Chile's 'flowering desert' a window on effects of climate change

Issued on: 21/10/2021 
  

Bright purple and yellow flowers blooming in the Atacama desert as part of the irregular "flowering desert" phenomenon in the north of Chile

 MARTIN BERNETTI AFP

Copiapó (Chile) (AFP)

The pata de guanaco and yellow ananuca are among 200 species of flowers that can bloom in an inhospitable environment that averages just 0.01 centimeters of rainfall a year.

Some parts of the desert can go years without seeing rain.

But this natural laboratory around Copiapo, a city 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Santiago, is providing scientists with a chance to study how such species can adapt to extreme climates.

In this case, it is created by a complex ecosystem in which flower seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades waiting for enough rainfall to allow them to come to life.

"When there is a certain amount of precipitation, which has been estimated at approximately 15 cubic millimeters, it triggers a large germination event," biologist Andrea Loaiza from La Serena University told AFP.

The surprising blossom is known locally as the "flowering desert."

The bloom is irregular, said Loaiza, and the last significant one happened in 2017. But it may not happen forever.

The ecosystem is "very fragile because it is already on the limit," said Loaiza, adding that "any disruption could break that balance."

There are more than 200 species of flowers in the Atacama desert in Chile's north, and some may not bloom for decades at a time 

MARTIN BERNETTI AFP

And it is important to study these species to understand how they survive in such extreme conditions given that experts say global warming could turn many fertile regions of the planet into deserts like the Atacama.

"To adapt to a climate crisis, we need to understand the natural processes," said geneticist Andres Zurita.

"We want to learn from these plants because these species demonstrate different adaptation mechanisms," Zurita said.

© 2021 AFP

America's foreign critics are unflattering, unfair, and worth hearing


Samuel Goldman, National correspondent
Wed, October 20, 2021


Wang Huning. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock

Americans like to be praised. When the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 19th century, he noted his hosts expected to be admired the way court poets apotheosized European monarchs. Because "the majority lives in perpetual self-adoration," Tocqueville observed, "there are certain truths that only foreigners or experience can bring to American ears."

Tocqueville brought some of those truths to light. Though remembered as an admirer of American democracy, Tocqueville was dismayed by individualist, commercialist, and conformist tendencies. He's still the best-known in a long string of foreign critics of the United States, intellectuals whose judgment of the U.S. can be uniquely instructive, especially when it's unflattering.

Tocqueville's ambivalence was echoed by other "friendly critics" described by Williams College sociologist James L. Nolan, Jr. in his 2016 book What They Saw in America. Looking beyond judicious admirers, however, Nolan considers the harsher assessment of visitors including the Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, who studied in the U.S. in the 1950s. Where Tocqueville thought Americans' virtues outweighed our vices, Qutb depicted Americans as facile barbarians who threatened everything that makes life worth living.

After 9/11, there was a surge of attention to Qutb, who was considered the intellectual mastermind of al Qaeda. That interest has since receded along with the ostensible Islamist threat, but a new chief intellectual challenger to the American way of life has emerged. That challenger is Wang Huning, a secretive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official whom some scholars have dubbed the "hidden ruler" of modern China.

Like many of his predecessors, Wang's criticisms of American life reflect the disappointment of a young idealist. A full professor at just 30, Wang was invited to visit the United States by the American Political Science Association in 1988. His experiences over six months form the basis of America against America, now a valuable collectors' item.

America against America is more than a travelogue. The title alludes to two tensions at the level of ideas. The first contrasts false images of America prevalent among Chinese intellectuals. The actual United States, Wang insisted, was neither the exploitative tyranny envisioned by older Marxists nor the utopia of freedom envisioned by young liberals. Instead, it was a complicated society where wealth and poverty, high technology and primitive beliefs, hierarchy and equality were constantly juxtaposed.

The title's second meaning addresses those internal contrasts. Borrowing a concept from the political scientist Samuel Huntington, Wang argued that American politics is driven by tension between an ideological creed and actual practice. Unlike societies that enjoy greater balance between self-perception and reality, such as Japan, America was trapped in a "unstoppable undercurrent of crisis."

In his influential essay, "The Structure of China's Changing Political Culture," Wang emphasizes resources and requirements of Chinese culture that might help China escape that undercurrent. That emphasis on cultural autonomy helped launch Wang's career in the CCP, where he has apparently survived many ideological changes of fashion.

But it's a mistake to see Wang as the product of a radically different intellectual tradition: His ideas are as much products of Western modernity as they are criticisms of it. Indeed, Wang's reliance on American self-critique is clear in America against America. In addition to his own observations while visiting in the late 1980s, Wang draws on U.S. political science and political theory of the period. His sources include Allan Bloom, whose diagnosis of nihilism was heavily influenced by the émigré philosopher Leo Strauss.

Published in 1991, Wang's meditation on decline in America against America was untimely. Evading rivalry with Japan, which was then widely anticipated, the United States went on to enjoy several more decades of economic and military hegemony. That reprieve may not have fooled Chinese authorities, whom Wang has counseled to look beyond short-term events, but it did leave American audiences less inclined to heed foreign warnings about domestic decay.

The reception is changing, though. A sympathetic profile in Palladium this month marks Wang's rediscovery as a kind of cult figure in certain quarters of the intellectual right. For these readers, Wang's interest isn't limited to his ostensible influence over the Chinese leadership. Like the chain of foreign observers extending back to Tocqueville and beyond, he's an outsider uniquely positioned to tell us the ugly truth about ourselves.

How accurate is that assessment? One reason it's difficult to say is that Wang apparently refuses to speak to foreigners and no longer publishes or conducts public events even in China. As a result, little of his work is available in English. Like Qutb, whose publications were both linguistically and intellectually inaccessible to all but a tiny number of Western readers, Wang's reputation benefits from a very unAmerican sense of mystery.

What of his work we do have is about 30 years old and partly in amateur translation. Stylistic infelicities aside, Wang's observations are not groundbreaking. A domestic critic with the same insights wouldn't receive the same interest. Wang's close attention to historical observers like Tocqueville and the German sociologist Max Weber, as well as contemporary neoconservatives, give America against America a somewhat derivative quality. He reports that American accept gross urban squalor, are obsessed with psychological wellbeing, and haven't figured out how to reconcile the promise of civic equality with the history of slavery and discrimination. None of this is exactly new.

Still, that's not reason to dismiss him. If people keep telling you that you have a stain on your shirt, you probably do. The great service of foreign observers like Wang has been to puncture Americans' widely recognized tendency to assume that we live in the best of all possible countries.

But there's also reason to be skeptical of the dire conclusions Wang draws. Like the friendly and not-so-friendly critics on whom he draws, Wang is convinced that liberal democracy stands on the precipice of collapse, and that only a powerful infusion of non-liberal values from the distant past can possibly save us from ourselves.

That may indeed be the case. But the fact that versions of the same diagnosis can be found among anti-liberal theorists all the way back to the foundation of the republic gives reason to doubt the situation is quite so dire. In retrospect, many of the developments foreign critics saw as symptoms of profound degeneration seem laughably quaint. Qutb was famously incensed by a church dance in Greeley, Colorado.

There may be a way to combine a more optimistic assessment of American prospects with Wang's analysis, though. Like Tocqueville, Wang wasn't writing about America for the benefits Americans. Instead, he was writing for his countrymen, who were inclined either to be unrealistically positive or unjustifiably negative about the country that has symbolized the modern world for more than two centuries. For them, Wang's message is simply: There's both good and bad in America, and America's good and bad are both very different from China.

That remains a valuable warning against the naive universalism in the idea that history is inexorably marching toward the triumph of U.S.-style democracy. China is not America and must find her own political, cultural, and economic destiny. So must other nations, including those in which the U.S. nation-building efforts have lately gone awry.

Yet Wang's new admirers should also keep the corollary in mind: America is not China, and there is a limit to the lessons we can derive from a great but very different civilization. America's friendly critics have never been impressed by the sophistication of American arts, the quality of American governance, or the power of American social cohesion. Instead, they've seen American greatness in individual freedom, unconstrained possibility, and an optimistic attitude toward the future.

Those characteristics certainly carry risks, including a recurring experience of crisis. But we won't find success in our rivalry with China — or anywhere else — by rejecting them.

America Against America : Wang Huning : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

America Against America by Wang Huning

Publication date 1991Topics communism, marxism-leninism, PRC, china, america, US, united statesCollection opensource

Translated with DeepL software. There are some errors but it is mostly intelligible.

From the uploader at /leftypol/:

"He [Wang] was a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai where he gained the attention of allies of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. In 2002, he headed the very important Central Policy Research Office and joined the Politburo Standing Committee – the CPC's top decision-making body – in 2017. He is widely regarded by outside observers as one of the most influential theorists in the country, which de facto makes him one of the most influential theorists in the world.

He has written several books, including National Sovereignty (1987), Comparative Political Analysis (1987), An Analysis of Contemporary Western Political Science (1987), Fighting Corruption: China's Experiment (1990), and co-edited books such as Logic of Politics: Marxist Principles of Political Science (1989). His advisor at Fudan University before he became a professor was Chen Qiren, an authority on Marx's works and Das Kapital. Wang's thesis was titled, "From Bodin to Maritain: On Sovereignty Theories Developed by the Western Bourgeoisie." His book National Sovereignty is a historical survey of the concept, tying it in with Marxist-Leninist concepts of national equality and self-determination.

The book covers a wide range of topics regarding the United States ranging from his observations about: Manhattan, Chinatown, "the heights of commodification," the Amish and the Amana colonies and the decline of farming; the American political spirit and the American national character, the space shuttle program, and America's "multileveled social control" system which includes the "invisible hand" and the "money-managed society," the legal culture and taxation system and its scientific administrators. There is a chapter of "interwoven political power" which he called the "rule of donkey and elephant," the party share-spoiling system, lobbyists, radical organizations and the contradiction between pluralism and meritocracy.

He spends a chapter on the 1988 presidential election, and spends another chapter on the "political pyramid" from Congress to the states to county politics. That is followed by a chapters on "soft governance" and "reproducing the system" which covers driver's licenses, workplace principles ("a company is not a democracy"), a visit to the Coca-Cola headquarters, and sections on the education system, MIT, the Kennedy School of Government, the U.S. Naval Academy, etc.

Lastly, there is a chapter on "active intelligence" (think tanks) and "hidden crises." This last chapters covers family values, wandering youths, the criminal underworld, beggars, racism against black people and Native Americans, and whether America is facing a looming "spiritual crisis" of values."

Wang Huning - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Huning

Wang Huning (Chinese: 王沪宁; born October 6, 1955) is a leading political theorist since the 1990s and one of the top leaders of the Communist Party of China, a current member of the party's Politburo Standing Committee (China's top decision-making body) and first-ranked secretary of the party's Secretariat. He served as the head of the Central Policy Research Office from 2002 to 2020 and as a secretary of the Secretariat between 2007 and 2012. He was named director of Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization in November 2017. Widely regarded as Xi Jinping's "Grey Cardinal" or the Mikhail Suslov of China, Wang is believed to be the chief ideologue of the Communist Party and principal architect behind the official political ideologies of three paramount leaders: "Three Represents" by Jiang Zemin, the Scientific Development Concept by Hu Jintao, and the Chinese Dream and Xi Jinping Thought of Xi Jinping. He has held significant influence over policy and decision making over all three paramount leaders and is currently regarded, along with Wang Qishan, as one of the two primary advisors and decision makers for Xi Jinpi

Meet the Jewish Former Southlake Student Who Spoke Out Against Teaching ‘Two Sides’ of the Holocaust


Marisa Kabas
Wed, October 20, 2021

BermanNBC - Credit: NBC News/Youtube

At a school board meeting in Southlake, Texas on Monday night, former student Jake Berman took the mic and uttered these powerful, and unfortunately necessary, words: “The facts are that there are not two sides of the Holocaust. The Nazis systematically killed millions of people.” He went on to describe his experience, which he said nearly drove him to suicide. “I received everything from jokes about my nose to gas chambers, all while studying for my bar mitzvah from a Holocaust survivor as my primary tutor,” Berman, 31, told the Carroll Independent School District Board. “I still struggle with the depression that started at Dawson Middle School in 2003 to this very day.”

Berman was there to share his experiences in light of Texas Senate Bill 3 (SB3), a law that passed this summer to regulate how schools in the state teach social studies — specifically America’s racist history. Last week, his former district found itself in the eye the SB3 storm when leaked audio from a teacher’s meeting caught an administrator instructing teachers to teach “opposing” perspectives on the Holocaust, to stay in accordance with the law. Two decades after his traumatizing experience, Berman knew he had to speak up. And in his first interview after the meeting, he explained why he feels “a moral obligation” to use his voice.

“The antisemitism piece obviously hits home for me because I’m Jewish, but I really tried to parlay it into what this law really is intended to do, which is whitewash the racism that still goes on in the state and in the country today,” Berman tells Rolling Stone the morning after his public comments, which have been viewed more than 65,000 times on Twitter.

“I wouldn’t have gone up there in a public forum and said what I said if I didn’t think it would have some sort of effect or impact,” says the 31-year-old, who now lives in nearby North Richland Hills, says. “The reception I’ve gotten this morning has just been overwhelmingly positive.”

If you’ve heard about any of the fights in schools across the nation over the teaching of Critical Race Theory, it’s in no small part because of Southlake, Texas. What started as a community response to a widely-circulated video of students chanting the n-word in 2019 ballooned last year in response to the country’s racial reckoning. Much of this came to light because of the NBC News podcast Southlake, which debuted in August and chronicled the feud’s origins, plus the contentious school board elections that played out as a proxy for people on both sides of the issue. (The Southlake school board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

While Southlake gives extensive examples of racism, and bigotry against LGBTQ/non-binary students, antisemitism never came up specifically on the show. But when school administrator Gina Praddy’s Holocaust comments went public, it struck a familiar cord with Berman. “I hold no ill-will towards her,” he says. “I don’t think she’s a Holocaust denier or anything like that. I think she just stepped in a pile of mud.”

Berman described himself as “the ‘Jewish kid’ growing up. “It wasn’t an issue until I got to middle school,” he said. “But when it got bad, it got pretty bad.”

The bullying started slowly, he says, with off-hand jokes about bagels, but eventually turned much darker, culminating in him opening his locker one day to a flurry of small sheets of papers covered in hand-drawn swastikas. While he’s quick to note that “middle school students don’t have the wherewithal to understand the gravitas that a Nazi swastika has,” the incident stays with him to this day.

At the time, he wasn’t aware of the district taking any action against the bullies or to implement systemic change, but he says they did their best to protect him. And his parents focused on him. “Their number one priority wasn’t solving any antisemitism issue or bullying issue within the school — it was the safety of their son.”

He transferred to a private school the following year, though his family remained in the town. Now, two decades later, problems of race and religion persist.

He hopes that, much like schools that defied the Texas governor’s mask mandates ban, one school — whether it’s Southlake or not — will defy the ahistorical law. “I think the mic cut off right before I got to say it, but I sort of implied that you’re at a crossroads, and you have the opportunity to be a leader as a school district — which you’ve long seen yourself as…If I were the superintendent, I would say ‘We’re not going to take part in this law.’”

He also hopes this incident will help others around the country will see how we’ve gone astray in trying to reinterpret history, but he says he’s not entirely convinced it can happen. “Unfortunately with the state of politics in the whole country, it seems like when you point out facts and logic and reason, for some reason the people on the other side of facts and logic and reason dig in deeper.”

Asked point blank if he thinks Southlake has a racism problem, Berman said, “I don’t know, because I don’t live there [anymore]. I would say from the outside looking in, it certainly appears that way.”

How ideas from ancient Greek philosophy may have driven civilization toward climate change

THEY COULD HAVE HAD STEAM ENGINES EXCEPT THEY HAD A SLAVE ECONOMY

Michael Paul Nelson, Professor of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Oregon State University 

 Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Oregon State University
Wed, October 20, 2021

Firefighters and residents battle a blaze in hot, dry conditions in Athens, Greece, in August 2021. AP Photo/Petros Karadjias

Wildfires driven by increasing winds and unprecedented heat surrounded Athens, Greece, this past summer, blanketing its ancient marble monuments and olive groves with ash and acrid smoke. These are the same places where philosophers gathered almost 2,500 years ago to debate questions about the nature of matter and morality.

The ideas formulated then echo through Western civilization – for better or for worse. At its best, classical Greek philosophy imagined humans as capable of great honor and achievement, guided by reasoned discussion. At their worst, some of their ideas have licensed an exploitative, expansionist way of life that has helped fuel global warming and pushed civilization toward the brink of self-destruction.

The centuries since classical Greek philosophers took stock of the world constitute an experiment on a global scale, testing which philosophies invite planetary thriving and which invite ruin.

Aspects of the worldview formulated by classical Greek philosophers – coupled, compounded and refined by others over centuries – helped set the stage for the climate changes that now fuel destructive fires and extreme weather around the world.
The Atomists’ perilous path

The early Greek philosophers were primarily interested in two kinds of questions. The first kind was metaphysical: What is the world? The second kind was ethical: What is a good person? The two sorts of questions were intertwined, as the physical description of the world shaped humanity’s place in it.

So where did the early Greeks take a perilous path? A group of philosophers now known as The Atomists – among them, Leucippus and Democritus – argued that matter is composed of atoms that, for them, are tiny solid particles that vary only by their shape, size and speed. A fire atom, for example, was sharp, small and fast; whereas an olive oil atom was round, large and slow. The tiny particles are independent of one another, interacting only when they collide.

If the world is only matter, it has no purpose or intentionality, no divine design or intervention, no spirit or sanctity. It’s just stuff moving around or not, crashing or not. The particles operate according to mechanistic laws, as expressed by the principles of geometry. Consequently, the world has no emergent qualities – soul, mind, consciousness – that cannot be expressed in numbers.

In that view, the world is profane, a word that comes from “profanum,” meaning “outside the temple.” There is nothing special about it, nothing inspiring respect or veneration.
An open door to exploitation and waste

Before the Atomists, early Greeks generally did not draw a sharp distinction between the material and the spiritual worlds. In their view, everything – river, mountain, child, tree – is enlivened by a life force.

But the mechanistic, reductionist, matter-in-motion worldview stripped the spirit from the natural world. In doing so, it also stripped the world’s inherent value. The world became unremarkable, reducible, explainable, ownable, for sale. And so, the mechanistic worldview opened the door to exploitation, waste and abuse.

Over time, this worldview became deeply embedded in Western thought. And so human enterprise, following this view, could damage and destroy the matter of the world and offend no god, value or sacred place.

A thick, intact rainforest stands on one side with the clear line where it was cut away, leaving an open field.

Of course, the Greek philosophers did not anticipate or intend this result. But over time, their ideas both fostered and sanctioned the ever-increasing human ability to exploit the planet, a process that began in the Renaissance and developed throughout the Industrial Revolution.

Civilizations’ social license to create an existential environmental disaster coincided with their power to do exactly that. At the same time, the power of their ideas – and the way in which those ideas served the interests of the powerful – demeaned, disempowered and in many cases destroyed Indigenous and other competing worldviews. In American Indian residential schools, for example, the federal government, often with the assistance of religious institutions, forced Native children to give up their cultural and religious traditions.
A call for a new worldview

With a new worldview, or one inspired by ancient Indigenous cultures, we believe it may be possible for Western civilization to free itself from the old materialism and restore life, spirit, purpose, value – and thus, some measure of protection – to the substance of the planet. Consider alternative answers to the two great questions:

Reconsider: What is the world?

Today, in a great convergence, ecological science, evolutionary theory, quantum theory, Indigenous wisdom and the religions of the world are all telling us that the story told by the mechanistic worldview is too small. On this expanded view, there is complexity in the cosmos, in rivers, plants, animals that can’t be explained by matter in motion.

The converging worldviews emphasize that new properties and entities evolve or emerge from the interdependencies and interactions of natural systems, not from their matter alone. Orchids or consciousness or beauty, for example, aren’t snapped together from particles of matter like Legos. Rather, they emerge over long expanses of time from the evolving organization of particular systems. As systems become more complex and interactive, they organize themselves into new patterns, new life forms, new realities.

And what of the second ancient question: What is a good person?

Ethics begins by recognizing that entities of this Earth are both material and animate. In this re-imagined worldview, humans are members of the community of beings. We share the urgency of life, shaped by our cultural, ecological and physical relationships. We will share a common fate.

There is no hierarchy of value in such a world; the value assigned to human beings is generously distributed throughout the world. If all beings are worthy, then all count in the calculation of what is morally permissible – and what is not.
Stopping the fires of planetary ruin

As strong winds drove wildfires through Greek forests this past summer, authorities organized boats for evacuations, and fire crews used helicopters, bombers and hoses to slow the fires’ advance. Firefighters from other countries urged the Greek crews to set backfires, pouring flames from torches in advance of the line of the firestorm; the strategy was to burn the ground clear of the heavy buildup of fuel, and so slow the advance of the fire.

As global catastrophe unfolds, it is unlikely that there will be boats for a planetary evacuation to a safe place. But we can adopt the strategy of the backfire to slow the conflagration. We can burn away the old mechanistic ways of thinking that are fueling the fires of planetary ruin and create space for a world where people live in respectful relation among other beings.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Michael Paul Nelson, Oregon State University and Kathleen Dean Moore, Oregon State University.

Tesla will only use iron-based batteries for standard model EVs



Aria Alamalhodaei
Wed, October 20, 2021

Tesla said Wednesday it will use iron-based batteries for its standard Model 3 and Model Y models across global markets. The update, provided in the company's third-quarter earnings report, confirmed hints that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been dropping for months about the cheaper battery chemistry's growing role in the company's product line-up.

Lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries use an older, cheaper battery chemistry and are popular in China. Outside of China, EV batteries are predominately nickel-based — either nickel-manganese-cobalt or nickel-cobalt-aluminum. But beyond cost savings, LFP battery cells are attractive because they are not dependent on ultra-scarce raw materials like cobalt and nickel. Notably, Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn confirmed during an investor call Wednesday that the company has seen pricing impacts to nickel and aluminum.

One major reason why LFP batteries are not seen much outside of China relates to a series of key LFP patents, which have allowed the country to dominate the LFP market.

But those patents will soon be expiring, and it seems that Tesla has its eye on that timeframe, with executives suggesting that the company intends to bring LFP battery production to the same locations where it manufactures its vehicles.

What Tesla’s bet on iron-based batteries means for manufacturers

“Our goal is to localize all key parts of the vehicles on the continent -- at least the continent, if not closer, to where the vehicles are produced,” Drew Baglino, SVP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla, told investors. “That is our goal. We're working internally with our suppliers to accomplish that goal, and not just at the end assembly level but as far upstream as possible.”

The company also provided a very brief, and slightly hedging, update on its 4680 battery pack, a custom cell design it created in-house. Tesla has said that the 4680 battery will be capable of greater energy density and range. Baglino said the 4680 is on track to be delivered in vehicles at the beginning of next year, with structural testing and validation all on schedule. But while the company is happy with the timeline, “this is a new architecture and unknown unknowns may exist still,” Baglino added.

“From a cell perspective, we are comfortable with the design maturity and manufacturing readiness matching the pack timeline I just mentioned,” he added.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says 3 days in the office and 2 at home is a good 'balance' between in-person collaboration and time off from the commute

Stephen Jones
Tue, October 19, 2021, 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Justin Sullivan via Getty Images


Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the company's hybrid working plans with The Wall Street Journal.


Three days in the office, two days remotely was a good "balance," Pichai said.


It gave staff lots of time to collaborate - but also let them avoid the daily commute.

Working three days a week in the office and two days remotely gives employees a good "balance" between time at home and time with their colleagues, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc., said.

Pichai said Google was "roughly planning on a three/two model," with employees given flexibility to work where they want for two days a week. Google first unveiled this "flexible work week" in December 2020.

Three days in the office was important for collaboration and community, Pichai said. Two days remotely gave employees time off from the commute, he said.



Pichai spoke to The Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief Matt Murray at the paper's Tech Live Conference on Monday. The conversation was recorded in a podcast.

Pichai was asked whether the three days office, two days remote model would be a permanent change for the company.

"I think so," he said. "Even in places like New York and San Francisco our employees dealt with long commutes and that was a real issue. And so I do think people get a better balance in a three/two model."

Pichai said that the corporation's data shows that it can make the model work.

The company would "probably" invest in real estate to make it easy for teams to get together, he said.

Google recently agreed a $2.1 billion deal to expand it's so-called "Google Hudson Square" complex in New York, and Pichai said that the company was "reimagining" its spaces to make them more collaborative and "fun."

Alphabet has delayed its full office return until January 2022, and Pichai said that beyond then, the company would tell each local office to make their own decisions about returning to work.

Between 20% and 30% of staff had voluntarily returned to the office already, he said - that rose to 50% in New York.

In October, Pichai announced that employees needed to be vaccinated before returning to the office.

He told Murray that the company expected about 20% of its workforce to become fully remote over time, and that the company was giving people more freedom to relocate.

In August, a leaked pay calculator suggested that remote Google staffers could face a pay cut of up to 25%. The company said that it had always calculated pay based on location.

Canada's COVID-19 travel vaccine passport: Canadian government reveals standardized, national proof of vaccination

IT TOOK AN ELECTION TO GET THEM TO DO THIS 


Travelers wearing face masks walk out of the arrivals hall at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, on July 5, 2021. Starting from Monday, "fully vaccinated" Canadians and permanent residents can enter Canada without undergoing quarantine

. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua via Getty Images)


Elisabetta Bianchini
Thu, October 21, 2021, 9:26 AM·3 min read

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday that provincial and territorial governments across Canada will move forward with a standardized proof of COVID-19 vaccination certificate.

"All provinces and territories have confirmed that they will be moving forward with a standardized, national proof of vaccination," Trudeau said at a press conference on Thursday.

The prime minister highlighted that Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Yukon, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories have put in for use of the national standard for proof of vaccination, with the remaining provinces "working hard to come online."


He added that the federal government will be "picking up the tab" for this standardized certificate.

The information on the proof of vaccination includes:


Full name and date of birth


A "neutral, factual" account COVID-19 vaccination history, including the dates of vaccination, the number of doses, vaccine type(s), product name(s) and lot number(s)


A QR code that includes the vaccination history and may include "additional information on the COVID-19 vaccines received"

The federal government has indicated that this proof of vaccination complies with the SMART Health Card standard, recognized by a number of international travel destinations.

Canada COVID-19 proof of vaccination (Government of Canada)
How to get your Canadian COVID-19 proof of vaccination?

If you live in a province or territory using a COVID-19 proof of vaccination system locally, like Ontario, you may already have the Canada COVID-19 proof of vaccination.

You have the Canadian COVID-19 proof of vaccination if the document:


Says “COVID-19 Proof of Vaccination” at the top of the document


Includes the official logos for your province or territory, the Government of Canada (the word “Canada” with the Canadian flag above the last “a”)


Has your full name and date of birth


Shows your COVID-19 vaccination history, including the number of dose(s), the vaccine type(s), product name(s) and lot number, the date(s) you got your vaccination(s), a SMART Health Cards QR code


Is a bilingual document

This proof of vaccination document can be accessed as a file on a mobile device, computer or mobile wallet, or printed.

While the federal government highlights that "many international destinations may accept the Canadian COVID-19 proof of vaccination," it is also stressed that "each destination makes the final decision on what they accept as proof of vaccination."

"There are many different standards being looked at around the world, Europe has one, we are using the SMART Health Card format that many places in the United States and elsewhere around the world are using," Trudeau said.

"We are very confident that this proof of vaccination certificate, that will be federally approved, issued by the provinces, with the health information for Canadians, is going to be accepted at destinations worldwide as proof of vaccination."

For Canadians returning to Canada, their proof of vaccination document can be uploaded to the ArriveCAN app up to 72 hours before arrival in the country.
Mixed COVID-19 vaccine doses

As of Nov. 8, Canadians vaccinated with any combination of authorized COVID-19 vaccines will be considered fully vaccinated by the U.S. government.

"The Government of Canada is actively engaging other countries and international partners to encourage them to recognize those who have received mixed vaccine schedules or extended dose intervals as being fully vaccinated," information from the Canadian government reads.

"Initial outreach has focused on the ongoing exchange of technical and scientific information to advance this time-sensitive work."
Travel within Canada

Effective Oct. 30, individuals travelling within Canada, age 12 and older, need to show proof of vaccination to board a plane, train or cruise ship.

This includes air passengers flying on domestic, transborder or international flights departing from airports in Canada, rail passengers on VIA Rail and Rocky Mountaineer trains, and marine passengers on non-essential passenger vessels, including cruise ships on voyages of 24 hours or more.

There will be a transition period where travellers will be able to go on their journey if they show a valid COVID-19 molecular test within 72 hours of travel, until Nov. 30.

TOYS FOR COPS

More talk about attaching sniper rifles to robots


Brian Heater
Thu, October 21, 2021

The whole gun on a robot thing was a question we’ve been barreling toward since the first practical quadrupedal robots arrived. Last week, that came to an inevitable head when a Ghost Robotics system was spotted at a tradeshow sporting a remote-controlled sniper rifle designed by a company called SWORD.

This is a question Boston Dynamics has worked hard to distance itself from. Understandably so -- creating war machines is generally considered bad PR. That they -- along with much of the robotics industry -- were, in part, bootstrapped by DARPA funding and now create robots that people liken to scary sci-fi movies certainly complicates things.

I discussed Boston Dynamics’ approach to addressing the use of Spot for purposes of intimidation and violence in last week’s column. I also talked a bit about my own feelings around mounting guns to the backs of robots (again, I’m against it and death machines generally). Ahead of writing the piece, I also reached out to Ghost Robotics, though only heard back after it was published.


I’ve since spoken to the company’s CEO Jiren Parikh about the system he refers to as “a walking tripod,” a nod to the fact that Ghost doesn’t design the payload -- in this case, the SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR). There are a lot of important ethical questions here. A walking tripod? Perhaps. But ultimately, there are questions of where the buck stops? The robotics company? The company that produces the payload? The end user (i.e. the military)? All of the above?

Important questions we need to address as we’re facing down a potential army of gun-strapped robotic dogs.

Let’s start with the question of autonomy.

The robots themselves are not using any type of autonomy or AI for targeting weapon systems. SWORD, who makes the system, I can’t speak for. From what I know, that weapon is a manual-firing trigger. Even the targeting is done by a human behind the scenes. Firing the trigger is fully human-controlled.

Is full autonomy a line the company doesn’t want to cross in this scenario?

We don’t make the payloads. Are we going to promote and advertise any of these weapon systems? Probably not. That’s a tough one to answer. Because we’re selling to the military, we don’t know what they do with them. We’re not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots.

We do draw the line on where they’re sold. We only sell to U.S. and allied governments. We don’t even sell our robots to enterprise customers in adversarial markets. We get lots of inquiries about our robots in Russia and China. We don’t ship there, even for our enterprise customers.

Does the company reserve the right to make sure the robots aren’t used for applications that you don’t support?

In a sense, yes. We have full control. Everyone has to sign a licensing agreement. We don’t sell the robots to anyone we don’t want to. We only choose to sell them to U.S. and allied governments that we feel comfortable. We just have to recognize that military customers don’t disclose everything that they’re doing. If they need to use that robot for specific purposes for national security or to keep a war fighter out of harms way, we’re all for that.


Image Credits: SWORD

The vetting is in the customers [Ghost] chooses, rather than the applications the customers use those robots for?

That’s correct. We’ve had people call to use these robots for fighting videos or putting together a reality show for crazy stuff the robots would do. Without naming names, we decline. We think that’s not tasteful. The robot is a serious tool. It’s a tool for inspections, security and all sort of military applications.

As far as what we saw [last week] in the photos, is there a timeline?

They’re expecting to do field testing on that sniper kit in late-Q1 of next year.

In this specific case, what is the nature of the deal? The DoD has an individual deal with you and SWORD?

There’s no deals. This is just a long-gun company that believes there’s a market opportunity for this. They developed on their own dime and we thought it was a compelling payload. There’s no customers.

An aircraft flying

Image Credits: Reliable Robotics

Okay, that’s it for the war dogs (for this week, at least). Let’s move from land operations to sea and sky. First off is Reliable Robotics, a Bay Area-based autonomous cargo-plane company that just raised $100 million. The Series C round brings the four-year-old firm’s total funding to $130 million, in Reliable’s bid to effectively move the autonomous trucking model into the skies.

Speaking of unmanned aerial vehicles, Wing just announced the beginning of what could amount to a big push into U.S. drone deliveries. Following successful pilots in Australia and a small town in Virginia, the Alphabet division announced a partnership with Walgreens to bring autonomous deliveries to the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.


Image Credits: Alphabet

Wing told us the following about its efforts on the regulatory side of things:

In April of 2019, Wing became the first drone operator to be certified as an air carrier by the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing us to deliver commercial goods to recipients miles away, and we got an expanded version of that permission to launch in Virginia in October 2019. Now, we’re working toward permissions for this expansion, and we’ll be conducting test flights and demonstrating our new capabilities in the area in the coming weeks as part of that process. Prior to launching our service in DFW, we will work with authorities at the local, state and federal levels to secure all the appropriate permissions.

Several Saildrone vessels float in formation on the ocean.
Image Credits: Saildrone

On the water-front comes another $100 million Series C. This one is for Saildrone’s autonomous boats, which are being deployed to collect data for scientific purposes. The company has already deployed a sizable fleet of its uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs), which have traveled around half a million miles, collectively.

Lastly, an interesting piece from The New York Times about the adoption of robotic waiters amid pandemic-related staff shortages. That part isn’t all that’s interesting in and of itself. What is, however, is that the wait staff has reported an increase in tipping, as a result. From the piece:

Servi saved wait staff and bussers from having to run back and forth to the kitchen and gave overworked servers more time to schmooze with customers and serve more tables, which led to higher tips.

This is a small vindication of what robotics companies have been suggesting for a while -- that autonomous systems won’t replace existing jobs, but rather augment them and fill in the gaps companies can’t with current headcount. That certainly seems to be the case on a shorter timeline when, frankly, these systems are incapable of replacing people outright. There’s a question around whether this is a step toward full automation, but in the near term, there’s something to be said for freeing up humans to do more humane things.

We don't have water': South American dam faces energy crunch as river ebbs



'We don't have water': South American dam faces energy crunch as river ebbsSouth American dam faces energy crunch as river ebbs

Daniela Desantis
Wed, October 20, 2021,

HERNANDARIAS, Paraguay (Reuters) - The giant Itaipu hydroelectric power plant, wedged between Paraguay and Brazil on the Parana River, is facing an energy crunch amid record low river and rainfall levels that experts say could last into next year.

The Itaipu dam, which supplies around 10% of the energy consumed in Brazil and 86% of that used in landlocked Paraguay, has recorded its lowest output since the hydroelectric plant began operating at full capacity in 2005.

Downstream, the Argentine-Paraguayan Yacyreta plant produced half the normal level of energy in September, an example of how severe droughts are complicating the shift away from fossil fuels by drying up rivers and reservoirs.

"We have available power, what we don't have is water to sustain that power for a long time," Itaipu's Operations Superintendent Hugo Zarate told Reuters, adding that the plant was "meeting the demand but for short periods of time."

Zarate estimated that production at Itaipu would be between 65,000 and 67,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) this year.

"That's about 35% of the maximum value of 2016 and 15% less than in 2020," he said in his office at the plant, located between the cities of Hernandarias in Paraguay and Foz do Iguacu in Brazil.

The low production levels hit power output as well as impacting royalties the countries receive for the use of the water.

The drought, one of the worst in the last century, has led Brazil's government to ask its citizens to reduce their consumption of electricity and water and raised the specter of possible power rationing.

'ENERGY CRISIS'

Itaipu has a normal average inflow of about 11,000 cubic meters per second (m3/s), while that of Yacyreta is 14,500 m3/s, according to their technicians. Both rely on the flow of the river and have limited storage capacity.

Production is impacted heavily by the flows upriver in the Parana basin, regulated by about 50 dams upriver in Brazil, which have seen water stores dwindle since 2019 amid declining rainfall levels.

The average flow in Itaipu so far this year is 6,800 m3 per second, a level similar to that of the 1970s, according to Zarate. Average monthly inflows for Yacyreta are between 6,000-9,500 m3/s, said Lucas Chamorro, its head of hydrology.

"The useful volumes of the reservoirs are reaching their historical minimums... while the extreme trends of the El Nino or La Nina are becoming more acute," said Chamorro, referring to cyclical climate patterns that can bring both heavy rains and drought to South America and elsewhere.

But relief does not seem to be around the corner. Despite a recent improvement, below normal rainfall seems likely for southern Brazil for the rest of the year, said Refinitiv Senior Weather Research Analyst Isaac Hankes.

"Plenty more rain is needed to ease drought concerns," he said.

The Itaipu dam "totally relies on the improvement of the water flows," said Zarate. "And if that doesn't happen, this energy crisis is going to persist for at least next year."

(Reporting by Daniela Desantis; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O'Brien)

Rabies vaccines are falling from planes by the thousands in Western NC. Here’s why


Hayley Fowler
Tue, October 19, 2021, 4:02 PM·3 min read

Hundreds of thousands of small, waxy packets the size of matchboxes have descended on Western North Carolina in a little-known ritual to help inoculate wild raccoons against a rampant virus.

No, not that one.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services has been dropping rabies vaccines from planes along North Carolina’s western borders since 2005 — long before most people knew about the coronavirus or concerned themselves with vaccine mandates — as part of an annual baiting program targeting raccoons.


The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services announced the start of its annual oral rabies vaccination program with little fanfare at the end of September. Beginning Oct. 5, officials said, more than 500,000 baits containing the vaccine would descend from a “fixed wing aircraft” over counties in the western part of the state.

They include Ashe, Alleghany, Buncombe, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, Mitchell, Swain, Transylvania, Wilkes and Yancey counties.

The mass inoculation is expected to wrap up by mid-October, N.C. DHHS said.

According to health officials, the baits are made of a plastic packet containing the vaccine that’s either “sprinkled with a fishmeal coating or encased inside hard fishmeal–polymer blocks.” Fish meal is a ground powder made from the “cooked flesh of fish,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

“When a raccoon bites into a bait, the vaccine packet is punctured, and the animal is exposed to the vaccine,” N.C. DHHS said. “This activates the animal’s immune system to produce antibodies that provide protection against rabies infection.”

Rabies only affects mammals, with more than 90% of reported cases occurring in wildlife, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

North Carolina’s annual vaccine drop is part of a nationwide effort to dampen the spread of rabies that dates to 1997 and is known as the National Rabies Management Program.

It is the “largest coordinated effort to control a zoonotic disease in wildlife populations ever undertaken in the U.S.,” National Geographic previously reported. Zoonotic diseases refer to germs that spread between humans and animals.

A reporter with the magazine accompanied wildlife officials as they scattered rabies vaccines across Pittsburgh and rural Pennsylvania in 2019. The tiny packets were distributed by plane, hand and car in every nook and cranny of the state — from wooded lots to storm drains.

A similar process unfolds yearly in other states, including Ohio, Texas and Vermont.
What to do if you come across a packet of rabies vaccine

Health officials in North Carolina said the vaccine packets don’t contain the live rabies virus and can’t cause rabies.

“Anyone who comes into contact with the liquid vaccine should wash the affected area thoroughly with soap and water and call the phone number listed on the bait for further instructions and referral,” officials said.

USDA Wildlife Services also recommends leaving the bait where it is unless it’s on a person’s lawn or driveway. The bait can then be safely moved to an area where raccoons are more likely to find it using gloves or another “barrier” to protect against the strong fish smell.

If a pet eats several baits, Wildlife Services said, they may get an upset stomach. But officials don’t recommend trying to take the packet out of a pet’s mouth, “as you could be bitten.”