more heavy elements, causing them to lose much of their mass via high-speed winds whereas low metallicity stars would have weaker winds and keep more of their star stuff, ultimately ending their lives by collapsing to become overlarge stellar black holes.

Making LIGOs merging black hole pairs, one conventional theory goes, would then require the binary evolution of two massive, low-metallicity stars that form as a pair. If, for instance, the two stars are very close, over the courses of their lives they can swap gas from their atmospheres back and forth in a cyclic process that pulls their orbits even closer and eventually produces two tightly orbiting, supersize black holes. At the end of this process, the spins and orbits of both black holes would have become inextricably linked, so each black holes equator would be aligned with the plane of their shared orbit.

Think of black holes as being like tornadoes that drag stars and matter around them, Cadonati explains. Now think of two going around each other, and each one spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, aligned with the orbital motion. Two black holes with such an alignment would possess more rotational energy than an unaligned pair, and thus require ever-so-slightly more time to coalesce together in the final moments of their merger. The deepest mystery of GW170104, LIGOs latest discovery, is that the merger happened too quickly for both of its progenitor black holes to be so aligned; in terms of Cadonatis analogy, at least one of the orbiting tornadoes must have been paradoxically tilted near or on its side.

The most common explanation for black hole pairs with such spin misalignment is that they did not form from the binary evolution of isolated twin stars. Instead, each black hole must have formed independently, and somehow found its partner after millions or billions of years of wandering through the universe. Any eventual union through this dynamical formation channel would most likely take place in thick swarms of stars called globular clusters, says Fred Rasio, a physicist at Northwestern University who is not a member of the LIGO collaboration. Imagine throwing a thousand black holes into a mosh pit where they kick each other around like crazy, Rasio says. Their spins will be randomized. The dynamics dont care which way the holes are spinning, so when they are bound into a pair that merges, their spins have no correlation with how they orbit.

According to some theorists, the best explanation for GW170104s curious misalignment is that its black holes did not start out as stars at all. Even in dense globular clusters, these black holes would not form in sufficient density to find each other in the age of the universe, says Juan Garca-Bellido, a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid who is not a member of the LIGO collaboration. Garca-Bellido is a leading proponent of the unorthodox idea that LIGOs abnormally heavy, oddly misaligned merging black holes are actually part of a putative population of primordial black holes. Rather than arising from stars, such exotic objects could have emerged in the first moments after the big bang, coalescing from particularly dense regions of the fiery plasmatic fog that then suffused the universe. If grouped in clusters, primordial black holes could also form merging pairs with misaligned spins.

There is, however, an additional wrinkle to ascribing primordial origins to some or all of LIGOs observed black holessomething that could be seen as either the theorys most alluring feature, or a nasty bug. Clusters of primordial black holes dense enough to produce LIGOs newfound population of merging ones, Garca-Bellido and others say, could also be a natural solution to the mystery of dark matterthe elusive and invisible 80 percent of the universes matter that astronomers see solely through its gravitational effects on glowing stars and gas in galaxies.

The idea would be that [the primordial black holes] would be concentrated in halos around the matter we can see, said Michael Landry, the head of LIGOs Hanford Observatory, summarizing the speculative concept in response to a question at a recent press conference. Its not impossible that what were seeing are primordial black holes that form the dark matter. On the other hand, Landry added, some teams of astronomers occasionally looking for halos of primordial black holes around the Milky Way have yet to find evidence they exist in sufficient numbers to account for the effects of dark matter. Whether black holes from the big bang explain dark matternot to mention LIGOs resultsis an open question, Landry said.

Whether born from binary evolution, dynamical pairing, the big bang or something else entirely, the true origins of LIGOs mysterious black hole mergers could soon be revealed. The collaborations current best guess is that somewhere between 12 and 213 such mergers occur each year in a cubic volume of space a bit over three billion light-years on a side. This suggests LIGOwhich is in the midst of upgrades to boost its sensitivity and planning for a new station in Indiacould eventually be detecting the chirps from black hole mergers at a rate of anywhere between once per day to once per week. Upgrades are also in progress for Virgo, a companion gravitational-wave observatory approaching LIGOs sensitivity. As early as this summer both projects will simultaneously monitor the sky to better localize the origins of any new celestial gravitational grumbles. Beyond LIGO and Virgo, additional observatories are likely to debut in coming years around the world, creating a globe-girdling network for finer-grained gravitational-wave searches. By the 2020s, the chirps will come so fast and furious, from so many merging pairs of black holes, their sounds could form a symphony.

Its not a single one or two black hole binaries by which we can distinguish between different models, Sathyaprakash said. Its only from a population of detections, which will give us distributions for spins and for masses. Thats where the differences between formation mechanisms will become clear. Very heavy, misaligned black hole pairs could prove to be very rare, strengthening the case that most mergers come from isolated systems of binary starsor they could prove common, suggesting denser, more dynamical origins. And if, Garca-Bellido says, any black hole in a LIGO merger proves to weigh less than our sun, this would be a smoking gun for primordial black holes, as such relatively minuscule black holes are thought impossible to form from stars.

Before our discovery, we didnt even know for sure that these [middleweight] black holes existed, Cadonati said at the press conference announcing GW170104. What we do know now is, first of all, they do exist, they may have played an important role in the early universe and were now starting to get a glimpse into how they behaved. This has really opened a new window on the universe, and were learning more about where were coming from. Thats the big excitement.

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LIGO's Latest Black-Hole Merger Confirms Einstein, Challenges Astrophysics - Scientific American

Artificial intelligence – wonderful and terrifying – will change life as we know it – CBC.ca

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Sunday June 04, 2017 more stories from this episode

"The year 2017 has arrived and we humans are still in charge. Whew!"

That reassuring proclamation came from a New Year's editorial in the Chicago Tribune.

If you haven't been paying attention to the news about artificial intelligence, and particularly its newest iteration called deep learning, then it's probably time you started. This technology is poised to completely revolutionize just about everything in our lives.

If it hasn't already.

Experts say Canadian workers could be in for some major upheaval over the next decade as increasingly intelligent software, robotics and artificial intelligence perform more sophisticated tasks in the economy. (CBC News)

Today, machines are able to "think" more like humans than most of us, even the scientists who study it, ever imagined.

They are moving into our workplaces, homes, cars, hospitals and schools, and they are making decisions for us. Big ones.

Artificial intelligence has enormous potential for good.But its galloping development has also given rise to fears of massive economic dislocation, even fears that these sentient computers might one day get so smart, we will no longer be able to control them.

To use an old fashioned card playing analogy, this is not a shuffle. It's a whole new deck and with a mind of its own.

Sunday Edition contributor Ira Basen has been exploring the frontiers of this remarkable new technology. His documentary is called"Into the Deep: The Promise and Perils of Artificial Intelligence."

Ira Basen June 2, 2017

Remember HAL?

The HAL 9000 computer was the super smart machine in charge of the Discovery One space station in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. For millions of moviegoers, it was their first look at a computer that could think and respond like a human, and it did not go well.

In one of the film's pivotal scenes, the two astronauts living in the space station try to return from a mission outside the spacecraft, only to discover that HAL won't allow them back in.

"Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL," Dave, one of astronauts, demands several times.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," HAL finally replies. "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something that I can't allow to happen."

The astronauts were finally able to re-enter the spacecraft and disable HAL, but the image of a sentient computer going rogue and trying to destroy its creators has haunted many people's perceptions of artificial intelligence ever since.

For most of the past fifty years, those negative images haven't really mattered very much. Machines with the cognitive powers of HAL lay in the realm of science fiction. But not anymore. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is the hottest thing going in the field of computer science.

Governments and industry are pouring billions of dollars into AI research. The most recent example isthe Vector Institute, a new Toronto-based AI research lab announced with much fanfare in March and backed by about $170 million in funding from the Ontario and federal governments, and gig tech companies like Google and Uber.

The Vector Institute will focus on a particular subset of AI called "deep learning."It was pioneered by U of T professor Geoffrey Hinton, who is now the Chief Scientific Advisor at the Institute. Hinton and other deep learning researchers have been able to essentially mimic the architecture of the human brain inside a computer. They created artificial neural networks that work in much the same way as the vast networks of neurons in our brain, that when triggered, allow us to think.

"Once your computer is pretending to be a neural net," Hinton explained in a recent interview in the Toronto office of Google Canada, where he is currently an Engineering Fellow, "you get it to be able to do a particular task by just showing it a whole lot of examples."

So if you want your computer to be able to identify a picture of a cat, you show it lots of pictures of cats. But it doesn't need to see every picture of a cat to be able to figure out what a cat looks like. This is not programming the way computers have been traditionally been programmed. "What we can do," Hinton says, "is show it a lot of examples and have it just kind of get it. And that's a new way of getting computers to do things."

For people haunted by memories of HAL, or Skynet in the Terminator movies another AI computer turned killing machinethe idea of computers being able to think for themselves, to "just kind of get it", in ways that even people like Geoffrey Hinton can't really explain, is far from re-assuring.

They worry about "superintelligence"the point at which computers become more intelligent than humans, and we lose control of our creations. It's this fear that has people like Elon Musk, the man behind the Tesla electric car, declaring that the "biggest existential threat" to the planet today is artificial intelligence. "With artificial intelligence," he asserts, "we are summoning the demon".

SHODAN, the malevolent artificial intelligence from System Shock 2. (Irrational Games/Electronic Arts)

People who work in AI believe these fears of superintelligence are vastly overblown. They argue we are decades away from superintelligence, and we may, in fact, never get there. And even if we do, there's no reason to think that our machines will turn against us.

Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, one of the world's leading deep learning researchers, believes we should avoid projecting our own psychology onto the machines we are building.

"Our psychology is really a defensive one," he argued in a recent interview. "We are afraid of the rest of the world, so we try to defend from potential attacks." But we don't have to build that same defensive psychology into our computers. HAL was a programming error, not an inevitable consequence of artificial intelligence.

"It's not like by default an intelligent machine also has a will to survive against anything else,"Bengio concludes. "This is something that would have to be put in. So long as we don't put that in, they will be as egoless as a toaster, even though it could be much, much smarter than us.

So if we decide to build machines that have an ego and would kill rather than be killed then, well, we'll suffer from our own stupidity. But we don't have to do that."

Humans suffering from our own stupidity? When has that ever happened?

Feeling better?

Click 'listen' above to hear Ira Basen'sdocumentary on artificial intelligence.

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Artificial intelligence - wonderful and terrifying - will change life as we know it - CBC.ca

Artificial Intelligence: From The Cloud To Your Pocket – Seeking Alpha

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Artificial Intelligence ('AI') is a runaway success and we think it is going to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest driver of future economic growth. There are major AI breakthroughs on a fundamental level leading to a host of groundbreaking applications in autonomous driving, medical diagnostics, automatic translation, speech recognition and a host more.

See for instance the acceleration in speech recognition in the last year or so:

We're only at the beginning of these developments, which is going in several overlapping stages:

We have described the development of specialist AI chips in an earlier article, where we already touched on the new phase emerging - the move of AI from the cloud to the device (usually the mobile phone).

This certainly isn't a universal movement but involves inference (the application of the algorithms to answer queries), rather than the more computing-heavy training (where the algorithms are improved through iteration rounds with the help of massive amounts of data).

Since GPUs weren't designed with AI in mind, so in principle, it isn't much of a stretch to assume that specialist AI chips will take performance higher, even if Nvidia is now designing new architectures like the Volta with AI in mind at least in part, from Medium:

Although Pascal has performed well in deep learning, Volta is far superior because it unifies CUDA Cores and Tensor Cores. Tensor Cores are a breakthrough technology designed to speed up AI workloads. The Volta Tensor Cores can generate 12 times more throughput than Pascal, allowing the Tesla V100 to deliver 120 teraflops (a measure of GPU power) of deep learning performance... The new Volta-powered DGX-1 leapfrogs its previous version with significant advances in TFLOPS (170 to 960), CUDA cores (28,672 to 40,960), Tensor Cores (0 to 5120), NVLink vs. PCIe speed-up (5X to 10X), and deep learning training speed (1X to 3X).

However, while the systems on a chip (SoC) that drive mobile devices contain a GPU processor, these are pretty tiny compared to their desktop and server equivalents. There is room here too for adding intelligence locally (or, as the jargon has it, 'on the edge').

Advantages

Why would one want to put AI processing 'on the edge' (on the device rather than in the cloud)? There are a few reasons:

The privacy issue was best explained by SA contributor Mark Hibben:

The motivation for this is customer privacy. Currently, AI assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Alexa are all hosted in the cloud and require Internet connections to access. The simple reason for this is that AI functionality requires a lot of processing horsepower that only datacenters could provide. But this constitutes a potential privacy issue for users, since cloud-hosted AIs are most effective when they are observing the actions of the user. That way they can learn the users' needs and be more "assistive". This means that virtually every user action, including voice and text messaging, could be subject to such observation. This has prompted Apple to look for ways to host some AI functionality on the mobile device, where it can be locked behind the protection of Apple's redoubtable Secure Enclave. The barrier to this is simply the magnitude of the processing task.

Lower latency and a possible lack of internet connection are crucial where there are life and death decisions that have to be taken instantly, for instance in autonomous driving.

Security of devices might benefit from AI-driven behavioural malware applications, which could run more efficient on specialist chips locally, rather than via the cloud.

Specialist AI chips might also provide an energy advantage, especially when some AI applications already use the local resources (CPU, GPU), and/or depend for data on the cloud (especially in scenarios where there is no Wi-Fi available). We understand that this is one motivation for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to develop its own AI chips.

But here are some of the challenges, very well explained by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL):

These low-end phones can be about 50 times slower than a good laptop-and a good laptop is already much slower than the data centers that typically run our image recognition systems. So how do we get visual translation on these phones, with no connection to the cloud, translating in real-time as the camera moves around? We needed to develop a very small neural net, and put severe limits on how much we tried to teach it-in essence, put an upper bound on the density of information it handles. The challenge here was in creating the most effective training data. Since we're generating our own training data, we put a lot of effort into including just the right data and nothing more.

One route is what Google is doing by optimizing these very small neural nets and feeding it with just the right amount of data. However, if more resources were available locally on the device, these constraints would loosen. Hence, the search for a mobile AI chip that is more efficient in handling these neural networks.

ARM

ARM, now part of the Japanese SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY), is adapting its architecture to produce better results for AI. For instance, its DynamiQ architecture, from The Verge:

Dynamiq goes beyond offering just additional flexibility, and will also let chip makers optimize their silicon for tasks like machine learning. Companies will have the option of building AI accelerators directly into chips, helping systems manage data and memory more efficiently. These accelerators could mean that machine learning-powered software features (like Huawei's latest OS, which studies the apps users use most and allocates processing power accordingly) could be implemented more efficiently.

ARM is claiming that DynamiQ will deliver a 50 times increase in "AI-related performance" over the next three to five years. That remains to be seen, but it's noteworthy that they are designing chips with AI in mind.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM)

The major user of ARM designs is Qualcomm and this company is also adding AI capabilities to its chips. It isn't adding hardware, but a machine learning platform called Zeroth, or the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine.

It's a software development kit that will make it easier to develop deep learning programs directly on the mobile (and other devices run by Snapdragon processors). Here is the selling point ( The Verge):

This means that if companies want to build their own deep learning analytics, they won't have to rent servers to deliver their software to customers. And although running deep learning operations locally means limiting their complexity, the sort of programs you can run on your phone or any other portable device are still impressive. The real limitation will be Qualcomm's chips. The new SDK will only work with the latest Snapdragon 820 processors from the latter half of 2016, and the company isn't saying if it plans to expand its availability.

Snapdragons like the 825, the flagship 835 and some of the 600-tier chips incorporate some machine learning capabilities. And they're not doing this all by themselves either, from Qualcomm:

An exciting development in this field is Facebook's stepped up investment in Caffe2, the evolution of the open source Caffe framework. At this year's F8 conference, Facebook and Qualcomm Technologies announced a collaboration to support the optimization of Caffe2, Facebook's open source deep learning framework, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon neural processing engine (NPE) framework. The NPE is designed to do the heavy lifting needed to run neural networks efficiently on Snapdragon, leaving developers with more time and resources to focus on creating their innovative user experiences.

IBM (NYSE:IBM)

IBM is developing its own specialist AI chip called True North. It is a unique product that mirrors the design of neural networks. It will be like a 'brain on a phone' the size of the brain of a small rodent, packing 48 million electronic nerve cells, from Wired:

Each chip mimics about a million neurons, and these can communicate with each other via something similar to a synapse, the connections between neurons in the brain.

The chip won't be out for quite some time, but its main benefit is that it's exceptionally frugal, from Wired:

The upshot is a much simpler architecture that consumes less power. Though the chip contains 5.4 billion transistors, it draws about 70 milliwatts of power. A standard Intel computer processor, by comparison, includes 1.4 billion transistors and consumes about 35 to 140 watts. Even the ARM chips that drive smartphones consume several times more power than the TrueNorth.

For now, it will do the less computationally heavy stuff involved in inferencing, not the training part of machine learning (feeding algorithms massive amounts of data in order to improve them). From Wired:

But the promise is that IBM's chip can run these algorithms in smaller spaces with considerably less electrical power, letting us shoehorn more AI onto phones and other tiny devices, including hearing aids and, well, wristwatches.

Considering its energy needs, IBM's True North is perhaps the prime candidate to add local intelligence to devices, even tiny ones. This could ultimately revolutionize the internet of things (IoT), which itself is still in its infancy but based on simple processors and sensors.

Adding intelligence to IoT devices and interconnecting these opens up distributed computing on a staggering scale, but speculation about its possibilities is best left for another time.

Apple

Apple is also working on an AI chip for mobile devices, Apple's Neural Engine. There isn't much known in terms of detail; its use is to offload tasks from the CPU and GPU so saving battery and speed up stuff like face and speech recognition and mixed reality.

Groq

Then there is the startup called Groq, founded by some of the people who developed the Tensor at Google. Unfortunately, at this stage, there is very little known about the company, apart from the fact that they're developing a Tensor like AI chip. Here is Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya (from CNBC):

There are no promotional materials or website. All that exists online are a couple SEC filings from October and December showing that the company raised $10.3 million, and an incorporation filing in the state of Delaware on Sept. 12. "We're really excited about Groq," Palihapitiya wrote in an e-mail. "It's too early to talk specifics, but we think what they're building could become a fundamental building block for the next generation of computing."

It's certainly a daring venture as the cost of erecting a new chip company from scratch can be exorbitant and the company faces well established competitors with Google, Apple and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).

What is also unknown is whether the chip is for datacenters or smaller devices providing local AI processing.

Nvidia

The current leader for datacenter "AI" chips (obviously, these are not specific AI chips but GPUs that are used to do most of the massive parallel computing of training neural networks to improve the accuracy of the algorithms.

But it is building its own solution for local AI computing in the form of the Xavier SoC, integrating CPU, CUDA GPU and deep learning accelerators and the GPU now contains the new Volta architecture. It is built for the forthcoming Drive PX3 (autonomous driving).

However, Nvidia's Xavier will feature its own form of TPU that it calls a Tensor Core, and this is built into the SOC.

The advantage for on-device computing in autonomous driving is clear - it reduces latency and the risk of loss of internet connection. Critical autonomous driving functions simply cannot rely on spotty internet connections or long latencies.

From what we understand, it's like a supercomputer in a box, but that's still too big (and too power hungry, sipping 20W) for smartphones. But needless to say, autonomous driving is a big emerging market in and by itself, and in time, this stuff tends to miniaturize, and that TPU itself will be a lot smaller and less energy hungry so it might very well be applicable in other environments.

Conclusion

Before we get too excited, there are serious limitations to putting too much AI computing on small devices like smartphones, here is Voicebot:

The third chip approach seems logical for on-device AI processing. However, few AI processes actually occur on-device today. Whether it is Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, the language processing and understanding occurs in the cloud. It would be impressive if Apple could actually bring all of Siri's language understanding processing onto a mobile device, but that is unlikely in the near term. It's not just about analyzing the data, it's also about having access to information that helps you interpret and respond to requests. The cloud is well suited to these challenges.

Most AI requires massive amounts of computing power and massive amounts of data. While some of that can be shifted from the cloud to devices, especially where latency and secure coverage are essential (autonomous driving), there are still significant limitations for what can be done locally.

However, the development of specialist AI chips for local (rather than cloud) use is only starting today and a new and exciting market is opening up here, with big companies like Apple, Nvidia, STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM), and IBM all at it. And the companies developing cloud AI chips, like Google and Groq might very well crack this market too, as Google's Tensor seems particularly efficient in terms of energy use.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Artificial Intelligence: From The Cloud To Your Pocket - Seeking Alpha

Slack eyes artificial intelligence as it takes on Microsoft and Asian expansion – The Australian Financial Review

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Noah Weiss, head of search, learning and intelligence at Slack, says the company is in a great position to take on the likes of Microsoft.

When former Google and Foursquare product specialist Noah Weiss joined workplace communication specialist Slack at the start of 2016, it was already vaunted as the world's hottest start-up, and enjoyed the kind of cool set aside for only the hottest of hot new things.

Described in some quarters as an email killer, the collaboration tool had evolved beyond being a co-worker chat tool to one that was attempting to redefine the way whole organisations and teams worked, shared information and applied their knowledge.

But the man who had helped Google define its "knowledge graph" of individuals' searches, was brought in to ensure it stayed at the forefront in an era where artificial intelligence has slipped off the pages of science fiction and into the marketing brochures of almost every tech company on the planet.

Making his first visit to Australia over a year later, Weiss, Slack's head of search, learning and intelligence tells The Australian Financial Review that the company has applied analytics and intelligence in such a way that it believes it can keep an edge over an eye-wateringly competitive field.

"A lot of people just love using Slack, because it felt like the tools that they used when they weren't at work, and we have now taken that further to the intelligent services, so that work systems feel as smart, convenient and proactive as the things you get to use on your phone away from the office," he says.

"It's kind of ironic that people are now able to do leisure more effectively than they can do work because their phone predicts what you want to do because it has all the data on you ... we have turned the unprecedented level of engagement that our users have to learn about what they do and who they do it with, so we can do interesting things to recycle it back to them and make them more effective at their jobs."

When he speaks of unprecedented levels of engagement he refers to stats that show more than 5million daily active usersusing Slack for more than two hours a day, andsending more than 70 messages per person per day.

In the same way that Google uses extensive user data to rank search results, Slack is now applying AI-like smarts when users look for information within it. Effectively Slack is watching its users, learning how they do their job and knows what users want to know before they even think to ask.

This will feasibly progress to theautomation ofsome of the purely process driven tasks, or suggestions about how workersshould be doing things better.

Weiss says there needs to be a balance between AI-driven communication and human interaction joking about a recent conversation in Gmail with a friend, where both came to realise that the other was using pre-predicted suggested answers but says once companies such as Slack perfect it, productivity should go through the roof.

"A lot of research into AI is is being published really openly both from the academic labs and and industry players, which is great for companies like us, which can use the public infrastructure to build these types of services as prices are dropping tremendously," he says.

"In a sense it has created a golden era for companies to create smart systems ... [which] means less people working on things that feel menial and rote, and hopefully more people getting to work on things that feel meaningful and creative and new."

Despite still being spoken of as a start-up, Slack is no small-time play. It has already raised just shy of $US540 million ($726 million) in external funding and is facing down some of the biggest companies in the world. While it is known in Australia as a competitor to Atlassian's HipChat product, it is also up against the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Weiss says that Slack tends to view Atlassian more as a partner, through the integration of Atlassian's Jira software with Slack, and rarely comes across HipChat in a competitive conversation outside of Australia. He says Slack's main game is a head-to-head against US giant Microsoft for the future of corporate teamwork.

Late last year Microsoft seemingly went straight after Slack with the launch of Microsoft Teams, but Weiss says he is confident it is a fight Slack will win.

"Frankly I think Microsoft is by far the most credible competitor, in part because we present the biggest existential risk to Microsoft more so than even Google ... but the juxtaposition between us and Microsoft couldn't be bigger," he says.

"We are building an open platform and ecosystem, where we want everybody else to be able to build great experiences into Slack, whereas Microsoft is trying to sell a bundle of its products and keep competitors out ... We are happy to be on this side of technology where we're trying to help you have this connective tissue that pulls all of the best services together."

A practical example he uses to highlight this is a partnership with US software firm Salesforce, which enables sales executives to work withthe specialist software from inside of Slack. He says Microsoft's wish to force customers to use its own Salesforce competitor Dynamics, means it will never allow integration with one of the most popularly used systems in the world.

In the near term,Weiss says Slack will continue its growth in the Asia Pacific region, which accounts for 15 per cent of its global usage, with plans to open an office in Japan this year.

While the product has not yet evolved to operate in Japanese, he said the country is one of the fastest adopters of Slack globally.

"Most of the history about technology companies in Japan is being befuddled by them wondering how to get these very wealthy intelligent folks to use their services," Weiss says.

"Our experience has been the opposite as we never even tried to build it for them and they seem to love using it. So we intend to see how great it can be if we actually tryto help them use it better."

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Slack eyes artificial intelligence as it takes on Microsoft and Asian expansion - The Australian Financial Review

Alexander Peysakhovich’s Theory on Artificial Intelligence – Pacific Standard

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Pacific Standard
Alexander Peysakhovich's Theory on Artificial Intelligence
Pacific Standard
He's a scientist in Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab, as well as a prolific scholar, having posted five papers in 2016 alone. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won a teaching award, and has published articles in the New ...

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Alexander Peysakhovich's Theory on Artificial Intelligence - Pacific Standard

Is Apple Secretly Working On AI Chips For The Next iPhone? – Forbes

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Forbes
Is Apple Secretly Working On AI Chips For The Next iPhone?
Forbes
Creating artificial intelligence that marvels and excites people has never been an easy job, but it has always been one that Apple Inc. has been good at. The company's virtual assistant for smartphones, commonly known as Siri, was the first of its kind ...

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Is Apple Secretly Working On AI Chips For The Next iPhone? - Forbes

Apple WWDC: Siri Speaker, iPad Pro, artificial intelligence and more rumors on our radar – GeekWire

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Apple CEO Tim Cook. (Photo: Apple)

Apples Worldwide Developer Conference starts Monday in San Jose. Here are a few of the areas well be watching closely.

Siri Speaker: Will Apple challenge AmazonsEcho?The possibility of a Siri Speaker is one of the biggest rumors coming into the event. The general consensus is that Apple needs to expand its virtual assistant into this growing area, possibly with the help of its Beats brand andtechnology.

Apple would be challenging not just Amazon but also Google, with its Google Home line of smart speakers. Google made an interesting move of its own last month, expanding its Google Assistant to iPhone.

One question is whether Apples speaker would have a screen, possibly along the lines of thenew Amazon Echo Show. Given the number of times that Siri currently returns web results in response to inquiries on iOS, a screen might be critical unless the virtual assistant is getting a major upgrade.

Which leads to our next big area of interest

Artificial Intelligence: We heardhints of Apples ambitions in AI from Carlos Guestrin, Apple director of machine learning, in an interview in February. He said the key to creating an emotional connection between user and device is the intelligence that it has how much it understands me, how much it can predict what I need and what I want, and how valuable it is at being a companion to me. AI is going to be at the core of that.

Hear GeekWire's Todd Bishop discuss this story Monday in the noon hour on The Record on KUOW, 94.9 FM in the Seattle region, andkuow.org.Guestrinis the University of Washington computer science professor who joined Apple with his team following the tech giantsacquisition of their machine learning startup Turi last year. Apple has established an engineering center in Seattle focused in part on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has talked about the importance of expanding artificial intelligence and machine learning across the companys products. Some subtle examples of machine learninginclude facial recognition in the iOS Photos appand the ability to automatically identify where someone parks a car in Apple Maps.

At WWDC, chances are that new AI features would come as part of iOS 11, which is expected to be unveiled at the event. Bloomberg News reports that Apple is alsoworking on a chip to power artificial intelligence in its devices.

New Hardware: This isnt the event where Apple typically shows the next iPhone, but you never know.

More widely expected at WWDC is a 10.5-inch iPad Pro, fitting in between the current 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch models, with upgraded specs and hardware. Although tablet sales have been declining overall, itsa competitive market: Microsoft, for one,recently unveiled its new Surface Pro.

Ona personal note, Im looking forward to seeing if the rumors of a refreshedMacBook Pro are true. My currentMacBook Pro is on its last legs, and myonly question is whether to chooseanew model or take advantage of what will likely be lower prices on last years MacBook Pros. Or, as a total wild card, maybe Illwait forthe new Surface Laptopto come out from Microsoft in a couple weeks.

Watch the Apple WWDC keynote at 10 a.m. Pacific time Monday morning, and follow GeekWire for coverage. Also subscribe to our Geared Up podcast and live video show for highlights and commentary.

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Apple WWDC: Siri Speaker, iPad Pro, artificial intelligence and more rumors on our radar - GeekWire

EBM in Aerospace – Additive Manufacturing | Arcam AB

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Additive Manufacturing taken to unseen heights

The Aerospace industry is a huge and diverse market withEBM applications found in basically all segments, such as commercial and military aircraft, space applications, missiles and various subsystems like engines and accessories.

A common driver throughout the aerospace segment is weight reduction. A term often referred to within the aerospace community is the Buy-to-Fly ratio. The Buy-to-Fly ratio is the weight ratio between the raw material used for a component and the weight of the component itself.

Due to the importance of weight optimization it is not uncommon with Buy-to-Fly ratio as high as 15-20 for flying components, adding a lot of cost to the component for material and machining. The EBM process opens up an opportunity to produce light-weight components with a Buy-to-Fly ratio very close to 1.

For casting the aerospace companies rely heavily on a few dominant suppliers and many times the lead time for design iterations is many months long. Arcams EBM technology is a tool-less production technology allowing design modifications with minimal lead time and cost.

The freedom in design provided byEBM technology enables designers to create completely new and innovative product designs.Components may be optimized with regards to weight reduction or functional aspects such as improved cooling, heating or filtering characteristics.

Arcam Brochure

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EBM in Aerospace - Additive Manufacturing | Arcam AB

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

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The IJAAA is the peer-reviewed journal of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Worldwide College of Aeronautics. With one of the most recognized names in aviation education across the globe and almost 90 years of excellence, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University provides a premier publication outlet for scholars, industry stakeholders, and government entities. The IJAAA is open access, thus there are no fees or charges required of authors or readers.

The Journal editorial staff work very hard to make your publication experience as easy and seamless as possible. Gone are the days of waiting months for decisions on your hard work. Currently, our average publication decision is made within 14 days.

Our articles are now available through Google Scholar. We are diligently pursuing primary research database indexing as well as inclusion in well-recognized impact factor measurement services. The IJAAA is now listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Cite Factor, and has a pending impact factor with SCOPUS. You can be assured your articles will receive wide distribution and availability.

We just released our second issue for 2017. We have numerous articles in queue for publication - check back soon for more great research!

NOTE: Only works listed under "articles" are peer-reviewed. Others are selected by editorial review.

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International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Aerospace and defense | Jacobs

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For our nations security, defense, and intelligence agencies, Jacobs is a leading provider of mission operations support, information technology systems, scientific engineering, cyber security, facility operations support, and building design.

Information technology is a critical enabler of security programs and facilities. Our solutions span virtually every form of modern software, data-processing and communications technology. We specialize in IP-based network engineering, cloud-based solutions, application development, enterprise voice communications, global video-teleconferencing solutions, service desk operations, and cyber security.

Attacks compromising the information systems and data security of both private and public organizations have increased alarmingly in recent years. Jacobs' cyber security experts apply a wide range of technologies, processes, and practices to protect data centers, networks, and computer systems from attack, damage, or unauthorized access. We are adept at working with traditional security architectures as well as meeting the challenges posed by virtualized and cloud-computing environments. Jacobs' experts develop and apply identity management and access control systems; enable cross-domain solutions; perform vulnerability analysis and penetration testing; and certify and accredit the security strength of systems. In addition, unlike most cyber security providers, we also tune systems for best performance.

Jacobs has extensive mission operations experience including all source analysis, war gaming, mission planning, modeling and simulation, and acquisition and logistics. Our buildings design expertise includes state-of-the-art data centers, mission critical infrastructure, military, intelligence, aviation, and civilian public sector facility projects. Our building services range from master planning to design to construction management.

Jacobs also operates and maintains a wide range of secure facilities including administrative, laboratory, wind tunnel, testing, research, and advanced manufacturing. We strive to reduce operational costs through condition-based maintenance principles, and we leverage the power of data analytics to optimize technology utilization and workforce alignment.

To ensure bias-free support to our clients, we require no firewalls or other corporate structures when selecting systems and hardware, and thus avoid traditional organizational conflicts of interest (OCI). Our freedom from OCI also allows us to serve in sensitive roles supporting our clients mission, providing independent and objective assessments of hardware, systems, and alternative approaches.

At Jacobs, we take pride in the trusted relationships we form with our customers, strive to maintain our technological and operational expertise, and follow through on our commitment to innovation and the transfer of best practices.

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Aerospace and defense | Jacobs

Aerospace industry, led by Insitu, lifts economies of Columbia Gorge communities – The Columbian

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A A

WHITE SALMON On a recent Wednesday morning, Everybodys Brewing already had a short line at its door 10 minutes before opening.

Then, right before its doors opened, polo-clad workers from a nearby avionics company rounded the corner and joined the wait.

Within an hour, the brewpub roiled with a lunchtime crowd, which seemed out of scale with the midsized building, perched on a hill in a small town that looked to fit well within a postcard for the Columbia River Gorge.

The owners werent surprised, though.

It happens a lot, said Doug Ellenberger, who co-owns Everybodys Brewing with his wife, Christine.

Everybodys Brewing is one of the restaurants in the Gorge now feeding off a new class of customer. Led largely by Insitu Group, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Boeing Co., these companies and their higher-wage workers are breathing life into small businesses in the Gorge that used to subsist on tourists and a few locals.

The brewpub opened in 2008, at the height of the recession, and its preparing to double its square footage by April 2018. Ellenberger thanks the aerospace industry and the community at large.

Companies across the street that work with Insitu, they get out around 11:20 and its always a good thing for us, he said. Employees of aerospace companies, like Insitu and its nearby suppliers, are the ones who have become the locals. When its not the season for tourism, theyre the ones who keep the lights on for us as well as everyone else in the community, he said.

Welcome to one of the most resurgent places along the Columbia River, 60 miles east of the Vancouver-Portland metropolitan area. Cities on both sides of the river have found success, thanks to landing big players in the drone industry.

In Klickitat County, the home of little towns like White Salmon and Bingen, the population has risen just 3 percent since 2010. But median household income has risen nearly 30 percent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 10 percent of households in the county earn between $100,000 and $149,999 more than double its share in 2010.

That rise has given a lifeline to restaurants, hotels and recreational companies in the area, said Tamara Kaufman, director of the regional Mt. Adams Chamber of Commerce.

Their presence has had a positive impact on this community overall, she said of the industry. I know that if you go to lunch around here, you can go to any number of these little eateries and see people carrying a lanyard indicating they are employees of Insitu or one of its many suppliers, she said.

That is the kind of development that helped Matt Ramey and Jen Peterson decide to locate their second barbecue restaurant in Bingen, rather than a place like Portland.

Pine Shed Ribs and Barbecue, based in Lake Oswego, Ore., will open kitty-corner from the Insitu headquarters on state Highway 14 at the end of June. Ramey said although Bingens population is small, its also less saturated with eateries.

If you spend a little bit of time online, you can find a list as long as my arm of restaurants that closed in Portland this year and in 2016, Ramey said. They went into Portland to get all the foot traffic, but they were also lost in the noise of other restaurants.

The couple had vacationed in the area for years but noticed the business opportunity last fall. They jumped on the vacant storefront, and now have what they hope will be a prime location for many years. Across the street, a white commuter bus drops off dozens of Insitu employees who are brought to job sites every day from as far away as Vancouver.

We knew where their offices were; we thought this might be a good idea, Ramey said of finding the location. We signed a lease on it almost immediately. Im really optimistic about its possibilities long-term.

The restaurant will also be close to Eagle Point, the 125,000-square-foot manufacturing plant that Insitu opened in 2014. Inside, workers in a bright warehouse piece together the modular drones according to customer specifications.

When completed, the drones can be used to monitor schools of fish, map wildfires or survey crops. Insitu whose name is latin for in the same place does not weaponize the drones, specifically, but drones without firepower can still map battlefields and, according to company officials, helped save the life of Captain. Richard Phillips, whose experience with Somali pirates was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks.

Employment has ballooned at Insitu this year. The company has hired more than 200 employees and plans to hire another 140. It has offices as far away as Vancouver and facilities in Oregon, California, Mississippi, England and Australia.

With all the new faces, Dave Poucher, the mayor of White Salmon, said its not uncommon to see the small towns jam-packed on a Friday or Saturday night.

By 4:30 p.m. Friday, there will not be a parking space in White Salmon, he said. Anybody thats doing any type of business is booming.

Poucher, 70, said hes seen enough to think the growth could last for generations.

There are so many baby carriages, people jogging, pushing strollers and things like that, he said. There just seem to be more and more of them.

Its a big turnaround for Klickitat County, which grappled with high unemployment even when times were good for its timber industry and aluminum plant, said David McClure, the countys economic development director.

Both lifelines fell hard in the 1990s, McClure said, and officials didnt know where to look.

In 1995, we were plotting out How do we get our community out of this? Aerospace wasnt even on our radar, he said. Insitu pretty much changed the landscape.

Insitu arrived in Bingen in 1994, but first made headlines four years later when a team of five engineers flew a 29-pound drone from St. Johns, Newfoundland to the Hebrides Islands of Scotland. It was the first unpiloted aircraft to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Company officials said business really took off, however, when the military started using drones for reconnaissance in 2004, during the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq.

Fast-forward to 2014, when the company, now a subsidiary of Boeing Co., built Eagle Point at the Port of Klickitat. Today the company has 1,300 employees, including 900 in the Gorge, said the companys infrastructure and real estate director, Jenny Taylor.

Besides Insitu, more companies popped up to carve out a role in the industry, some founded by former employees. Zepher Inc. provides assembly, testing and transportation services, and Sagetech builds the worlds smallest aviation surveillance equipment.

More companies are arriving. In January, Australian propulsion systems company Orbital announced it would set up an office in Bingen.

Today, the Gorge aerospace industry employs about 1,700 people across 17 companies in the Oregon communities of Hood River, Wasco and Sherman, and Skamania and Klickitat counties, according to the Gorge Technology Alliance, an industry association.

They make a significant difference in the region in terms of employment and the quality of the jobs and the wages they pay, said executive alliance director Jessica Metta.

Sitting in the thick of the lunchtime clamber at Everybodys Brewing, McClure, whose job it is to find and retain new businesses in Klickitat County, said he couldnt take credit for Insitu. He called it a unicorn that just happened to find its way to their land.

I wish I could claim it, he said. Its the center of gravity for aerospace in this region. For it to pop up here, its significant.

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Aerospace industry, led by Insitu, lifts economies of Columbia Gorge communities - The Columbian

Launching an aerospace startup at Mach 2 with your hair on fire … – TechCrunch

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Alice Lloyd George Contributor

Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.

There are few industries whose evolution includes dramatic steps backwards, but thats exactly what happened in commercial aviation and its experiments in supersonic flight.

For 27 years, supersonic travel was a reality, creating a bridge between Europe and the U.S. that led to a bright future for commercial flight. And then, suddenly, that future disappeared. Blake Scholl is determined to bring that future back.

In an interview for FluxI chatted with Blake, the founder and CEO of Denver-based Boom, a supersonic jet company. We got into how the Concorde business model was flawed,why it takes an outsider to re-ignite innovation in the industry and howsimulation software has greatly reduced the time and cost of plane design.

An excerpt of our conversation is published below.

AMLG: Todays guest is Blake Scholl, founder of Booma supersonic civilian aircraft company based in Denver, Colorado. RRE is an investor and were a huge fan of Blake. He is a certified pilot and a repeat entrepreneur who previously founded the payments company Kima Labs, which was acquired by Groupon. He also built Amazons marketing automation stack. Welcome Blake. Lets jump inwhat is Boom exactly and where did the idea come from?

BS: The first 50 years of aviation from the Wright brothers forwardwe had incredible progress and safety and comfort and economics and speed. Then this weird thing happened in the 1960s and 70s where we stopped making progress in speed. The American Airlines special from New York to San Francisco back then was actually scheduled for an hour less than it is today. What technology have we had the capability and then actually gone backwards? We had Concordea Mach 2 passenger airplaneflew it for 30 years and never took it mainstream. Now its in museums.

A visualization of the Boomplane

What were doing at Boom is trying to fix that problem, to bring back faster air travel but in a more mainstream, more affordable way than Concorde. Were going to chip away at that problem until we have the fastest airplane thats also the cheapest one to fly.

AMLG: We came up with road networks and steam engines, and humans got faster and faster and faster and then we had the Concorde and then we didnt have it. It feels like we stopped with cars and jets. How does progress just halt like that, especially in an area like transport thats so fundamental to the economy?

BS: You have to look at where innovation comes from. Everybody knows the first airplane came from bicycle entrepreneurs. Whats less well known is that the first practical airliner, the DC-3, and the first jetliner the de Havilland Cometboth came from founder-led companies. We havent had any founder-led companies in commercial aircraft since the last one was founded in 1921. The last founder retired from the industry in 1958. Since then weve had big companies basically optimizing the same concept.

What really happened that blocked supersonics? Well you have to look at where Concorde came from. Concorde was not an entrepreneurial project. It was a joint venture between two governments, the French and the British. Of course most joint ventures between the French and British have been wars.

AMLG: Yes weve had our fair share of wars. As a Brit I can say that warring with the french is one of our favorite things to do.

BS: Right. So its remarkable Concorde ever flew. It wasnt about, lets usher in the supersonic age. It was about, lets beat the Russians. It was a Cold War era glory project disconnected from economics. It was a glorious technical achievement but wasnt aimed at being practical.

So the Europeans had Concorde, the Russians had this thing people call Concordski. And on this side of the pond there was what was supposed to be a Concorde killer that the U.S. government was championing. The Americans had to have a Mach 3 three hundred seat airplane. By the way that thing was going to be an economic catastrophe. In 1970 Congress pulled the subsidies that were going to Boeing to build that airplane. We got this unholy alliance between aerospace protectionist interests and ostensibly environmental concerns and we banned supersonic travel in the US. Literally banned it. We put in place a speed limit.

AMLG: Wait why did they pull the subsidies? Due to cost?

BS: Theres a lot of ambiguity in the U.S. about whether the government should have been paying 75% of the development cost of a private airplane. That was the biggest reason that Congress pulled it. Besides it was over budget, behind schedule, all the normal things. But it was after that that we banned supersonic travel, when Concorde looked like a threat. That messed up what would have been the normal development path, the normal go-to-market path for supersonic airplanes.

Think about everything from cell phones to computers to electric cars. The way they come to market is they start at a relatively high price point that a small number of people can afford. Then as the technology gets figured out and you get economies of scale and the cost comes down, eventually every kid has a cell phone. But you have to start somewhere. The natural place for supersonic aircraft to have started would be the supersonic private jet. A small number of people whose time is super valuable who can afford something expensive. Those people fly mostly over land. If you cant fly supersonic over land, well that destroyed the market. It destroyed what would have been the normal evolution of supersonic. Had that not happened I think wed both be flying on supersonic jumbos today.

AMLG: But youre not starting with the high-end private jet. Youre starting with commercial and want to make this accessible to everyone?

BS: Thats right. Basically because of the supersonic over land ban, you have to skip a step in your market development. Until thats reversed I dont think theres a market for the supersonic private jet. But you can start with the thing thats the next level of development, which is a small supersonic aircraft for commercial airliner use. The reason after 50 years why this is finally possible is enough development has happened in aerospace, around aerodynamics and materials and engines. You can pick up those pieces of technology and use them to create a small supersonic aircraft and skip the private jet part. In airlines you focus on routes that are mostly over water like New York to London, San Francisco to Tokyo, Seattle to Shanghai.

AMLG: So the plan is 45 people per plane, one on each side of the aislewhich sounds appealing, none of that battle for the arm restand youre aiming for much lower fuel consumption per passenger right, something like 30% greater efficiency than the Concorde? How do the economics and profitability compare?

A British Aircraft Corporation sales chart, Jan. 18, 1967, showing 69 Concordes onorder.

BS: Concorde was extremely expensive to operate for two reasons. Oneit was a gas guzzler. Twoit had no economies of scale. The reason it had no economies of scale was that ticket prices were really high. You had to charge $20,000 per round-trip ticket to make any money and you had to put 100 seats on the airplane. You cant fill 100 seats at $20,000 a pop. It doesnt work.

If you want to make this work what you have to do is improve the fuel economy so you get the ticket prices down. Taking those one at a time. On the fuel economy piece if you run the numbersand all the data for this is on Wikipediaif you beat Concorde by 30% on gas mileage youre at parity with subsonic business class. Youre not yet at parity with economy, and we need to get there eventually, but you can do it for business class.

So with this Mach 2.2, 45 seat airplane with business class pricing then the story for airlines is hey, if you can fly a Boeing or Airbus on a route and fill the seats and make money, you can fly the Boom jet on the same route and fill the seats and make money. Except you can be differentiated because the flights get there in half the time.

AMLG: It sounds like this is going to take a lot of money. Ive seen you say that we can build the entire company and get to breakeven for less money than Uber raises in a round, which is funny for a lot of reasonshow much will this really cost?

BS: Its definitely a capital intensive business. Were working both on demonstrating the technology as well as demonstrating the market demand and that we have product/market fit with what airlines want.

Were about a year away from flying our first airplane the XB-1 supersonic demonstrator which is a smaller version of the same thing that shows all the tech works. It will probably require the better part of a billion to get the first passenger flights happening. But at the same time, the market here is a thousand plus airplanes and they are $200 million dollars each. So its a pretty good prize and a pretty big ROI even though the capital requirements are large.

AMLG: So $200 million per plane is pretty good, and youve got flagship deals with Branson at Virgin Atlantic, whove said theyd like to buy at least 10 jets, as well as a bunch of other carriers with LOIs. Obviously they want your jets, so why havent they done it themselves? Boeing for instance had proposals for supersonic, why didnt they build it?

BS: Put yourself in the shoes of the Boeing CEO for a moment. Boeing does one new clean sheet commercial aircraft about every 15 years. So they have to be choosy about what they take on. They have to go after the biggest market opportunity they see. Boeing is widely known to be working on a 797, which is a replacement for the 757, and they think the market size is 4,000 to 5,000 airplanes.

Its a straightforward replacement of an existing product, for an existing market. Imagine the CEO of Boeing saying you know lets not do the 797 lets do this supersonic thing, well sell a thousand of them, itll be great. The boards probably going to replace you. This is one of these things that looks great from the perspective of a startup. Moreover, if the small supersonic aircraft pulls passengers off the Dreamliners then theyre going to sell less Dreamliners or have to reduce the price of the Dreamliner which doesnt sound good. Why would you cannibalize your own business.

AMLG: So its a classic innovation dilemma for the legacy corporations. As you say maybe this is why it has to be a founder-driven thing. I want to go back to how you got into this. Youre a repeat internet entrepreneur. How did you get into airplanes, where did this interest come from?

BS: Ive loved airplanes since I was a kid and Ive been flying for fun since I was in college. I was living in a world where all other parts of technology are getting better and better, but air travels horrible and getting worse. It made no sense. I had this on my bucket list for the better part of a decade, that maybe some day Id work on it. I created a Google Alert for supersonic jet in 2007. I wanted to be the first to know when someone cracked the nut. It was like crickets. Maybe a business jet I couldnt afford to fly? Crickets. Sci-fi concepts that are never going to work? Crickets.

AMLG: With this one in particular it feels like thered been some stigma, that it had been left on the drawing board. I do have to ask though, I mean clearly youre passionate about aerospace, but usually the founder picks a market where they have a ton of expertise or experienceyou didnt have the engineering background to build planes from scratch. How did you feel qualified to start such an ambitious, technical company?

BS: You can learn a lot when youre motivated. Most people underestimate their ability to go acquire new knowledge. In the first year of working on this it was basically education and recruiting. I read textbooks. I took an airplane design class. I spent a lot of time talking to the best people I could find in the industry and asking them questions and getting them to teach me things and to tell me when I was wrong about stuff. This doesnt make me an aerospace engineer and Im not going to design the airplane personally, but I know enough to be dangerous and I know enough to judge talent. I think thats really important.

AMLG: So in that year you studied enough and talked to enough experts to get over a threshold and come to the conclusion that yes, this is a viable problem, this can be solved?

BS: Thats right. There was a pivotal moment where Id built basically a spreadsheet model of the airplane. Airplane performance really comes down to four key variables: aerodynamic efficiency, structural efficiency, propulsive efficiency and speed of the airplane. If you have estimates of those things you can relatively straightforwardly predict what the fuel economy is going to be. I had some assumptions there and wasnt sure how valid they were.

I built the model, took it to a professor at Stanford and said, hey can you look at this and check my math and tell me whether this is reasonable? This guy had done a bunch of research on supersonic airplanes and his feedback was, if youre going to do this you should really try harder because these seem conservative. At that point I figured either I had no courage or had to find a way to start the company and make it happen.

AMLG: So that was the moment where you realized OK Im doing this. Youve said that all the information you needed was on Wikipedia. It reminds me of Elon, of what he did with rockets. He ordered a bunch of manuals off the Internet, read everything, then started to build SpaceX. It turns out you can do that.

BS: It turns out you can do that.

AMLG: Has SpaceX been an inspiration for you, has it paved the way for investors to be more open-minded to this?

BS: I do not think this company would exist if it werent for SpaceX, for multiple reasons. One is just personal inspiration. That Elon was able to go off and do something that a lot of people thought was technically impossible, and practically impossible to do as a startup. Hes gone off to accomplish things nobody else can do with less money and greater impact. Thats so cool. Its an existence proof thats personally inspiring. Also for investors, its like OK things of this scale arent impossible.

AMLG: I want to get back into the technology for a second. You mentioned there have been advances in materials science, engines, aerodynamics. Whats changed that makes this more feasible than before? I know that you can for instance, run design tests in simulations at a far cheaper cost?

BS: If you take Boeings latest airplane and put it next to their airplane from the 1960s, they look pretty darn similar and their capabilities are pretty darn similar. But theyve actually completely swapped out the technology stack. Weve got carbon fiber composites, better aerodynamics and dramatically improved engines. Those are the big three things that make this technically possible todayaerodynamics, materials and propulsion.

From the aerodynamics perspective you used to have to go to wind tunnels to design airplanes. That sucks because every wind tunnel iteration takes six months and costs millions. Youve got to have an enormous budget and a huge team and a lot of time and you cant test many ideas. Today you can do the equivalent of six months of wind tunnel testing in half an hour with a simulation running in the cloud. Its almost like cheating, you can come up with better aerodynamic design, you can test a lot more ideas. If you look at our airplane carefully youll notice theres not a straight line anywhere on it. It looks a bit like Concorde if you squint but the fuselage is differently shaped, the wings are differently shaped.

AMLG: Longer and thinner?

BS: Yes a bit longer and thinner. The key thing is the shaping. Its not just a tube with wings coming out. That makes a huge difference. Its not that Concordes designers were stupid, they just couldnt do as many iterations as we can.

AMLG: With the aerodynamicsobviously the Concorde used afterburners to get up to speed, to get to Mach 2. Youre not going to be doing that. Thats the really inefficient part?

BS: That was the only way you could get to sufficient thrust with 1950s technology. Today we have something called turbofan engines which are quieter and more efficient and can generate enough thrust to get you going fast. When the Concorde flipped on the afterburners their fuel consumption went up 78% and they got just 17% more thrust. Thats a bad way to get extra thrust. Its 2017 we dont need afterburners to go fast anymore.

AMLG: So the turbofan helps solve some of that?

BS: Yes the turbofan gets you enough thrust for high speed while also being significantly quieter. Concorde was a pretty loud airplane, those afterburners were ripping.

AMLG: Thats kind of the elephant in the room. Ive got to ask, why did you name the company Boom? Isnt it a bit of a jinx, arent you fighting that whole conception of a noisy plane?

BS: Sonic booms are way overblown. And were owning it. Thats part of why we named it Boom. Its like boom and youre there. Its fun to say. I love the name.

To talk more about the noise issue. There are two potential noise issues with supersonic airplanes. One is around the airport. The Concorde flying on an afterburner, that was just loud around airport communities. Turbofans basically solve that problem. This is going to be no louder than other airplanes that are flying today. The second piece is the sonic boom. A sonic boom is a noise that you hear any time a supersonic aircraft flies over. Its not just one time, it happens on fly over.

AMLG: Youve said yours is going to be 100 times quieter than the Concorde, thats significant. What will that sound like?

A supersonic boom is the sound created by an object traveling through the air faster than the sound waves itcreates.

BS: It will be more like a thump than a boom. Theres a story in the news a couple of weeks ago about how the military had scrambled some F-16s that had gone supersonic at a few thousand feet, and man that rattled windows and there was a loud crack. At that altitude at that speed with that airplane design it sure is loud. But when youre up at 60,000 feet with an airplane thats designed to attenuate the boom it can be a lot more benign. Youre in New York City. Theres all kinds of stuff thats noise in your backgroundambulances going by, fire trucks, trains and construction noise. The sonic thump is quieter than many of those things.

AMLG: But the same restrictions are in place. Do you think this is enough to get the rules changed? I know youve got lobbyists, youve got a head of policy, youre spending a bunch of time in D.C. and trying to get productive conversations going. How do you get movement in Washington?

BS: There are two ways it could go. One is, we manage to persuade people quickly that these rules should be fixed. I would call that our Plan A. If that happens youre going to suddenly see a lot more investment in this space, because if you can fly supersonic over land the market size quadruples.

But sometimes rule changes happen slowly. There have been efforts to change this for 20 years that havent gone anywhere. So plan B is, we bring our product to market we fly supersonic over water, we fly subsonic over land. Then youre living in a world where San Francisco to Tokyo is faster than San Francisco to D.C. A lot of people will be scratching their heads and asking, what? Why do I have to spend four more hours on the back of this crappy airplane? Let me listen to that sonic boom thing. Wait a minute that? Thats the reason I have to suffer? Lets fix that.

AMLG: Did you ever go on the Concorde?

BS: Only in museums. It shut down when I was in my early 20s and I didnt have twenty grand to drop on a joyride.

The Concorde in production

AMLG: I never made it either. Although my dad did. In his twenties he was fired from his job, he used his last paycheck to go on the Concorde, where he actually met his future investor who invested in his firm. A fortuitous tale before the Concorde shut down.

BS: Thats awesome. One of our board members Sam Altman whos president of Y Combinator was telling me that he got to go on Concorde when he was seven and it was a formative experience for him. I wish Id had that. Were going to make it possible for our kids.

AMLG: Youre going to change everything. Only 5 percent of the worlds population has ever been on an airplane. Did you know that? Seems very low.

BS: Its very low. Weve got to fix that too. Thats where the future of supersonic gets interesting. Today with the first airplane were building were going to make this accessible for basically business class prices. So if you can afford to buy a business class international today, then you can afford to get there in half the time.

Thats just the starting point. Theres an interesting flywheel that happens. As we were saying about Hawaii, the faster the flights the more people go more often. When more people are going more often, the ideal size of the airplane increases. So instead of being 55 seats maybe its 100 or 150.

When you build a bigger airplane you can make it way more fuel-efficient which means that ticket prices can come down and more people can afford to fly more often which means the airplane can get bigger which means it can be more efficient. That virtuous cycle starts spinning. And as you grow the market you can afford to invest more in your technology. Theres a whole roadmap for supersonic efficiency which basically no one is working on today. But when the market exists, we start to get investment.

Theres also a tipping point at which the fastest flight actually becomes the cheapest one. Because the faster you go, the more flights you can do with the same airplane, with the same crew. I call it the speed dividendwhen things are faster, you get savings. Thats going to push us to a point where faster airplanes actually have an economic advantage over slow ones.

AMLG: But youre not planning to do the full stack and run a Boom airlines?

BS: No. One hard problem at the time. What were doing is pretty darn ambitious. Lets do an airline and lets build an airplane company and a supersonic airplane company on top of that? Its too much for a startup.

The menu on British Airways first commercial flight included 1969 Dom Perignon, caviar and lobster canaps, grilled fillet steak, palm heart salad with Roquefort dressing and fresh strawberries with double cream. Customers were also offered Havana cigars.[Source]

AMLG: Its also a very different concept, bringing speed to the masses. On the British Airways Concorde flight they served Dom Perignon, caviar and lobsterthats my conception of the Concorde. This is different, this is really making it accessible.

BS: This is not about luxury or prestige. Its about something everyone should have.

AMLG: OK segueto a totally unrelated question. I love movies so I have to askfavorite airplane movie? Air Force One, Top Gun, Snakes on a Plane?

BS: You have to love Top Gun. Im reminded of a line from it: You wont be happy unless youre going Mach 2 with your hair on fire. I find that inspiring.

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Launching an aerospace startup at Mach 2 with your hair on fire ... - TechCrunch

Tamil Nadu will draft aerospace and defence policy: Chief Minister – Times of India

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CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu would soon come out with a aerospace and defence policy aimed at benefitting companies planning to invest in these two sectors, Chief Minister K Palaniswami said on Saturday.

"I am happy to inform that the state Government, along with Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation, is engaged in setting up an aerospace park on 267 acre land in Sriperumbudur", he said.

"As a next step, a new aerospace and defence sector policy will be released soon" he said at the third edition of Southern Regional Council Meeting, organised by industry body CII.

Referring to 98 MoUs that attracted Rs 2.42 lakh crore investments in the maiden Global Investor Meet held in 2015 by the late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, he said 61 projects worth Rs 62,738 crore are in various stage of implementation.

"Through this initiative, 76,777 new jobs have been created", he said.

Palaniswami said the second edition of the event would be conducted in 2018 following the success of GIM 2015.

On the status of Foreign Direct Investments in the state, Palaniswami said Tamil Nadu attracted Rs 1.25 lakh crore of FDI between May 2011 and December 2016.

As per information provided by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the assured total number of investments in the State between 2011-17 was Rs 3,07,457 lakh crore, he said.

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Tamil Nadu will draft aerospace and defence policy: Chief Minister - Times of India

SyberJet Aircraft Announces First Class of Utah Aerospace Pathways Graduates in Cedar City – Utah Business

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Cedar CitySyberJet Aircraft is pleased to announce the first class of graduates from the Utah Aerospace Pathways program. A total of twelve students from the Iron County School District participated in the program and were present for the official graduation today in Cedar City.

MSC Aerospace and SyberJet Aircraft are proud to be a part of this program that will help to fill high paying, innovative aerospace jobs in the southern Utah area for years to come. A partnership with the state of Utah and industry, the Utah Aerospace Pathways program was initiated in April 2016 and prepares graduating high school students with the skills and knowledge for a rewarding, long-term career in aerospace manufacturing. This pilot project was created and endorsed by industry, government and education leaders for high school students in various school districts throughout Utah.

Students who graduate from the program with a certificate in aerospace manufacturing will have demonstrated knowledge and proficiency in basic manufacturing and will have completed specific classroom studies including Precision Sheet Metal Assembly, Manufacturing Principles, Tool Usage/Safety, Environmental Health, Precision Measuring Instruments, Organizational Awareness, Applied Math, and Aerospace Blueprint Reading.

During the graduation ceremony Chuck Taylor, President of SyberJet Aircraft explained why MSC is uniquely suited to be are partner in the Utah Aerospace Pathway program.

MSC provides a unique experience based learning opportunity for the students, he said. The students work hand in hand with experienced industry professionals and are exposed to all facets of aircraft manufacturing. They work with aircraft designers, fabricators, assemblers, quality inspectors, aircraft mechanics, and flight test personnel. They can even help roll a finished aircraft out of hangar. They are exposed to it all.

Whitney Clayton, CEO of MSC Aerospace added, We are fortunate to be doing business in states with the focus and initiative to invest in educational programs that benefit both individuals and also local industries. MSC is committed to our local communities for the long term and looks forward to welcoming these graduates to our team.

This program is a great example of industry, education and government working together to create a program that builds the talent pipeline for Utahs growing Aerospace Industry. These graduates are better prepared to enter the aerospace manufacturing job market and/or use this experience to enhance their post-secondary education goals, said State Workforce Development Board Chair and MSC Aerospace Human Resources Director Megen Ralphs.

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SyberJet Aircraft Announces First Class of Utah Aerospace Pathways Graduates in Cedar City - Utah Business

Aerospace Soars Past S&P 500 – Seeking Alpha

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This research report was produced by Colorado Wealth Management Fund, Founder of The Mortgage REIT Forum, with assistance from Big Dog Investments.

Which sector has dominated?

The PowerShares Aerospace & Defense Portfolio ETF (NYSEARCA:PPA) is invested in the industrial sector which has been dominating for a while now. The returns have come with a lot of volatility, which along with current market valuations is why I would not want to be starting a position in this fund. That's not to say it isn't good and hasn't performed well - it's just valued too high. The underlying index for PPA is the SPADE Defense Index.

I'll be focusing on analyzing the ETF. The market is priced too high right now and so is this fund. This is probably one of the best times to take a look at funds and decide which ones should go on a watch list for when the market takes a dive.

Expenses

The expense ratio right now is at .64%. Compared to the equity ETFs I have been covering, this is on the expensive side. I wouldn't be comfortable paying an expense ratio this high, but every investor has a different tolerance level. What I would be willing to do is take the holdings of this company and simulate its results.

Yield

The current yield is .90%, which may not be high enough for a lot of investors going for a dividend yield. The growth of this fund has more than made up for a small yield if an investor had a long-term investment approach.

Risk profile

Let's take a look at how volatile this fund has been.

Since the inception of the fund on October 26, 2005, there has been total returns of 239.8% compared to SPY's returns of 152.9%. These returns are fantastic, but look at the volatility:

PPA:

SPY:

Yes, the great returns have been there, but the fund has shown more volatility and a larger drawdown than SPY since it started. This is the kind of volatility it sometimes takes to beat SPY. I prefer to allocate my funds more defensively. Consumer staples has been my go-to choice when it comes to looking at ETFs, but there's been other sectors like industrial which has done very well.

Even over the last couple of years PPA has done amazing.

PPA:

SPY:

Sector

Here are the sector holdings from the Morningstar website:

There is only a tiny bit of diversification, and the rest of the fund is in industrials. This sector has done quite well over the last decade, but that doesn't mean it will continue to do so. I worry about investing in any sector when all the money is flooding there.

Holdings

Here's a chart of the top 30 holdings:

Ticker

Name

Allocation

Div Yield

(NYSE:GD)

General Dynamics Corp.

7.02%

1.66%

(NYSE:UTX)

United Technologies Corp.

7.01%

2.17%

(NYSE:HON)

Honeywell International, Inc.

6.89%

2.00%

(NYSE:LMT)

Lockheed Martin Corp.

6.83%

2.57%

(NYSE:BA)

Boeing Co./The

6.82%

3.04%

(NYSE:RTN)

Raytheon Co.

5.64%

1.95%

(NYSE:NOC)

Northrop Grumman Corp.

5.30%

1.40%

(NYSE:TDG)

TransDigm Group, Inc.

3.89%

0.00%

(NYSE:COL)

Rockwell Collins, Inc.

3.85%

1.23%

(NYSE:TXT)

Textron, Inc.

3.59%

0.17%

(NYSE:LLL)

L3 Technologies, Inc.

3.56%

1.79%

(NYSE:HII)

Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc.

2.50%

1.22%

(NYSE:HEI)

HEICO Corp.

1.72%

0.19%

(NYSE:OA)

Orbital ATK, Inc.

1.64%

1.26%

(NASDAQ:ESLT)

Elbit Systems Ltd.

1.42%

1.32%

(NYSE:BWXT)

BWX Technologies, Inc.

1.33%

0.78%

(NYSE:OSK)

Oshkosh Corp.

1.32%

1.29%

(NYSE:HXL)

Hexcel Corp.

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Aerospace Soars Past S&P 500 - Seeking Alpha

TransDigm Group acquires three aerospace product lines – Crain’s Cleveland Business

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Crain's Cleveland Business
TransDigm Group acquires three aerospace product lines
Crain's Cleveland Business
The product lines will be consolidated into TransDigm businesses and include "highly engineered aerospace controls, quick disconnect couplings, and communication electronics," the release stated. "Each of these acquisitions contain proprietary products ...
TransDigm Acquires Three Add-On Aerospace Product LinesPR Newswire (press release)
TransDigm (TDG) Adds 3 Aerospace Product Lines to PortfolioZacks.com
Transdigm Group Incorporated - TDG - Stock Price Today - ZacksZacks

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TransDigm Group acquires three aerospace product lines - Crain's Cleveland Business

A Periodic Table of Behavior for Psychology – Psychology Today (blog)

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A Periodic Table of Behavior for Psychology
Psychology Today (blog)
Modern science took off during the Enlightenment and changed the world. Science was differed from philosophy in that it did not presuppose how nature must be, as the early philosophers tended to do, but instead scientists got up out of their armchairs ...

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A Periodic Table of Behavior for Psychology - Psychology Today (blog)

LOOSE ENDS: Eldar Shafir on the effects scarcity – centraljersey.com

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Memorial Day weekend followed by Princeton University reunions and graduation is a time when most Princeton residents rarely think about scarcity. Generally, the conversation under tents and in backyards is filled with groans about too much food, too much drink, too many people, too many cars, and too much stuff loaded into those cars.

On the weekend of June 10, however, several Princetonians are going to be thinking a lot about scarcity, thanks to Princeton University Professor Eldar Shafir. Dr. Shafir who is speaking at a Housing Initiatives of Princeton Garden Party benefit June 10 is internationally renowned, along with his co-author Dr. Sendhil Mullainathan from Harvard University, for the 2013 book "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much."

As a behavioral scientist whose main area of interest is behavioral economics and decision-making, Shafir will talk about the thesis of his book the scarcity vicious cycle and relate it to the mission of HIP. Individuals with a scarcity of funds fail to make smart decisions concerning their finances for a variety of cognitive reasons, including the lack of supportive resources, thus their lives spiral downward. It turns out that the work done by HIP could be a case study for Shafirs academic work.

Since 2004, the Housing Initiatives of Princeton has been helping to break that downward spiral for dozens of people by offering a holistic menu of services to those in dire financial circumstances. It is dedicated to transitioning low-income working families and individuals who are homeless or facing imminent homelessness to permanent housing and sustained self-sufficiency.

The charitable non-profit does far more than place a temporary roof over ones head. The organization becomes a supportive resource for clients by providing individualized case management services to enhance life skills needed to attain self-sufficiency and permanent housing and ultimately to succeed independently.

Most in Princeton have a comfortable life," Shafir said. "We can afford to hire accountants, investment brokers, mortgage brokers, psychologists, attorneys to help make smart decisions about our well being. But there are those who are struggling with a scarcity of funds and do not have the support systems. The problems associated with poverty consume mental energy and capacity. Those struggling financially often make decisions that perpetuate and exacerbate poverty."

The concept of scarcity and smart decision-making applies to more than financial decisions, and thus everyone can relate to the premise of the book, regardless of his or her economic situation, noted HIP Interim Board Chair Carol Golden. The authors research and conclusions describe how scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time.

The book is so significant, in my opinion, because it gives individuals who have no financial problems a real understanding as to why it is extremely difficult for people with great financial challenges to change their lives unless they have access to outside help, said Golden, a Princeton resident and attorney who volunteers her services as the full-time chair of the organization, officially known as Housing Initiatives of Princeton Charitable Trust.

Shafir further elaborated on his thesis in a research paper, Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function, published in the August 2013 issue of Science (written with Anandi Mani and Jiaying Zhao).

According to the papers summary, the poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty.

We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis," the authors wrote. "First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich.

"This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor.

As Princeton University Professor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy, Shafir, who has been working at the university for the past 25 years, also serves as the director (its inaugural director) of Princetons Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and co-founder and scientific director at ideas42, a social science research and development lab.

A $10 million anonymous gift created theCenter for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton, enabling the university to strengthen its leading role in this emerging field and improve the development of effective policymaking. The donor, a Princeton University parent, was a longtime admirer of the work of Dr. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, and a Princeton University professor of psychology and public affairs emeritus, and Dr. Anne Treisman, a Princeton University professor of psychology emerita.

The center is building on the research that earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2002. The award-winning work integrated insights from psychological research into economics, particularly concerning decision making under uncertainty.

In the traditional view, policies are designed for people who make rational decisions based on thorough consideration of the options and on well-informed cost-benefit analyses," the university stated in a release announcing the gift in 2015. "In the approach pioneered at Princeton, policies are developed with a focus on what really drives people in decision making the idiosyncratic and sometimes surprising ways in which they view their choices, perceive the social, economic and political world around them, and decide whether or not, and how, to act. Why do some people spend too much and save too little, choose unhealthy diets that might shorten their lives?"

Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said:

This generous gift will allow us to deepen and expand our efforts in an extremely promising area of teaching and research. . . . Princetons faculty members are applying behavioral science techniques to topics that include law, economics, health care, household finance and dispute resolution, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said. "We expect that the research conducted at the center will directly influence local, national and global public policy, identifying new approaches to address social problems and improve lives.

And HIP clients and supporters offer an abundance, not scarcity, of thanks for the academic work and research that will help HIP serve the community in the most effective manner possible.

The Housing Initiatives of Princeton will host its annual Garden Party, June 10, beginning at 4 p.m. at a private residence in Princeton. Admission costs $95 and features Shafir's talk, cocktails and light fare. To register, go towww.housinginitiativesofprinceton.org.

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Behavioral science hacks for your next speaking opportunity – SmartBrief (registration) (blog)

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Behavioral science hacks for your next speaking opportunity
SmartBrief (registration) (blog)
I was giving a presentation on behavioral science and customer experience at the end of a long conference. Sure, I could've hit my listeners over the head with an academic discourse on predicted utility versus value-seeking, but showing it drove the ...

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Behavioral science hacks for your next speaking opportunity - SmartBrief (registration) (blog)