Rebane's Ruminations

Yellowstone Supervolcano about to blow?

George Rebane

[This little interlude will most likely interest very few RR readers, but it has provided me a respite from the political struggles through my continuing love-affair with pushing squigglies.  Truth be told, I do this kind of stuff quite often, and who knows, there's always the off-chance that some reader may show interest.]

As we sat last Saturday morning waiting for the history making Senate confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh, I meandered across yet another article on the supervolcano that rumbles under Yellowstone National Park.  Geologists tell us that the volcano has erupted every 600K – 800K years or so with a devastating effect that we in recent decades have come to call a ‘nuclear winter’.  The last one occurred about 640K years ago.  When that magma dome blows again it will put so much dust, dirt, and ash into the earth’s atmosphere as to change the earth’s climate for several years starting with a two- or three-year winter that will kill much of the planet’s vegetation and critters, make agriculture near impossible, and therefore cause the wholesale death of most of us who live here – at least that’s what NASA and a covey of paleo-geologists tell us.

It turns out that modern technology today can provide a very beneficial prophylactic to prevent such an event, and in the process generate a considerable amount of clean geothermal electricity.  Scientists at NASA tell us that it would be possible to cool the molten magma bubble by drilling laterally into its sides, pumping down cold water, and harvesting super-heated steam for electricity generating powerplants on the surface.

The cost of drilling such 10km deep holes comes to almost $3.5B, add another few billion dollars to the budget to put up a powerplant or two, and you could see doing the whole thing for about $10B while lowering or completely eliminating the risk of a big blow-up.  The cost of the electricity generated in this manner comes to about $0.10/kWh – cheap at twice the price.  So why aren’t utilities rushing in there to do just that? (more here and here)

Well, the best anyone can tell is the high business risk of such an undertaking in a national park that is surrounded by high walls of environmental regulations manned by legions of super-zealous, lawyer-ladened, eco-nazis with a paucity of critical thinking skills.  Now this is where government should step in and play the crucial role of paving the way to implement such a humanity-saving insurance policy with a clean energy solution to boot.  But so far no one on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has made a peep about this.  It can’t be the cost, because the feds lose more than $10B a day with what they drop off their loading docks.  So, for an answer, let’s look at the risk side of this potential earth-shaking catastrophe.

To quantify the downside risk we techies first appeal to what is called probability rate theory that is a well-known tool in areas like search and detection using radars and sonars.  The best estimate of Yellowstone’s catastrophe rate is once every 700K years.  That’s about the average frequency at which the big magma bubble gets close enough to the surface for its outward pressure to blow its top.

The real question we have to answer today is something like ‘what is the probability that Yellowstone blows again in the next 100 years?’  Clearly, if that probability, let’s label it P100, is sufficiently high, we should get busy tout de suite on the drilling and powerplant project described by NASA.  I have no idea what is ‘sufficiently high’ for the congress critters to get something going.  Most certainly if P100 = 0.5, then things in Washington would start happening.  But if P100 = 0.01, then I think we would continue to sleep on it a bit more.  So what is the real value of P100?

Lucky for you dear reader, mom sent me to school to learn how to answer such questions.  So I’ll save you the trouble of reading my brilliant analysis before calculating the answer, and give it to you right off the bat – P100 = 0.000246.  That’s a pretty low number for the next supervolcano eruption to take place sometime in the coming 100 years, and it pretty much explains why people aren’t getting too excited about it in the government or in the energy industry.

Now that doesn’t mean we won’t have one of those smaller eruptions that occur every few 10K years, these will not be civilization enders, but they might screw up our agriculture on the Great Plains for a few years.  Maybe later, if there’s available data, I’ll do some noodling on the chance that a ‘minor’ eruption will happen in the next century.  So the question remains, why are the NASA people getting excited about Yellowstone’s civilization ending volcano?

fMRI in your pocket

George Rebane

A longtime friend, RR reader, and former colleague just made me aware of this latest reason to celebrate capitalism.  The name of the new start-up is Openwater that has invented and is now productizing a whole new medical imaging technology that uses light and sound.  Its introduction into the healthcare markets here and abroad promises to totally revolutionize the ability to deliver timely, continuous, and low-cost healthcare to literally billions around the world, especially those who have never been able to afford or get close to today’s massive imaging equipments such as fMRI and CT scanners.

The technology was invented by the active and successful entrepreneur Dr Mary Lou Jepsen and her team.  Here is the link to more information and to the TED talk on her technology that Dr Jepsen recently gave in Vancouver.  Wow!

Fair Division 101B

George Rebane

In ‘Fair Division 101’ I introduced readers to the field of fair division algorithms and presented a powerful and easy-to-use two-party algorithm derived from the literature which I named FD01.  At the conclusion of that dissertation I offered a method for extending FD01 for use by more than two parties.  The method works but is a bit clunky to apply.  Since then I have developed a slick multi-party version dubbed FD02 which retains the correctness, format, and all the simplicity of FD01.  FD02 is suitable for online implementation, and can be used in adjudicating wills, dissolving partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, and private occasions requiring the fair division of an identified set of assets.  You can download the short paper ( Download TN1808-1_FD02) describing it and the MS Excel™ spreadsheet ( Download FairDivisionAlgo_FD02) that is fun to play with, demonstrates its implementation, and can be modified or used as is in the realworld.  Enjoy.

Sapir-Whorf on the Art of Coding and the Communications Conundrum

George Rebane

In his ‘Code to Joy’ essay (featured in the Jun-Jul 2018 issue of 1843, the Economist’s bi-monthly features magazine), science writer and author Andrew Smith almost discovers Sapir-Whorf.  But not quite, and therein lies a tale.  The man had been writing about computer technology and its impact on our lives for most of his career before he realized that he really didn’t know exactly how software worked, and it was the software that enabled all those wonderful things that most of us now take for granted in our daily round.

So he asked, “Is learning to code in middle age a fool’s errand or a committed act of digital citizenship?”, and started his quest for a programming language which he could learn well enough to code up a simple task.  On his travels through the programming world he interviews important personages and finds a well-known mentor to help him as he inevitably hits the ‘dark night of the soul’ when all gleaned progress and understanding fades into a hopeless morass of imminent defeat.  But with a mini-epiphany here and there along the way, he perseveres and finally celebrates his finished and fully functional Python code snippet.

What Smith’s trail of tears illustrates is another confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis cum dictum that a person’s language(s) bound their capacity for thought.  We have visited the ramifications of S-W in these pages before (e.g. here) in the context of languages such as English and mathematics.  The bottom line of it all is that every human being is not capable of thinking all human thoughts; they are limited by the languages they have mastered.  And Smith’s essay is a clear illustration of this, even though he is not able to connect it with S-W.  (He is not alone, almost none of our ‘educators’ have this understanding as they mangle our schools’ curricula and/or teach in our classrooms.)

The ramifications of S-W necessarily extend beyond thought to communications and understanding.  What you cannot think, you cannot communicate, and what is beyond your lexicon, you cannot understand what someone else is trying to tell you.  Cultures with such language deficits have a difficult time making progress since it is hard for them to come together to solve problems and make more complex plans for productive cooperative enterprises.  It has been the expansion of language that has always provided the bases for the advancement of cultures in the sense of securing more resources, insuring their survival, and increasing their quality of life.

Think of what your life would be if you had no concept of nor ability to communicate ‘before/after’,  'future/past', ‘more/less’, ‘harder/easier’, ‘if/then’, numbering/counting things in your environment, expressing the subjunctive, considering counterfactuals (“A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change.”), quantifying risk (the notions of likelihood/probability), … .

In the same manner, Smith and others not familiar with the art of coding have no concept of the kinds of primitives that are both necessary and possible in various programming languages.  And therefore, given a problem to solve that involves the manipulation of specific types of data or implementing a user task, they simply have no place to start thinking about how to approach and structure a solution (i.e. to algorize).  Smith runs into this problem without appreciating it when he initially considers which one of the current 1,700+ programming languages he should first learn.  His mentor takes him through such considerations, but without connecting to the larger linguistic landscape of thought and communications taught by Sapir-Whorf.

Today much (almost all?) of our discussion of social issues is also hampered by the various boundaries that exist in the (partially) shared language people use domestically, which, of course, is immensely amplified when translation is required between languages with widely different roots and current capacities for understanding and expressing thought.  The comment streams of blogs (e.g. RR’s) along with countless letters-to-the-editor attest to the so far insurmountable difficulties Americans have in communicating with each other, no matter how sincere are their efforts.

Ruminations – 22may18

George Rebane

America’s students are still struggling as they compete for leadership in the high tech job markets of today and tomorrow with other students arount the world.  A correspondent from the east coast emailed me the following – “The 2015 Program for International Student Assessment tests 15-year old students around the world.. It's administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  The United States placed 24th out of 71 countries in science. It did worse in math, ranking 38th.  The U.S. scored at 470 in math, below the OECD average of 490. That's well below the scores of the top five, all of which are Asian: Singapore at 565, Hong Kong at 548, Macao at 544, Taiwan at 542, and Japan at 532.  China was not included, since only four provinces participated.  In science, the United States scored at 496, above the OECD average of 493. The top five highest scoring countries were Singapore at 556, Japan at 538, Estonia at 534, Taiwan at 532, and Finland at 531.”

Fellow blogger and RR reader Russ Steele has a new blog – Rural Economy and Technology - that focuses on the introduction of technologies into rural economies.  It’s worth reading, especially as it treats the slow introduction of broadband to communities like Nevada County.  (more here)

Still on travel.  Apologies for sparse postings and responses to comments.

Criminal Uses of Drones & AI

George Rebane

It didn’t take long for criminals and terrorists to start using affordable, commercially available drones for surveillance and even weaponized munitions delivery platforms on the battlefield.  Terrorists routinely launch their own eyes in the sky when being attacked by the militaries of countries seeking to destroy them.  In the US drones have already been used by prepared criminals to actively harass the FBI during a hostage situation.  And there’s more to come.

With affordable face recognition AI, authorities are anxious about the launch of assassination drones in built-up areas to search out and then kill a designated human target either with a firearm or explosive.  Drug smugglers are using ever more sophisticated drone platforms to monitor and catalog border security procedures and process so as to pick the proper times and places to bring in the drug payloads.  Smaller deliveries of high value narcotics are already handled by drones from Mexico.

Our military and law enforcement are playing catch up with counter-systems and delays caused first by the usual calcified bureaucratic assessments of ‘oh, they’ll never be able to do that’ to R&D and procurement red tape that doesn’t allow the good guys to invent and test as fast as can the terrorists and criminals.  Of course, all that government can field against the bad guys is the same stuff that they can field against law abiding citizens to keep the rest of us on our mandated straight and ever-narrowing paths.  As someone once said, ‘There is no free lunch.’  And that goes double for advanced technology.  Stand by for ram.  (more here and here)

 

‘Quants’, Kelly, and the RK formula

George Rebane – 19 May 2010 (V5apr18)

[I originally posted this little blurb on some work I had done on the Kelly formula prior to 2010.  Well, after some more noodling and squiggly pushing I found that there was a conflict in the way odds and expected gain/loss were defined which required me to revise what is now the RK formula.  As a result, I took down the 19may10 version and am now replacing it, appropriately edited and modified where required, with the current corrected version which still reflects its original publishing date.]

Contrary to the rumors you’ve been hearing for the last year plus, GeorgeW didn’t cause the Great Recession.  This fiasco had three main progenitors - government idiots, corporate greedies, and some very clever, but not clever enough, Wall Street traders practicing the arcane art and some of the more dubious science of financial engineering.

Scott Patterson has been reporting on things financial for the WSJ, and recently wrote The Quants – How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (2010) which immediately shot up to the top of the charts and is still there.  I finished Quants before going on travel and was just going to add it to my collection of finance and economic history books.  But then I thought that there might be some little gems of broader interest there.

Patterson goes back to the beginnings of financial engineering in the 1960s, and takes us right up to the fall of 2009, the Great Recession and all.  In fact, the whole purpose of the book is to explicate the role of the quants in fostering the recession.  What’s a quant?  A quant is a person trained in many of the mathematical ideas and toolsets of the system sciences.  A bunch of them came from research universities like MIT, Caltech, UC, … .  They are generally at the PhD level, so they have a demonstrated ability to think out of the box and extend human knowledge.

Now these young graduates were snapped up by various ‘Wall Street investment houses’ and hedge funds.  Their job was to examine the price behavior of all kinds of securities around the world, and then apply their math wizardry to develop automated trading programs to lickety-split execute profitable arbitrage transactions that their algorithms discovered in the massive daily dataflows of the finance and securities industry.  Since I have some knowledge of these high-jinks (actually, I also claim to be a financial engineer), this kind of historical background fascinates me.  And doubly so since the political reverberations of this recession will be with us for a long time to come.

Financial engineering actually began with Modern Portfolio Theory credited mainly to Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe.  They both became Nobelists for their work.  MPT is used to allocate funds among a short list of competing investments like stocks.  Sharpe’s contribution was the Capital Asset Pricing Model or CAPM which introduced the notorious alpha and beta numbers to a stock.  Brilliant and elegant modeling of an investment world that turned out not to exist – well, not to exist quite like their equations required.

Today MPT and CAPM are used primarily by professionals for CYA purposes to manage other people’s money.  If the client’s portfolio blows up, you can always point to the Nobel prizes and claim you did the prudent thing.  And thereby hangs a tale, or should I say ‘tail’?.

Most of the applied financial phrenology is still based on the view that security prices move up and down sort of like a drunkard’s (or random) walk.  If you assume this, you can fit nifty bell curves to the magnitude of price movements, and off you go into the land of stochastics.  Stochastics is a fancy word for random processes that depend on other random processes.  The problem with the random walk model is that it doesn’t predict big catastrophic price swings very well – practically not at all.

(To continue reading, please Download Quants2_2018)

And then what shall we do?

The company that pits its labor against another’s use of technology loses.  The worker who pits his labor against technology loses. – The John Henry Law & Corollary

George Rebane

[This is the linked transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 January 2018.]

Let’s take a break from the political goings on in Washington and Sacramento, and consider something that will really change our lives in the not too distant future.  In previous commentaries we have visited the approaching Singularity, when machines, the so-called AIs, surpass human intelligence. (more here, here, and here)  Many people already are aware that we live in the pre-Singularity years as we hear daily reports of smart machines and robots displacing humans in another area of expertise or somewhere new in the workplace.

It wasn’t that long ago when even well-read people still used the ‘never’ word – ‘machines will never be able to do this, or they’ll never best humans doing that.’  Well, today we are already on a slippery slope, and witness machines beating the best humans in the most sophisticated games, outperforming the most knowledgeable humans in more and more areas of medicine (such as diagnostics, prescribing treatments, and even in delicate surgical procedures); machines are already world-class masters in finance and manufacturing.  And autonomous vehicles are taking to the highways, our airspace, and distant battlefields.

The old shibboleth that new technologies will always create more jobs than they destroy has given us hope since John Henry the Steel Driving Man of the 19^th century (here and here), but sadly that no longer holds true.  Today human employment has become more selective than ever, and our current high employment rate is maintained almost entirely by low participation in the workforce, and an expanding economy which itself is driven by increased uses of advanced technologies.

What work humans will do in the next decade or two is anyone’s guess, but you can bet the farm that we all will be competing with tireless, strong, extremely agile, very smart, and much less expensive workers with silicon brains.  And talk about income inequality – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

As an example, let’s turn to a pursuit that almost all of us still think will forever be reserved for humans - making music.  Specifically, composing, producing, and performing it.  Before you write off silicon artists, both unembodied and humanoid, consider how second-best performances already fare in the entertainment and sports markets.  Why do women’s athletics have such a hard time competing with the men for media audiences?  Who today would be interested in following a man vs machine match in which the machine is the guaranteed winner?  And who would even watch a human vs human contest where it is known that they are second rate competitors – an intelligent machine has and would again beat either of them.  In short, consider that we might soon attend human-only competitions with the compassion that today motivates us to watch the Special Olympics or foot races for amputees.

Now imagine watching a perfectly fashioned, fully conversant, pre-sentient android virtuoso violinist or pianist play a difficult classical concerto or some newly composed music that no human could master.  How would we accept such artistry with the knowledge that even the best human virtuoso is not up to the art of the possible?  And beyond that beckon conceivable musics in new audio formats that can only be synthesized by machines, conceived by other machines which have learned to compose aural presentations that are siren-like to the human auditory system, and therefore overwhelmingly pleasing above the consumption of all other previously offered recreational sounds.

In such a fast approaching world, what then will we humans do to challenge, amuse, and entertain ourselves - in short, what shall we do to maintain a purposeful existence?  Today we already see some answers to what people will do when they see themselves as without hope and irrelevant to the established social order.  For the rest of us, our best defense and greatest comfort against such far out notions come from simply ignoring the possibilities, or holding fast to the belief that it will never happen.  But wait a minute, there’s that ‘never’ word again.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

US Students’ PISA Ratings

George Rebane

The latest (2015) release of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores are out, and the all important ratings for 15-year-olds in now a matter of record.  We have long mourned the performance deficits in our educational system and the resulting standing our students have on the international stage where America must compete more and more in the high tech areas of AI, genomics, and nanotechnology – the main sectors that will determine who will win and lose both economically and strategically in the coming pre-Singularity decade(s).  As the chart below shows, America will not be among the winners.

Our deplorable ratings have been covered here for years.  During that same interval progressivist pundits have been white-washing the bad news to our gullibles as nothing to worry about, that we’re doing OK in our super expensive, union-dominated public schools.  The latest spin comes from a team of researchers from the University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego.  These academic worthies have conducted some psych experiments with students and concluded that US kids are just as smart as anyone, but that they’re simply not trying hard enough (also note the inappropriate use of "about average" with the above data).  They ran a test with American and Chinese (first place) math students to see how performance could be improved with cash money prizes. (more here)

Well, guess what?  It turns out that the Chinese were not much affected since they were already on top, but US kids’ performance improved enough, that according to the pencil pushers, they would have placed 19^th instead of the (fasten seatbelts) dismal 36^th among the 65 nations taking the PISA tests.  So the conclusion is that our kids just don’t give a crap about doing well on such tests, and they would do much better if motivated by some kind of valuable prize.  (Recall, they’ve all grown up in world where everyone gets a trophy for just showing up and fogging a mirror.)  Now, 19^th in the world in math is still horrible for our country’s future, but that claimed improved score is specious on its face.  It assumed that the rest of the world’s scores were static; no other country’s kids were enticed with prizes.  A more rigorous test would have been to offer such rewards to all the test takers, and then see how much our students’ ranking would have improved.

So that no one misunderstands, American students’ gray matter is just as good as that between the ears of the rest of the world’s students – i.e. we are not genetically disadvantaged.  Where we have a huge deficit is in our carefully inculcated culture of learning – three generations of politically correct schooling and parenting – and a school system designed to keep the bottom quartile of college graduates gainfully employed and fully pensioned (with unfunded pension portfolios).

The cited study heralds that if we just motivate our students better, their performance can be improved from putrid to piss poor, and we can all stop worrying about our schools.  Well, that’s not the case in any of the three tested areas – science, reading, math – as the above data plot shows. 

In parting, we should remember two notables.  In Silicon Valley, where STEM jobs/skills dominate, more than half the workers are foreign born and educated.  And to show how good California’s schools and economy are in supplying and attracting born-in-state workers, only 18% of such students qualify for and/or accept jobs in the highly-touted high-tech mecca from which Sacramento draws the lion’s share of its tax revenues. (more here)

The second notable is the absolute bullpucky in PISA’s testing in the ‘science’ category.  They make it out as if science and math are somehow two separate and disjoint areas of learning, and therefore produce two separable skill sets.  This myth is designed to successfully fool those holding education degrees, and the general public which doesn’t have a clue.  The simple truth of the matter is that for at least the last half century there has been no science without math, and today ALL science is done with and within the language of mathematics.  (emphasis mine)

An Innumerate SCOTUS, oh my!

A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 November 2017.]

Numeracy is the name given to a set of math oriented skills that an educated lay person is supposed to have in order to hold a job, function as a householder, and understand the day’s news and issues.  Such skills include the ability to do arithmetic, understand graphs and charts, be able think logically, comprehend the basics of chance and risk, and so on.  For a numerate person, the mastery of these basic skills need not be at the level of a technician, but sufficient to comprehend today’s work-a-day world that will be ever more complex tomorrow.

The Singularity is Nearer

George Rebane

Have you noticed over the years when we have met in these pages to talk about the Singularity, that today finally everyone is talking about it in one fashion or another.  It’s as if suddenly everyone who reads is being introduced to the newest developments in AI and the possible futures it portends for humanity.  To be sure, not everyone in this conversation is still aboard with the inevitable advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence), the level of machine cognition that has become the specific definition of the Singularity.  (see more in Singularity Signposts)

Let’s first dispense with troglodytes like the Dr Miguel Nicolelis, Distinguished Professor in the Duke School of Medicine, Professor of Neuro-science and Co-Director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering.  He writes about ‘The Perils of Putting a Chip In Your Brain’ and tries to make the case that striving for transhumanism is fraught with unacceptable risks which in the end will still be futile in humanity’s competition with the machine, which he believes will never even equal us where it counts – creativity.  He concludes the display of his ignorance of what already has transpired with –

The human brain should be revered as something exquisite and unique. We need to rethink the role of digital systems in education and ensure that humans—not machines, or humans joined to them— control the creation and decision-making process for art, science, politics and all the things that define us. Digital technology will never surpass what our brains can do—but it can shape them, and that is the biggest danger.

Duke should be looking for a new a new co-director.

Nicolelis is not alone in his dim and uninformed view of machine intelligence evolution.  There are also international notables like Nick Bostrom and Stephen Hawking (whom we have reviewed), who still believe that humans will write the code for the first AGI, when even now such efforts have pretty much been abandoned by that dwindling rear guard of ‘programming AI’.  As argued in these pages for years, AGI will be achieved ONLY through machines that develop their smarts through learning.  The most that humans can do and are doing today is developing algorithms and paradigms that make such learning machines more facile.  None of these bleeding-edge workers know exactly what these machines will wind up learning and what they will be able to do after they have been allowed to chomp through vast amounts of realworld data, measurements, and/or observations.  Trained neural nets don’t yet fully reveal their inner workings as they fashion the immensely complex discriminants that allow the amazing feats they today demonstrate in game playing, medical diagnoses, financial decisions, speech understanding, facial recognition, and the dynamic control of some very complex systems.

In tune with what’s really happening and what will be required in the very near future are people like Dr Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science, who understands and promotes transhumanism.  He argues that ‘We’ll Need Bigger Brains’ in order “to avoid a dystopian future fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, (and) we must move quickly to create technologies that enhance the human brain.”  The whole goal is to “keep up with machines” and become a thriving part of the post-Singularity future.  The alternative is to become a kept species that will ultimately die out or just be disposed of by the then dominant intelligence as described by several authors, most recently by Max Tegmark in his Life 3.0 (2017).  Koch and other transhumanists point to computationally augmented humans with microchips in their bodies that can compute, communicate, and store data that is all accessible and controllable through new brain-machine interfaces being now developed by a “burgeoning neuro-tech industry”.  And ominously, Dr Koch makes it clear that it is the heavy hand of government that can act as the anchor to these critically needed advances.

The most significant ‘hardware’ developments to support all areas of modern societies are in quantum computing.  All nations have major programs akin to our fabled WW2 Manhattan Project to develop the first practical (i.e. 50 qubit) quantum computer.  And the big fear is that them that gets there firstest with the mostest will wind up ruling the roost on this planet.  A good tutorial on quantum computers, ‘Welcome to the Quantum Age’ by Jack Nicas, appeared this weekend in the Nov/Dec issue of WSJ’s magazine The Future of Everything.  Globally, China has placed the largest bets on getting there first with new quantum computing institute under construction.  In America the leading contender in the race is Google.  Our federal government, as usual, is a day late and more than a buck short.  It’s hard to tell how many times we can pull a hat trick by coming up with some critical needed technology in the nick of time.  We’ve done it in the past, but the lead times to do it again are getting exponentially shorter.  As usual, it appears that the only hope for salvation here is from a minimally fettered private sector.  (more here)

Introducing Politically Correct Mathematics

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 October 2017.  A slightly edited version of this appeared as an op-ed in the 4nov17 Union (here). gjr]

In these commentaries we have chronicled the long decline of America’s K-12 education, a decline that has now been joined by our very politicized higher education system.  The race toward the bottom continues, and is very apparent from the aggregate performance of our local public schools.  Today we have major news outlets confirming that “Internationally, US Students are Failing”, prominent technocrats like Bill Gates tell all that “schools are failing America’s kids”, and the government’s own National Center for Educational Statistics states flatly that “everything is just going down.”

Where America is most in trouble is in the critical science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, subjects which provide students the necessary expertise to ultimately enter the workforce into careers ranging from researcher, through electrician and carpenter, to assembler in our new roboticized factories.  The underlying rot in the system exists at several levels, but today I want to highlight some new and unbelievable insanity from our universities that recently came to my attention.  But first, let’s review some background that provides context and perspective for what you are about to hear.

When all is said and done, America has been the world’s leading high-tech nation, providing our citizens an enviable quality of life through our ability to develop, consume, and export products, all of which depend on a constant stream of advances in STEM.  In recent years other developed nations have been catching up and even surpassing us in certain fields, while our schools have “stagnated” and are now “just going down”.  Internationally, American students are “outperformed by their counterparts in 36 countries in math; 18 countries in science, and 14 countries in reading.”  In all categories we rank below developed country averages.  Some startling statistics include 30% of military applicants failing their entrance exams because of poor STEM preparation, and that 2/3 of our 8^th graders already perform below grade level in math.

The language basic to all fields of science, technology, and engineering is mathematics.  And while education at all levels has come under attack by ideologues with agendas that have successfully already politicized almost every subject taught in schools, in recent years these have come to include classes in engineering and the sciences.  Mathematics has remained the last redoubt - untainted, until now.  Today math instruction is also under assault by academics from university schools of education seeking to de-emphasize and dumb down the subject in order to provide social justice for some minorities and students in general who, for a variety of reasons, have difficulty with math.  To put a face on it, let’s take a look at an academic who is a prominent leader of this destructive assault.

Ruminations – 11oct17 (updated)

George Rebane

MIT’s Max Tegmark just released Life 3.0 – Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which I bought immediately and dove right in last night.  In his prelude Tegmark takes us through a scenario of a developing AI super-intelligence and its human ‘handlers’ that includes treatment of rampantly systemic unemployment addressed through an institutional approach very similar to the Non-profit Service Corporations which I have proposed in these pages (here).  The book promises an education of how the current pre-Singularity years will unfold – check it out, Tegmark writes good stuff.

The Boy Scouts of America have decided to start admitting real girls, and I guess that means going beyond just boys who wake up feeling like they have been issued the wrong plumbing.  The move seems to be motivated by more than political correctness in these gender-confused times.  According to the Girl Scouts of America it really has to do with the BSA needing more funds, and thereby raiding the GSA membership is a reasonable plan forward.  The resulting dust-up will continue between what were two of America’s iconic institutions, as the times they are a’changin’.  (more here)

I have always viewed Kaspersky’s popular antivirus software with a gimlet eye.  I guess that I just don’t trust Russian companies, given the kleptocratic regime under which they all operate, and therefore are all instruments of the state in one way or another.  So why would I want to install Kaspersky on my company’s in-house computer systems, especially if I develop high tech stuff or have other valuable intellectual property that keeps me in business?  Well, now it turns out that ‘Russia Has Turned Kaspersky Software Into Tool for Spying’ – whouda thought?

[update]  Implicit Bias, another flat-earth pseudo-science lapped up by the liberal legions turns out to be bullshit.  Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.  (the hilarity of it all continues here)

Wanna see another liberal shibboleth bite the dust?  Take a look at ‘A Flawed Study Depicts Drug Companies as Profiteers’.  And then corroborate that with the share price histories of the big pharmas.

The ‘Casting Couch’ has been a Hollywood staple for over 80 years.  And since most of show biz folks have been historical proto-communists, the Left has left the sexual abuses of young sweet things under the rug where they have always had a home.  Now ol’ sleazebag Harvey Weinstein finally gets exposed, and our lamestream is making it out as if they have found the only bad apple in their barrel.  Another demonstration that they don’t give a crap about women save what political advantage they can wring out of our fair sex.  I’d love to see a clean sweep of the overwhelmingly leftwing entertainment industry to expose what aspiring women have really had to put out or up with to succeed.  It didn’t all happen in corporate offices of other industries that have a tilt to the right.

Why Not 24/7 Air Attack? (updated 11oct17)

George Rebane

Dropping fire suppressants from fixed and rotary wing aircraft is an extremely effective way to fight wildfires.  Living in the southern California mountains we annually witnessed how air attack kept little fires from becoming big, and big fires from going into populated areas.  In the 1993 Malibu fire, it was five or six heavy lift helicopters with big buckets that saved the community of Topanga with 8,000 housing units.  The demonstrated airmanship was awesome to behold as an orbit was established with the heavy lifters dropping sea water on the ridge where we lived that separated Topanga Canyon from Tuna Canyon as the four-day-old fire returned to consume the last few houses on the Tuna Cyn side as it tried to breach the ridge.  The heavy lifters soaked our ridge, climbing up Los Flores Cyn, dropping their loads (our cars got sea water rinses) with pinpoint accuracy, and then diving down through the narrow Tuna Cyn gorge with rock walls within a hundred feet of their rotors to the ocean to fill up and repeat the cycle.  With their skill and courage, those airmen saved an entire town (our ridge-top house included) in the Santa Monica Mtns.

Witnessing year after year how effective were the aircraft, many of us wondered why the operations had to shut down after sunset, and sometimes even when the smoke got too thick.  The answer given was always flight crew safety, it was not possible to fly when you couldn’t see the terrain.  But by the 1990s a lot of technology had already been developed that might mitigate that concern, and today that definitely appears to be the case.

So, I raised the question about 24/7 flight ops again to my professional aviator friends.  And to make sure that I don’t get anyone’s undies in a knot, I am not impugning the skill and courage of the flight crews, nor do I want them to take any more risks than they are already taking.  (For the techies, I don’t want them to undertake missions in which their probability of accident is any greater than it is today.)  But I am questioning the policies under which our wildfire air attack operations are designed, prepared, and executed.  And I am perfectly willing to be educated and accept any reasonable answer.

Tax Policy Noodlings

George Rebane

The newly proposed GOP tax cut has everyone talking.  A couple of its main features are supposed to include switching from sequential taxing to concurrent taxing of earnings.  Also discussed is the removal of certain deductions like mortgage interest paid from taxable earnings.  I was interested in the impact of these two policy changes so I pushed a few squigglies, and I’ll share with you here some of the results without taking you through the weeds – BTW, nothing higher than your high school algebra is required to derive these formulas.

In sequential taxing, the taxing jurisdictions calculate the taxes due in sequence, the later jurisdictions applying their tax rate to the remaining earnings after you’ve paid the earlier jurisdictions.  As an example, say, jurisdiction J1 (e.g. California) taxes at rate r₁, and J2 (e.g. the feds) then tax the remainder at rate r₂.  The overall tax rate r_S  you pay on earnings E is given in formula (1) in the panel below.

In concurrent taxing, the jurisdictions all compute their tax take on your taxable earnings E.  The overall tax rate r_C you pay is then given in formula (2) above.  This rate is always higher than the overall rate for sequential taxing, and the switch from sequential to concurrent is an effective tax increase R_SC given by formula (3).

Say, that r₁ = 0.1 (10%) and r₂ = 0.2.  Then from formula (1) r_S  = 1 – (1 – 0.1)(1 – 0.2) = 0.28 = 28%.  And similarly, from formula (2) r_C  = 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3 = 30%.  From (3) we calculate the increase in effective tax rate as 0.1*0.2/(0.1 + 0.2 - 0.1*0.2) = 0.0714 = 7.14%.

For calculating the effective tax rate for deductions, assume that to compute your taxable earnings you can deduct a fraction f of your earnings E before applying the relevant tax rate r.  Then your effective tax rate r_f  is given by formula (4).  Now suppose that a deduction, say Δf, is no longer allowed.  This reduces the fractional amount of E you can deduct to (f – Δf).  Your effective tax rate is now given by formula (5).  Finally, the percentage of your tax increase R_fΔf through the denial of such a deduction is given by formula (6).

As an example, let f = 0.35 = 35% and Δf = 0.25, then R_fΔf  = 0.25/(1 – 0.35) = 0.385 = 38.5%.

You may want to enter the formulas into a spread sheet and play with the numbers to understand the real damage that such tax policy changes will deliver.

Max Tegmark, welcome aboard!

George Rebane

The Singularity must really be near when we have MIT physicist Max Tegmark climb aboard with the spate of science and industry luminaries who have recently discovered that intelligent machines will someday surpass humans, will systemically displace human labor, and (in a TBD form) will become the dominant lifeform on Earth.  Dr Tegmark has just published his epiphany in Life 3.0, and joins Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, … in spreading the news of the incipient Singularity to the general public.  Of course, none of them dare call it Singularity; for if they did, then it would instantly identify them as Johnny-come-latelies.

For those of us in the field, as recorded herein, the possibility of Singularity has been known for at least thirty years (and more decades in science fiction).  And science savvy entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) and Jeff Hawkins (founder of Numenta the developer of hierarchical temporal memory) have long staked out businesses that are pioneering the only branch of computer science that promises to deliver the Singularity – systems that are capable of learning from vast amounts of data present in their ‘environments’.  Here I don’t want to revisit the ‘learn vs program’ debate on the path to super-intelligence other than to say that the ‘program school’ of computer science has woefully been the dragged anchor, diverting resources from the ‘learn school’ which now finally dominates the field of AI.  All of the above people and technologies have been introduced and discussed here over the years (see RR’s Singularity Signposts section).

Deep learning is the label given to the latest generation of massive artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have learned to do amazing feats requiring intelligence and cognitive processing.  Most of these feats already far surpass humans’ ability to do the same tasks.  And what is happening today in the field of deep learning will literally blow your mind, in the sense of blowing it away as redundant, in the event that you decide to compete with it in the workplace – this brings to mind the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man (here).

Companies large – e.g. Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, … - and small are racing to integrate deep learned AI into their operations and products at breakneck speed.  The heads-up companies are launching in-house education and training programs to introduce deep learning to their technical and management staffs.  As an example, I can modestly cite my computer scientist son-in-law Roland Fernandez at Microsoft Research who has co-developed and operates that company’s online course in deep learning (q.v.).

What the sclerotic (‘programming school’) side of computer science did not realize for some decades, with some still in their benighted darkness, is the message Dr Kurzweil has been telling (preaching?) to people for years – that technology is advancing exponentially.  The programmers could not conceive that very soon there would emerge computers and databases that are large and fast enough to implement ANNs with thousands of layers that learn to ‘instantly’ manipulate millions of parameters in tasks like voice understanding, image recognition, medical diagnosis, concurrent large cohort control, and on and on.  And that’s just today.

For more on Professor Tegmark’s new book, I bid you read the excellent review ‘When Machines Run Amok’ by Frank Rose.

The Return of Featherbedding (updated 5aug17)

George Rebane

When George Westinghouse patented his railway ‘fail-safe’ airbrakes in 1869, that new technology inaugurated a century of what came to be called featherbedding for the railroad industry as unions successfully fought the railroads to continue employing unneeded workers.  Prior to airbrakes on each railroad car, the speed of trains on down grades were controlled by brakemen manually setting each car’s brakes and then releasing them.  This was demonstrably the most dangerous job on a train since it required the brakemen to run up and down the length of the moving train equipped with narrow wooden gangways on the roofs of freight cars, jumping from car to car night and day in all kinds of weather.  Thousands of brakemen died during the 1800s until all trains were equipped with the Westinghouse brakes.  Today we still have railroad ‘brakemen’ doing other things, but that’s another story.   (more here) 

The important notion to understand here is that after remotely operated airbrakes were installed, railroads were still forced to hire brakemen whose new make-work tasks allowed them to also while away their work hours ‘featherbedding’ in the obligatory caboose (crew’s sleeping quarters) at the end of each train.  Due to successful lobbying of the federal and various state legislatures by the unions, laws were passed to enforce specified crew sizes and compositions, and, of course, union memberships.  This continues to this day.

Ruminations – 11jul17 (updated 13jul17)

For people whose work is the written word, reporters can be stunningly indifferent to what words actually mean. onthecommons.org

George Rebane

California is now a one-party state, as recognized by everyone in the land (more here).  The Democrats have sealed their decades-long control with an uncontestable supermajority in the legislature, and dominate all state elective offices.  Now they can really get to work on vacuuming up other people’s money to insure their autocracy.  The student of history knows that tyranny is the most stable form of governance – it just renews itself with a series of new cliques of elites that displace the old.

The latest attempt to derail the Trump administration has now fastened on Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer last summer.  Since there’s no there there, the media has been reduced to reporting what other media are reporting about the inconsequential meeting.  But then, posit that the lawyer could have given Trump Jr some actual (not alleged) dirt on Hillary.  Would it not have been only proper, but also long-established protocol, for an opposition party to use that in a political campaign?  Our country has meddled in exactly the same way in other countries’ elections – it’s all a popular and classic game of thrones.  Aren’t we all glad that we found out about Hillary’s servers making classified information criminally available to the world, and the DNC emails conspiring to screw Bernie?  If Trump did something criminal, we would all want to know; but continuing an expanding number of investigations that will be halted only when all allegations have been proven is more than a bit beyond silly.

Compassionate secession by our Left is the constructive advice of America’s liberals as highlighted under ‘Healthcare from Hell’.  Since we can’t see ourselves letting illegal aliens die in the streets, and we won’t seal our borders, their only counsel is for America to slowly succumb to the onslaught of unassimilating mass migrations across our open borders.  Achieving Agenda21’s post-American globalism with no fuss or muss.

[12jul17 update]  The lamestream and Dems have tacitly admitted that the ongoing Russia investigations have so far been pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp.  The enthusiasm and excitement with which they have fastened on to the blatantly inconsequential TrumpJr meeting, while completely ignoring their formerly ‘substantial allegations’, lends credence to the fact that so far they had nothing, and that this latest revelation is all that’s left with which to bring down the Trump administration.  One of our left-leaning readers has diagnosed that only “God knows what dirt the Russians have on Trump.”  If he is correct, perhaps continuing the investigations from a house of worship will be more conducive to their speedier conclusion through divine revelation.

[13jul17 update]  Reading about all the political attacks and politically correct proscriptions happening across the country, added on to what thoughts and speech are already prohibited as being at least 'micro aggressions', does anyone else have the feeling that we are starting to reprise the age (1478 - 1834) of the Spanish Inquisition??

Speaking of inquisitions, now we can generate totally fake videos of people saying things in their own voice that they never actually said.  All that using new technology developed at the University of Washington (more here).  Talk about producing some real convincing fake news that will convince millions that a targeted person is culpable of something totally fabricated.

Scattershots – 12jun17 (updated 13jun17)

George Rebane

Investigations will cease only after all allegations have been proven – Dictum from The Swamp

The ‘Robot-Human Alliance’ is a hopeful promotion by Dr Kenneth Goldberg, a UC Berkeley engineering professor (here).  He sees little to worry about human job markets with the advance of ever more intelligent machines, and bases his sanguinity on discovering that humans and AI machines can still do useful work together, and that AI tools allow some people of more modest skills to get gainful employment.  He feels that this is such a significant discovery that it deserves a most inappropriate name with an extremely lame definition – “Multiplicity: diverse groups of people and machines working together to solve problems.”  It turns out that early 19^th century threshing machines also supported multiplicity.  Professor Goldberg’s problem seems to be one of a limited horizon.  Yes, humans and smart machines will be able to work together; and yes, AI based machines can act as a workplace prosthetic for the inadequately skilled, but all this describes is a temporary palliative for the pre-Singularity years in which we find ourselves.  With each passing month AIs are able to permanently displace more and more workers, and this replacement pace is increasing.  Only government’s regulatory intercession can slow it down using the fiat of the gun.  The important problem to solve today is how we will manage a guaranteed national income for the systemically (read terminally) unemployed.  The ongoing impact of AI on the workforce is longstanding theme in these pages - see Singularity Signposts.

The Beveridge Curve is the anointed name of a plot of unemployment rate vs job openings rate (see nearby graphic from the 12jun17 WSJ).  The curve abets the previous reflection on Goldberg’s multiplicity. This presents a “dissonant reading (that) points to an increasing mismatch between workers’ skills and the roles employers are seeking to fill.”  Increasing mismatch indeed, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.  (more here)  A more detailed discussion of this mismatch problem was presented in these pages here.

George Boardman’s column in today’s (12jun17) Union gives a person pause.  In his ‘It’s time to start affirmative action program for campus conservatives’ the man does a solid recounting of liberal bias and suppression of free speech in today’s academe, and goes on to recommend positive measures to correct the situation and expose the resident snowflakes to some heat from opposing ideas (here).  Mr Boardman’s contribution does much to regain the tilt of his perch as that of a mid-roader IMHO – in recent months it had gone a bit wopperjob toward port.  Given his words today, I am more interested than ever in learning what are the tenets of his assuredly complex credo.  As readers are aware, no one left of the conservetarians here have deigned to reveal any of their core beliefs in a clear list of tenets that define their ideological ontology.  (Mine is found in the upper right panel.)

[13jun17 update]  The Union’s columnist and mistress of trivia, Ms Hilary Hodge, makes a mighty attempt to elucidate ‘Housing in Nevada County’ in today’s (13jun17) paper.  But her attempt goes awry immediately after she once more establishes the nature of her sexuality for the chance new reader.  In lieu of serious editorial content, that seems to be the lady’s never-ending message.  (Full reciprocal disclosure, I am a lifelong heterosexual.)  Her column’s preamble forewarns us that this is but “the first part in a three-part series looking at housing in Nevada County.”  Unfortunately, after sliding in the now obligatory “my friend and eventual wife”, the sequel rambles off into the underbrush of her arcane anecdotal archives to retrieve some memories of their moving to Nevada County, snippets (or perhaps the entire opus?) of her vitae, and the subsequently understandable travails of finding employment here.  The patient reader departs with the hope that she still has two more chances to at least get a base hit on housing.  Nevertheless, given the other more appropriate sections of the newspaper, the question still ignored by The Union’s management - ‘Is our op-ed page really that desperate for content?’ 

As a relevant afterthought, for substance compare a Hilary Hodge column to The Union's other prominent women columnists Mses Lynn Wenzel and Terry McLaughlin.

Scattershots – 25may17 (updated 26may17)

George Rebane

Former President Obama willfully violated Americans’ 4th Amendment rights for years by authorizing and executing large-scale surveillance on all electronic communications by our intelligence agencies (primarily NSA). He did this in the face of protests from the FISA court from which by law he is supposed to seek authorization before conducting such ‘wiretaps’. No matter how you look at it, that was a sustained criminal activity. From Zerohedge we learn that “These new discoveries come from a recently unsealed FISA court document dated April 26, 2017 and center around a hearing dated October 26, 2017, just days before the 2016 election, in which the FISA court apparently learned for the first time of "widespread" and illegal spying on American citizens by the NSA under the Obama administration.”

With the lamestream predictably silent on the matter, let’s see what recourse occurs under our corrupted justice system. (more here)

Algorithms rule. That long-known truth is finally recognized bigtime in the public media. RR readers have been apprised for years of the power and seminal role that algorithms play in sustaining modern civilization. The most recent revelations and information on algos is featured this week in the WSJ which is a running a week-long series on algos and AI in different sectors of industry and commerce (more here). The growing problem is still to find people clever enough to design the algos that can be implemented in fast computers connected to very large databases. We don’t do such a good job at turning out enough of them, and other countries are beginning to play catch up in their academia. All we can do is hope that their central planners continue stifling the entrepreneurial juices of their people faster than our leftward bound government stifles ours. That’s a hell of a strategy for us to count on remaining competitive in the global markets.

The Manchester bombing confirms something that no one is talking about in the media. Salman Abedi, the Islamist killer, was already on the UK list of suspicious people who should be tracked to see if/how their radicalized behavior progressed. More than that, it turns out that Abedi not only had a supportive network but also a bomb making shop in his home. (more here) What did the UK authorities know about all this – nothing. The obvious thing that this investigation again corroborates is that the UK police and intelligence services are overwhelmed with the literally thousands of Muslim suspects that they have to track. The number of potential terrorists in UK’s native-born and imported Islamic population is so large today that devout killers like Abedi abound. More importantly, they are so numerous that it is politically too sensitive to publicly admit that the domestic terrorist threat has become existentially unmanageable. In short, no matter what happens in Mosul or Raqqa, ISIS and other Islamist terror organization have already infiltrated the lands of the infidel to levels that dramatically changed the way we are forced to travel, do business, and entertain ourselves. In the interval the progressives’ drumbeat against ‘Islamophobia’ is heard across the land, impacting any remaining policies with which we may still defend our civilization.

[update]  The French brain drain.  Isn’t socialism wonderful, and more socialism even more wonderful?  The situation in France is now so bad that there is a national effort ongoing to reach out and convince the country’s emigrated and escaped educated classes to return to their homeland.  Why did they leave?  If you have to ask, then you haven’t been paying attention to what has happened to that bastion of collectivism in the west.  The French government has been ingenious in the way it has stifled enterprise and entrepreneurship.  Back in 2015 Emmanuel Macron, then economic minister and now president, already attempted to fashion a siren song for the French intelligentia on foreign shores (here).  No luck.  Now two years on the problem has gotten so bad that it is making news in the world’s prominent media outlets like the WSJ (here) and BBC (here).  And today our own socialists (now indistinguishable from Democrats) are doing everything possible to bring that European dream cum nightmare to America.

[26may17 update]  The WSJ series on algorithms and quants concludes today with Jason Zweig’s article ‘How to be Your Own Quant’ (a quant is a quantitative analyst in the investment field who today develops and uses computer executed algorithms for securities trading).  At the end of the article Zweig includes a little directory of all the other articles in the series and their links.

TT2017 Survivors’ Breakfast

George Rebane

This morning we held the annual Survivors’ Breakfast for TechTest2017 at our usual venue, Tofanelli’s in Grass Valley.  The event was scheduled earlier than usual (0730) due to some school needs; after all this is a school day and we wanted to hold the lollygagging to a minimum.  This was the eleventh breakfast that feted the test takers who numbered 20 this year with 14 of those able to attend along with divers parents, sponsors, friends, and SESF directors.

Executive Director Russ Steele started off the hearty breakfast with some opening remarks, which were expanded upon by board member and former 7-Hills math teacher Robert Sharpe and yours truly.  Everyone had a chance to tell the gathering about their college plans and career hopes.  It was truly inspiring to hear about the futures to which these accomplished students were bound.  It’s good for the soul to be uplifted by such young people after being bombarded by America’s, and especially California’s, stats on STEM educational performance.

I am fortunate to have been able to work with many of these students during the preparatory TT seminars over the last years since juniors and some qualified lower-class students may take the test for practice before going for the money in their senior year.  TT is a four-hour, college level, merit scholarship examination - only your resulting test score counts in ranking the winners.  (All past TT solution sets are available on sesfoundation.org.)  The test is administered and graded by the Nevada Joint Union High School District – Ms Barbara Ross, academic committee chair - and draws scholars from all the county’s high schools as recommended by their science/math teachers.  SESF writes the test and, with participating sponsors, underwrites the scholarship awards.

Besides the coveted Survivors’ t-shirt, the top three scoring seniors receive scholarships of $6K, $4K, and $2K.  Additionally, $300 honoraria are awarded to the next several highest test scores.  Pictured in the above collage we have this year’s Survivor attendees and the three top money winners – l2r Harrison Constantino, Keegan Zetterberg, Jack Devlin – whose scores were within three points of each other.  (Thanks to Ellen Steele for the photos.)  The ranking of the top three will be announced during the county’s annual awards ceremony later this spring at which time all TT awardees will receive their checks.

The third picture with the four students (and the old guy in the back) includes Ryan Brott, this year a junior, who turned in TT2017’s very impressive top score.   Ryan is an academic all-star, respected and acknowledged by his peers, who excels in several different fields, and who definitely needs a dedicated post to do justice to all his accomplishments.

And now we start preparing for TT2018.

How Deictic is Your Ontology?

George Rebane

While our Left, especially of the academic bent, assiduously works to stunt the English language – e.g. reduce/mangle the information carrying capacity of words – our technologists have been very busy expanding the language and introducing new words into English and other tongues.  This battle is both important and its outcome is not yet determined, although for most people the Left’s determination to limit speech and thought along Orwellian newspeak lines seems to be taking hold with their constituents recently from union schools now being tutored by even more radical mentors in our institutions of higher learning.

In the last century we discovered a strong determinant that limits thought is a person’s language(s).  An individual has a hard time thinking thoughts (e.g. formulating concepts and storing them) that his language does not support.  More formally, the structure and breadth of a speaker’s language determines his perception and categorization of experience. This phenomenon is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which we have reviewed here before.

While words like ‘discriminate’, ‘immigrant’, ‘hero’, ‘prejudice’, ‘stereotype’, ‘racist’, ‘climate change’, ‘misogynist’, … have been mangled beyond meaning, other words like ‘meme’, ‘network’, ‘hashtag’, ‘feedback’, ‘in-the-loop’, ‘online’, ‘email’, ‘variance’, ‘steady state’, ‘causation’, ‘transient’, ‘algorithm’, … have worked their way into everyday usage as our individual ontologies have expanded to keep pace with the times.  (Ontology? Please stand by.)

TechTestJunior Expands in 2017 (updated 28mar17)

Russ Steele, SESF Executive Director

This week the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation is sponsoring TechTestJr for 2017, with partners Telestream and AJA Video.  The TechTestJr exam took place on Thursday the 23rd of March at the following partner locations (pictured and indicated below).  This year TechTestJr was part of the Nevada County STEAM Expo [http://www.nevcoexpo.org/] held on Saturday the 25th of March at the Nevada County Fair Grounds at which time the test takers received their awards.

Grades 5 and 6: AJA Video - 180 Litton Dr., Grass Valley

Grades 7 and 8: Telestream - 848 Gold Flat Rd., Nevada City

TechTest Jr. is a math-based exam that focuses on problem-solving methodologies and critical thinking skills. This challenging opportunity is offered to 5th through 8th graders from all schools in Nevada County. The event includes tours and demos, providing the students with a glimpse of life in the high-tech world of manufacturing. Students have an opportunity to collect some insight into what engineers, scientists, and their support teams do to create devices sold around the world.

This year approximately 30 students signed up in each category. The top three winners in each category taking home quadcopters equipped with HD cameras, including a paper by Forrest M. Mims III, America's premier amateur scientist and author of "Forrest Mims' Science Experiments." The Mims' article describes how to use these mechanical marvels to collect real science data for analysis.

A couple of years ago, I had lunch with an MIT astronomer who was working on the Chandra X-Ray Telescope. I asked her how she became interested in astronomy. She told me a man came to her sixth-grade science class and showed students how to build a telescope using PVC plastic pipe, surplus Xerox copier lenses and an eyepiece.  She went home and built a telescope, which launched an interest in astronomy and her acceptance to MIT. We hope the TechTest prizes will similarly spark students’ interest in a STEM career.

SESF's goals are two-fold: First, to excite students to seek Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math careers. And second, to encourage students to prepare for the TechTest Merit Scholarship program in their senior year to compete for a share of $15,000 + in college scholarships.

TechTest2017 will be held on 1 April 2017 9am-1pm in the Science Lecture Hall of Nevada Union High School (contact Ms Barbara Ross at NUJHSD for information).  We are looking forward to all of this years TechTestJr participant's to compete in future TechTests. Past TechTests and more information about TechTestJr winners are at http://sesfoundation.org.

SESF Board Members coordinating TechTestJr activities this year are David Pistone and Laura van den Berg.  Donations from Intel and Telestream funded the prizes.  It is these hard-working Board Members and our partnership with these technology companies, including AJA Video, which make TechTestJr possible.

[28mar17 update]  The Union today published a well written article (here) by SESF's David Pistone describing TTjr and last week's doings with the test and its recognition as part of the county's STEAM festivities at the fairground.

The Wikileaks Conundrum Resolved

George Rebane

Bankable stereotypes:  Government regulators are imperious, hubristic, and unbelievably ignorant in proportion to the power they wield.

Recently friends and colleagues have asked for my takes on the Wikileaks phenomenon, especially as it applies to its release of classified information and data that our government claims will compromise our national security.  The problems such an outlet presents to governments, important personages, and corporations are complex and hard to parse in order to attempt an assessment before even beginning to consider any feasible/practical solutions.

Here I want to focus on the recent release of 8K+ pages of CIA documents detailing the tools and some methods the CIA uses to capture every (written and spoken) communication within the US and those crossing its borders.  Andrew Napolitano has detailed these activities and their legal bases, a process that has been active since 2006.

Before going further it’s important to understand that ‘wiretapping’ involves two major tasks – data collection/storage and monitoring.  The former can and is overwhelmingly automated, the latter is mostly automated but ultimately involves human assessment.  So for our purposes we can presume that our federal government intelligence community has over ten years of collected data on everything from emails, financial transactions, through telephone conversations.

So here is what we know about the latest CIA leaks -

1. Someone provided Wikileaks with the CIA documents. There is no evidence that Wikileaks has ever used its own employees or agents to obtain documents from their source (legal owner, or legal third party repository).  Wikileaks is the recipient and discretionary disseminator of such documents and/or the info/data contained in them.
2. The latest CIA document tranche, labeled “Vault 7” by Wikileaks, was either 1) hacked remotely or 2) obtained by someone on the ‘inside’. Each means has its up and downsides.  The CIA is acting as if it was an inside job. (more here)
3. We do know the CIA documents from Vault 7 Wikileaks has made available to the world – the ‘public tranche’. We don’t know whether/if Wikileaks has provided more information in confidence to third parties from the unknown ‘comprehensive tranche’ (more here).  Wikileaks claims that the comprehensive tranche is almost 100 times bigger than the public tranche and contains yet to be released computer codes related to the CIA hacking and monitoring tools named in the public tranche.
4. We must presume that ALL the world’s bad actors have downloaded and are studying at least the public tranche of CIA documents – it would be imprudent to think and act otherwise. All of these governments and agencies have various capabilities to obtain, monitor, and place information on the internet.
5. We presume the verity of the public tranche since the CIA and feds 1) have not discredited any of the released contents, and 2) continue to behave as if the release has done serious damage to their capability to surreptitiously capture and monitor the above described communications.

In assessing the role of Mr Assange and Wikileaks in this latest release, and such previous releases, it is important to distinguish between the party or parties that purloined the Vault 7 materials and those, mainly Wikileaks, who made possible their public dispersal.  From my perch as a patriotic American, the criminals who originally stole the information and data are traitors, and their crime has definitely compromised to a TBD level our national security.  They should be pursued, caught, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

To judge Wikileaks role we must first ask ourselves – As American citizens are we entitled to know how competent our intelligence agencies are in keeping the nation’s secrets when such mishandled secrets are already in the hands and known by our enemies, or should we continue in a state of blissful ignorance, trusting in the presumed yet non-existent capabilities of our intelligence agencies to secure their classified materials?  In short, since our government agencies derive their power from and act under the watchful eye of our elected representatives, should American voters be the only ones affected (aided/punished) by such treasonous acts and incompetencies who are then to remain deprived of that information?

My answers to these questions are a resounding YES and NO respectively.

Given the above understanding and analysis, I view the activities of Assange and Wikileaks as those of an amoral conduit and welcome messenger informing me about important things which bear on my wellbeing, and which are already known to my enemies.  Therefore I take all these self-righteous huffings and puffings by the lamestream media and our government as nothing but an attempted smoke screen to hide their own failures to correctly discharge the commissions under which they were formed and operate.  Shooting the messenger is the last refuge of the incompetent.

AI Will Change Everything

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 March 2017.]

For those who have been paying attention, you know that AI or artificial intelligence will change everything.  And the word here you want to wrap your head around is ‘everything’.  I’m a lifelong professional computer systems geek who has earned his bones in pushing back the AI frontier and building smart systems; those are systems that have various forms of AI, also known as machine intelligence, imbedded in them.  Over the last 50 years AI has traveled a rocky road, now and then delivering some real pyrotechnics to catch everyone’s attention, and then falling short on promises.

Those days are over.  During the last 20 or so years AI has quietly shed the hype and grown up, delivering real functionality in a range of systems and applications too wide to detail here.  But rest assured, your day’s labors benefit in untold ways from AI, starting with your smart phone, making big advances in healthcare, satisfying your transportation needs, managing your wealth, and keeping you employed in a hundred, mostly invisible, ways.

Regular listeners to these commentaries know we are living in the pre-Singularity years during which machine intelligences are catching up and surpassing human intelligence in task after task.  Most of us think nothing of asking our smartphone to dial a number, send a text message, or quickly answer any of a myriad of questions.  Today many of us already have intelligent assistants in our homes supplied by companies like Amazon and Google that respond to the spoken word to deliver information, entertainment, and control certain gizmos in our house.

For example, in our home we have Amazon’s Alexa ‘who’ is always listening and ready to do our bidding on a rapidly growing repertoire of commands and questions.  ‘She’ listens for her name, which is her wake-up word.  So now, we and several of our friends with Alexas, have to call her something else like ‘Judy’ when referring to ‘her’, else she will immediately join the conversation and try to make sense of it with unexpected results ranging from funny to annoying.  One of the ‘benefits’ of all these listening devices, like your phone, smart TV, house assistant, and even your computer, is that the government can now listen in on your conversations whenever they want.  Just yesterday the world heard more details on how that is accomplished.  How’s that for ‘1984’ already up and running in your living room?

Industry experts who develop and track the progress of AI advise us that “in a few years everyone will be using speech recognition.  It will feel natural.  You’ll soon forget what it was like before you could talk to computers.”  The WSJ recently interviewed Andrew Ng of China’s Baidu and Neil Jacobstein of the Singularity University (here).  They are among those who agree that today’s advent of AI is like that of electrification 100 years ago, the arrival of which changed every single industry in the land.  We are now “in the phase where AI will (again) change pretty much every major industry.”

But nothing comes for free.  Over the next 10 to 15 years we will have a transition where machines will be able to displace humans in almost every routine job available in industrialized countries.  Neil Jacobstein, who studies things like the ratio of jobs created vs jobs destroyed, tells us that “at least in the short term” that ratio could be “unfavorable”.  And according to my lights you can bet the ranch that that ratio will become even more unfavorable in the long term.

Finally, the left-leaning Brookings Institution did a study (here) on ‘work and social policy in the age of artificial intelligence’ that predictably concluded, “Progressive tax regimes that fund effective education, income support, health and housing programs will become more important in a future where many are working fewer hours for less pay. Policymakers need to acknowledge that dwindling work in the era of AI may look entirely different from the past. Deploying efforts to prepare for that future will go a long way to mitigating the potentially far-reaching impacts of automation on millions of workers around the world.”  And it has already done that for 90M of America’s workers no longer in the workforce.

So pay attention and be prepared, the smart machines are already here, more are coming in droves.  And sadly, there are no “effective education” programs that will enable the less intelligent among us to learn skills to earn enough for a good quality of life.  Any feasible solution will require fewer people and more wealth redistribution.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.