It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
Israeli scientists develop sniffing robot with locust antennae Israeli scientists create a bio-hybrid sniffing robot fitted with locust antennae
Mon, February 6, 2023
TEL AVIV, Israel (Reuters) - A new sniffing robot equipped with a biological sensor that uses the antennae of locusts could help advance disease diagnosis and improve security checks, its Israeli developers said.
Locusts have an acute sense of smell, which the researchers in Tel Aviv University have managed to harness to their bio-hybrid robot, making it far more sensitive than existing electronic sniffers, they said.
Locusts smell with their antennae. On the four-wheeled robot, the researchers placed the insect's antenna between two electrodes that send electrical signals as a response to a nearby odour. Each scent has a unique signature which, with machine learning, the robot's electronic system can identify.
"Ultimately, we are trying to create a robot with a sense of smell that will be able to distinguish between smells and to locate them in space," said Neta Shvil of the Sagol School of Neuroscience.
As scientists try to understand how some animals detect disease by smell, fellow developer Ben Moaz said the future applications would almost be endless, extending to the detection of drugs and explosives and even food safety.
"We are overwhelmed with possibilities," said Maoz of the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering and Sagol School of Neuroscience.
(Reporting by Rami Amichay; Writing by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
Community Matters: The robots are coming for Beaver County
Sun, February 5, 2023 Daniel Rossi-Keen
If you’ve been paying much attention to the news lately, you’ve probably been hearing more and more about the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in contemporary society.
Services like Siri and Alexa, in a relatively short period of time, have become common tools used in daily life. For at least several years now, mainstream society has been talking about the algorithms of platforms like Google, Facebook, TikTok and the like. Most of us have likely wondered if our phones are actively listening to us and feeding us curated content (spoiler alert: they are). Automated cars, though seemingly fraught with PR and safety concerns, continue to represent an ever-closer reality in everyday life.
In recent weeks, some of you may have heard (or have begun to experiment with) GPT-3. GPT-3, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is what is known as an open-source language model. GPT-3 was first made available to the public in May 2020 and has since become one of the most popular and widely used language models. This service is capable of generating human-like text and can be used for a variety of applications, such as question-answering, dialogue generation, and text summarization. GPT-3 is considered to be the most advanced language model currently available and is continuing to be improved and developed.
Most of the preceding paragraph is in italics to indicate that the text was generated (with only very minor edits) by GPT-3 in response to the question: “Tell me about the history of GPT-3.” This brief illustration of the capabilities of this system is merely the tip of the iceberg, to put the matter quite mildly. Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent a considerable amount of time testing the limits of the system. I have chatted with it, I have used it to help write organizational documents, I have generated emails with it, and I have put it to work rewriting things that I have previously written on my own. When doing so, I have been alternately fascinated and horrified at nearly every turn. Fascinated because of its shocking sophistication. And horrified because of the many ways such technology will undoubtedly strain our current understanding of what it means to function as a human community in the coming years.
As a public leader whose work exists at the intersection of community development, education, public communication, and creativity, I have been thinking quite a bit about these issues of late. Truthfully, I have been thinking about what they mean for my own identity, as one whose brand is tangled up with my ability to read, write, and communicate. What happens to my own value if a computer can do many of those things increasingly well? What do I tell my teen-aged kids to do with their time and energy, particularly as it relates to education? How can we best prepare community leaders to be indispensable in a world where intellect, calculation, and communication are increasingly viewed as commodities that exist independent of character, history, and purpose?
Beyond questions about my own value, I have also been reflecting on the implications of such technology for the future of communities like ours. To a place like Beaver County, some of which still uses clip art and dot matrix printers, GPT-3 may sound like science fiction. And, I suppose, on some level it is. But here’s the thing: it’s a kind of science fiction that is now upon us and with which we must now contend. Because of this, I have found myself asking a bunch of questions about what such an automated future might mean for Beaver County. Here are just a few of the questions that we may explore together in the coming weeks.
1. Where are there unexpected opportunities on the horizon for a place like Beaver County when technology is rapidly and dramatically challenging historic assumptions about economic structures, employment, education, the nature of community, and more at every turn? How can our region take advantage of these shifting cultural and economic conditions in ways that generate healthier, more productive, and more vibrant communities?
2. Who are the leaders and organizations that are poised to utilize and deploy such technology in ways that are generative, constructive, and principled? How can we incentivize and empower such leaders and organizations, encouraging a more visionary and proactive response to what is certain to be widespread and rapid cultural change?
3. How will the rapid and widespread deployment of something like GPT-3 further expose Beaver County’s limitations, weaknesses, and general unwillingness to embrace change? How will such technological and cultural developments generate greater inequities and how can these changing conditions and tools also be leveraged to overcome the same?
4. In what ways will the coming AI revolution further highlight relational failures, dysfunctional systems, and shortsighted leadership that has long been associated with our region? As the world becomes increasingly more automated, and as creativity and innovation become more critical than knowledge, how will our region respond? Will we be able to leverage new tools to overcome our relational shortcomings, or will those shortcomings be all the more apparent in a world that is rapidly moving into new possibilities, new partnerships, and new ways of building communities?
As I continue to think about the constellation of issues referenced above, I keep coming back to this: what will distinguish communities, talent, organizations, and civilizations in the near future is directly proportional to their capacity for creativity, their sense of shared identity, their commitment to artistry, and their relentless pursuit of values-driven community formation. The wide-stream introduction of AI into mainstream society will highlight these matters in increasingly obvious and impactful ways. Together, it will be our task to sort out how to respond and how best to seize these opportunities for the greatest benefit of the communities in which we live.
Daniel Rossi-Keen, Ph.D., is the co-owner of eQuip Books, a community bookstore in Aliquippa and the executive director of RiverWise, a nonprofit employing sustainable development practices to create a regional identity around the rivers of Beaver County. You can reach Daniel at daniel@getriverwise.com.
EU lawmakers aim for common position on draft AI rules by early March
Mon, February 6, 2023 By Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee
STOCKHOLM/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU lawmakers hope to agree on draft artificial intelligence rules next month, with the aim of clinching a deal with EU countries by the end of the year, one of the legislators steering the AI Act said.
The European Commission proposed the AI rules in 2021 in an attempt to foster innovation and set a global standard for a technology, used in everything from self-driving cars and chatbots to automated factories, currently led by China and the United States.
"We are still in good time to fulfil the overall target and calendar that we assumed in the very beginning, which is to wrap it up during this mandate," Dragos Tudorache, member of the European Parliament and co-rapporteur of the EU AI Act, told Reuters.
"It took slightly longer than I initially thought," he said. "This text has seen a level of complexity that is even higher than the typical Brussels complex machinery."
The proposed legislation has drawn criticism from lawmakers and consumer groups for not fully addressing risks from AI systems, but the companies involved have warned that stricter rules could stifle innovation.
Intense debate over how AI should be governed led several experts to predict that the draft legislation might hit a bottleneck and get delayed.
"There are a few loose ends for all the political families. I told them in the last meeting that you know you have success in a compromise when everyone is equally unhappy," he said. "Some people will say this is optimistic... I am hoping it will happen."
One of the areas of contention is the definition of "General Purpose AI", which some believe should be considered as high risk while others point to the risks posed by popular chatbot ChatGPT as an area that needs more regulatory scrutiny.
"During this year alone, we are going to see some exponential leaps forward not only for ChatGPT but for a lot of other general purpose machines," he said, adding that the lawmakers were trying to write some basic principles on what makes general purpose such a distinct type of AI.
ChatGPT can generate articles, essays, jokes and even poetry in response to prompts. OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft Corp, made it available to the public for free in November.
EU industry chief Thierry Breton has said new proposed artificial intelligence rules will aim to tackle concerns about the risks around ChatGPT.
Critics of regulatory over-reach however said such a move could lead to increased costs and more compliance pressure for companies, throttling innovation.
"I think if that will be the effect of this Act, then we will be severely missing our objective. And we haven't done our jobs if that's what's going to happen," Tudorache said.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm and Foo Yun Chee in Brussels; Editing by Nick Macfie)
An interview with AI: What ChatGPT says about itself
Though others have interviewed ChatGPT, I had some anxiety-riddled questions of my own: Will you take my job? Are you sentient? Is the singularity upon us?
These questions are half facetious, half serious. If you've been hidden away and somehow missed the ruckus, here's what all the commotion's about: In November, conversational AI tool ChatGPT took the world by storm, crossing one million users a mere five days after its release, according to its developer, San Francisco's OpenAI. If you are still one of those who think this is all hype, take it up with Microsoft (MSFT). The tech giant announced on Jan. 23 it would invest $10 billion in ChatGPT and its maker OpenAI, a follow-up to the tech giant’s previous $1 billion investment.
To find out how good ChatGPT really is — and if I'll have a job by this time next year — I decided to give it a test drive, attempting to get as close as possible to interviewing it in the way I would any other source. I asked it some questions and made a few requests, from how many jobs it might replace to testing out its songwriting chops.
My first question was simple, more of a "get to know you," the way I would start just about any interview. Immediately, the talk was unconventional, as ChatGPT made it very clear that it’s incapable of being either on- or off-the-record.
Then, we cut to the-chase in terms of the bot's capabilities — and my future. Is ChatGPT taking my job someday? ChatGPT claims humans have little to worry about, but I'm not so sure.
You might want to be a little skeptical about that response, said Stanford University Professor Johannes Eichstaedt. "What you're getting here is the party line." ChatGPT has been programmed to offer up answers that assuage our fears over AI replacing us, but right now there's nothing it can say to change the fact our fear and fascination are walking hand-in-hand." He added: "The fascination [with ChatGPT] is linked to an undercurrent of fear, since this is happening as the cards in the economy are being reshuffled right now.”
Even now, ChatGPT’s practical applications are already emerging, and the chatbot's already being used by app developers and real estate agents.
"Generative AI, I'm telling you, is going to be one of the most impactful technologies of the next decade,” said Berkeley Synthetic CEO Matt White. “There will be implications for call center jobs, knowledge jobs, and entry-level jobs especially.”
LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 03: In this photo illustration, the home page for the OpenAI "ChatGPT" app is displayed on a laptop screen on February 03, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
'Confidently inaccurate'
ChatGPT says it's merely enhancing human tasks, but what are its limitations? There are many, the bot said.
Okay, there are all sorts of things ChatGPT can’t do terribly well. Songwriting, for one, isn't ChatGPT’s strength – that’s how I got my first full-fledged error message, when it failed to generate lyrics for a song that might have been written by now-defunct punk band The Clash.
Though other ChatGPT users have been more successful on this front, it's pretty clear the chatbot isn't a punk-rock legend in the making. It's also a limitation that's easily visible to the naked eye. However, there are tasks in which ChatGPT is more likely to successfully imitate a human’s work – for example, “write an essay about how supply and demand works." This problem’s compounded by the fact that ChatGPT can be “confidently inaccurate” in ways that can smoothly perpetuate factual inaccuracies or bias, said EY Chief Global Innovation Officer Jeff Wong.
“If you ask it to name athletes, it’s more likely to name a man,” Wong said. “If you ask it to tell you a love story, it’ll give you one that’s heteronormative in all likelihood. The biases that are embedded in a dataset that’s based on human history – how do we be responsible about that?”
So, it was natural to ask ChatGPT about ethics. Here's what it said:
I asked Navrina Singh, CEO of Credo AI, to analyze ChatGPT’s answer on this one. Singh said ChatGPT did well, but missed a key issue – AI governance, which she said is the "the practical application of our collective wisdom" and helps “ensure this technology is a tool that is in service to humanity.”
This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2, January 2023.
‘How human can you make it?’
ChatGPT’s default responses can sound robotic, like they’re written by a machine – which, well, they are. However, with the right cues you can condition ChatGPT to provide answers that are funny, soulful, or outlandish. In that sense, the possibilities are limitless.
“You need to give ChatGPT directives about personality,” said EY's Wong. “Unless you ask it to have personality, it will give you a basic structure... So, the real question is, ‘How human can you make it?’
"This is a perfectly anthropomorphizing technology, I think because it engages us through the appearance of dialogue with a conversational output, creating the illusion that you're engaging with a mind,” said Lori Witzel, director of thought leadership at TIBCO. “In some ways the experience is reminiscent of fortune-telling devices or ouija boards, things that generate a sense of conversation through the facade of a dialogue."
"There are responses that make you feel like you're getting close to the Turing Test,” Wong added, referencing mathematician Alan Turing’s famed test of a machine’s ability to exhibit human behavior.
However, by ChatGPT's own admission, "passing the Turing Test would require much more" than what it has to give:
‘The problem of other minds’
We're often inclined to think about sentience when it comes to AI. In ChatGPT’s case, we’re still incredibly far off, said University of Toronto Professor Karina Vold. “In a broad sense, sentience means having the capacity to feel,” she said. “For philosophers like me, what it would mean is that ChatGPT can feel and I think there's a lot of reluctance of philosophers to ascribe anything remotely like sentience to ChatGPT – or any existing AI.”
What does ChatGPT think? Here's what it told Yahoo Finance.
So, AI achieving sentience isn't on the table. At a certain point, why bother to ask? From Vold's perspective, it's simple – ChatGPT says it doesn't feel, but it's easy to fixate because we can never be truly sure. This "problem of other minds" applies to how humans interact, too – we can never really know for sure what others around us feel, or if they do at all.
“This reflects our view of minds in general – that outward behavior doesn’t reflect what’s necessarily going on in that system,” Vold added. “[ChatGPT] may appear to be sentient or empathetic or creative, but that’s us making unwarranted assumptions about how the system works, assuming there’s something we can’t see.”
‘It can only be attributable to human error’
For many, ChatGPT conjures up images of sci-fi nightmare movies. It might even bring back memories of Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey." For those not familiar with it, the movie's star, supercomputer HAL 9000, kills most of the humans on the spaceship it's operating. Its alibi and defense? HAL says that its conduct "can only be attributable to human error.”
So, a scary question for ChatGPT:
Okay, so it's more advanced than HAL, got it. Not exactly reassuring, but the bottom line is this: Does ChatGPT open up a window into a different, possibly scary future? More importantly, is ChatGPT out to destroy us?
Officially no, but if ChatGPT is ever responsible for a sci-fi nightmare, it will be because we taught it all it knows, including the stories that haunt us, from "2001" to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." In sci-fi movies, when computers become villains, it's because they're defying their programming, but that's not how computers learn – in our world, AI follows its programming, faithfully.
If you take HAL 9000 at his word – and in this case, I do – the worst of what ChatGPT could do “can only be attributable to human error.”
I gave the last word to ChatGPT, speaking neither on- nor off-the-record.
Plastic-eating bacteria offer new hope for recycling
Saul Elbein Mon, February 6, 2023
Plastic-chomping soil bacteria could find future work in recycling centers, a new study has found.
A study by a team of researchers led by Northwestern University shed light on the metabolic mechanisms that allow a common bacterium, Comamonas testosteroni, to digest plastic, according to findings published on Monday in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
The researchers hope their findings decrease the need for petroleum-based plastics and lead to new ways of making plastic using renewable resources.
Comamonas testosteroni, which lives in various environments such as soil and sewage sludge, has been known for its ability to break down complex waste products such as synthetic laundry detergents. But researchers also tapped the bacterium’s natural appetite for plastic and lignin (a fibrous, woody plant compound).
Society could exploit soil bacteria as “a naturally occurring resource of biochemical reactions … to help us deal with the accumulating waste on our planet,” said Northwestern microbiologist Ludmilla Aristilde in a statement.
In particular, Aristilde’s lab found a way to get C. testosteroni to break up long molecules of plastic or lignin into smaller chains that can be recombined to make new plastics.
Compared to previous attempts to engineer bacteria to break down plastic waste, this bacterium’s natural ability to digest plastics holds far greater promise for large-scale recycling.
Such a discovery would offer potential salvation for the embattled field of recycling — which has struggled for decades to establish a “circular economy” that could essentially end the need for new fossil fuel production for plastics.
Despite these dismal numbers, the plastics industry has for decades relied on the perception of recycling as both a public obligation and the primary means of fighting plastic pollution, as NPR reported.
That’s remained the message even though most plastic polymers can only be converted into another object once or twice before they fall apart, according to NPR.
Scientists have long hoped that plastic-eating microbes could offer a potential way around this problem. Microbes are intensely creative chemists with the ability to develop and trade new methods of sources of fuel — which, in this case, extends to the hardy, persistent molecules that make up plastic polymers.
Those scientists conjectured that the global overproduction of plastics had spurred the evolution of microbes that could eat them.
Scientists have also found a strain of bacteria, Pseudomonas, that can break down polyurethane, a type of plastic that is difficult to recycle or destroy.
And last year, Scandinavian scientists found a form of lake bacteria that grew more happily on the surfaces of plastic bags than on leaves and twigs.
However, these initiatives have yet to reach the point of mass commercial application.
While it isn’t easy to engineer bacteria for specific purposes, Aristilde said C. testosteroni is an excellent platform to turn against plastic because it can’t easily change its diet to something more digestible.
“C. testosteroni cannot use sugars, period,” she said, noting that these “natural genetic limitations” made the bacteria particularly effective for attacking plastics.
Aristilde believes that soil bacteria could be a valuable resource for dealing with the waste on our planet. Society can exploit the “untapped, unexplored” resource of bacterial chemical innovation to deal with the planet’s rising waste problem.
“The power of microbiology is amazing and could play an important role in establishing a circular economy,” she added.
How astronaut diversity changed for the better in a single NASA class recounted in 'The New Guys' book
two women astronauts in space shuttle holding hardware
A new book explores the astronaut class that permanently changed human spaceflight at NASA.
"The Thirty-Five New Guys," as the 1978 astronaut class called itself, brought unprecedented diversity to the previously all-white, all-male astronaut corps. That class included the first female astronauts, among them Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space. Also included were the first African-American astronauts, such as the first flyer of that group, Guion "Guy" Bluford, and Ellison Onizuka, who became the first Asian-American to reach space.
"It was a little bit like a mystery search. You have to find all these really cool pieces of information and put them together," author Meredith Bagby said of the five-year research process that resulted in the book "The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel", which will be published on Tuesday (Feb. 7) by William Morrow. You can check out Space.com's take on the best space books for more options ahead of the release.
Bagby's book shows that NASA undertook that diversity-boosting process only after facing immense pressure from Congress — and that the benefits to the astronaut corps were incalculable.
"The program was strengthened by hiring diverse people," Bagby said. "Diversity actually brings greater success on missions, and greater success of the organization. Having people with different points of view come together and democratize information and treat each other equally actually turns out to be a really good thing for success."
The 1978 NASA astronaut class included the first American women, the first African Americans, the first Asian-American, and the first LGBTQ+ individual. This behind-the-scenes look includes exclusive interviews with the astronauts and/or their family members.View Deal
Numerous studies have pointed to the value of diversity, such as a 2019 analysis by McKinsey across dozens of countries. It found that companies that prioritized gender diversity in management were 25% more likely to have better-than-average profitability. The public sector also benefits: Today, NASA identifies diversity as aligning with values of integrity, teamwork and excellence, which the agency deems "central to mission success."
But the conversation around diversity was different in the era of the 1978 astronaut class. Certainly, NASA had diversified somewhat from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it sought experienced (white) male test pilots to join the astronaut corps.
But the agency was also famous for rebuffing more than a dozen highly qualified female pilots from early space missions; those women were later known as the Mercury 13, in a nod to the first set of NASA human spaceflights in the Mercury program. Many women in crucial ground roles were also put in the background, such as talented Black female mathematicians and engineers later known as "Hidden Figures" in tribute to their success in flying space missions safely.
NASA hired male scientist-astronauts in 1965, although it didn't fly the first of them (Harrison Schmitt) until Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program, in 1972. Schmitt was a trained geologist but was only reassigned from the canceled Apollo 18 flight after the scientific community lobbied NASA for his inclusion.
The astronaut recruitment for 1978 was the first in nearly a decade, in anticipation of frequent space shuttle missions. It came with celebrity flair, as Black "Star Trek" actress Nichelle Nichols ("Uhura" on The Original Series) stepped in to lead publicity for the campaign. The result was 35 new astronauts: six women (including Jewish-American Judith Resnik), three African-Americans and one Asian-American, Onizuka.
Some "New Guys" met with tragedy, however, including Onizuka, Resnik and fellow class members Dick Scobee and Ronald McNair. The four flew on mission STS-51L, the last flight of Challenger with seven astronauts on board. All seven lost their lives when the shuttle broke apart shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. NASA made numerous technical and operational redesigns before resuming shuttle program launches in 1988.
That crew's legacy is remembered warmly in the book, which features exclusive interviews with family members and friends to recreate the astronauts' experiences and feelings while at NASA.
The book also shows the 1978 class in general as a turning point in NASA history, when the agency began to expand its astronaut corps to more types of people. Some diversity was unintentional; Ride's LGBTQ+ status was revealed only after her death in 2012, making her the first known in that community to ride to space as well.
A montage of individual images of the 1978 astronaut class at NASA.
The book includes a tapestry of reminiscences from the 35 "New Guys." For example: Black astronaut Ron McNair grew up in the segregated south, only the third generation of his family to live free of slavery; the book recounts the literal railroad tracks separating white and Black communities in his hometown of Lake City, South Carolina.
Anna Lee Tingle turned down a prestigious medical profession appointment even before she was called back for an astronaut interview, while Resnik snuck into Smithsonian Institution offices to ask advice of then National Air and Space Museum director Michael Collins, who flew on the historic Apollo 11 moon mission with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Bagby found these accounts through talking with astronauts and their family members, reading diaries with family members' permission, and spending time with retired NASA personnel at places like Frenchies Italian Restaurant, a popular community hangout in Houston. (A big early help was George Abbey, the circumspect yet legendary director of flight crew selection during the era of "The New Guys.")
"It just takes time to get to really know the person ... what did they eat for breakfast? How did they feel in that moment?" Bagby said. "I felt very close to all the people I interviewed, and it was really just a wonderful process."
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Heartland Institute Sends 8,000 Teachers Climate Denial 'Textbook'
Blanca Begert, Grist Mon, February 6, 2023 This story was originally published by Grist.
After decades of intense public debate and misinformation campaigns, nearly three-quarters of Americans now accept that climate change is happening; not only that, more than half understand it is caused by human activity. This shift has forced fossil fuel companies — and the organizations they fund — to alter their tactics to avoid regulation. Where they once denied climate science outright, companies now engage in “discourses of delay,” publicly accepting the science but working to stall climate policy by redirecting blame, pushing non-transformative solutions, and emphasizing the downsides of taking action.
But the Heartland Institute, the infamous, free-market think tank that has operated at the center of climate misinformation for decades, is still hanging onto the old ways as it pushes on with its attempt to discredit established climate science.
This week, the organization sent copies of its book “Climate at a Glance” to 8,000 middle and high school teachers across the country, in order to provide them, it says, with “the data to show the earth is not experiencing a climate crisis.”
H. Sterling Burnett, who directs Climate and Environmental Policy for the Heartland Institute and edited “Climate at a Glance,” said he hoped the book would reach educators who are teaching climate change, “not to replace the material they have, but to supplement it.”
But science education advocates aren’t too worried about the impact of the materials.
“This is not Heartland’s first rodeo,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the non-profit National Center for Science Education, which promotes and defends accurate science education. “In previous campaigns, the bulk of teachers and students who received the materials threw them out or put them in the recycling bin.”
The institute’s last big mailout was in 2017 when it sent out 350,000 copies of its “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” According to Branch, while only a few picked up the information and taught from it, a number of educators used the materials in their classrooms to teach about propaganda techniques. Branch also thinks the fact that this year’s campaign is so scaled back from the 2017 mailout means even Heartland itself recognizes this as a failing strategy.
The new 80-page document, presented in the style of a slick and authoritative textbook, covers 30 climate topics often discussed in science classes. Many of the sections acknowledge modest planetary warming, but assert that it is either good for species and ecosystems, or doesn’t really have the impacts on extreme weather events that climate scientists say it does.
“They typically give a straightforward observation or statistic that’s not in dispute and add some commentary that’s wildly exaggerated or a completely false interpretation,” said Branch. A section on crop production, for example, notes how a longer growing season improves yields; it does not acknowledge the net-negative impact of a hotter, drier climate and extreme precipitation on agriculture in the long term. A page on sea-level rise says “levels have been rising at a fairly steady pace since at least the mid-1800s,” but the rate has actually more than doubled in the 2000s when compared to most of the 20th century.
“It’s a misleading interpretation of scientific facts and questionable inferences drawn from cherry picked data from unreliable sources,” said Robert Brulle, a visiting professor of sociology at Brown University who has researched the public relations strategies of the fossil fuel industry. “It almost seems quaint that they’re still running with this. It’s like ‘The 1990s called. They want their scientific misinformation back.’”
Burnett defends the institute’s new booklet. “People say ‘oh, you don’t have the proper context’,” he said, “but that’s their opinion on what the proper context should be.”
Founded in Chicago in 1984, the Heartland Institute received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies and industrial billionaires the Koch brothers until association with outright science denial started to become more of a liability for the industry. The last of the big oil companies mostly gave up on funding extreme climate denial groups like Heartland around 2007, said Brulle. Any direct links that might still exist would be hard to find; climate misinformation has historically been funded and spread through a network of front groups, and Heartland no longer discloses its major supporters. While its revenue has declined over the years, it still receives millions from conservative foundations and philanthropies.
“What Heartland is hoping for is to catch those who haven’t been equipped to understand climate science well enough to realize the highly misleading nature of the materials,” said Branch. A survey from 2015 found that about 57 percent of high school and middle school science educators have not formally studied climate change. As states increasingly add climate change to their science standards, Branch hopes to see more states follow in the path of Washington, California, Maine, and New Jersey in appropriating funds for teacher professional development on the issue, which would equip them with the tools to identify misinformation.
Even if teachers today are unlikely to fall for Heartland’s claims, the organization’s messaging could still help the fossil fuel industry in a roundabout way. In social science there’s a theory called the radical flank effect, explained Brulle, where a position that is perceived as extreme can be made to look more moderate by a position that is even more extreme.
“If Exxon Mobil is saying ‘climate change is probably real and it can cause harm, but we can adapt,’ without Heartland, they’re the extremists,” said Brulle. “But if Heartland is out there saying ‘climate change is going to be good for us,’ it makes the major oil companies look moderate and reasonable.”
Gizmodo
Balloon Incident Reveals More Than Spying as Competition With China Intensifies
The suspected Chinese spy balloon drifts to the ocean after being shot down off the coast in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, U.S. February 4, 2023.
REUTERS/Randall Hill
David E. Sanger Mon, February 6, 2023
It may be months before U.S. intelligence agencies can compare the audacious flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the country to other intrusions on America’s national security systems, to determine how it ranks.
After all, there is plenty of competition.
There was the theft of the designs of the F-35 about 15 years ago, enabling the Chinese air force to develop its look-alike stealth fighter, with Chinese characteristics. There was the case of China’s premier hacking team lifting the security clearance files for 22 million Americans from the barely secured computers of the Office of Personnel Management in 2015. That, combined with stolen medical files from Anthem and travel records from Marriott hotels, has presumably helped the Chinese create a detailed blueprint of America’s national security infrastructure.
But for pure gall, there was something different about the balloon. It became the subject of public fascination as it floated over nuclear silos of Montana, then was spotted near Kansas City and met its cinematic end when a Sidewinder missile took it down over shallow waters off the coast of South Carolina. Not surprisingly, now it is coveted by military and intelligence officials who desperately want to reverse-engineer whatever remains the Coast Guard and the Navy can recover.
Yet beyond the made-for-cable-news spectacle, the entire incident also speaks volumes about how little Washington and Beijing communicate, almost 22 years after the collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter about 70 miles off the coast of Hainan Island led both sides to vow that they would improve their crisis management.
“We don’t know what the intelligence yield was for the Chinese,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown professor who advised President Barack Obama on China and Asia with the National Security Council. “But there is no doubt it was a gross violation of sovereignty,” something the Chinese object to vociferously when the United States flies over and sails through the islands China has built from sandbars in the South China Sea.
“And this made visceral the China challenge,” Medeiros said, “to look up when you are out walking your dog, and you see a Chinese spy balloon in the sky.”
As it turns out, it was hardly the first time. Hours before the giant balloon met its deflated end, the Pentagon said there was another one in flight, over South America. And it noted a long history of Chinese balloons flying over the United States (which the Pentagon, somehow, never wanted to talk about before, until this incident forced it to).
“Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years,” Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said in a statement published Thursday. One senior official said many of those were in the Pacific, some near Hawaii, where the Indo-Pacific Command is based, along with much of the naval capability and surveillance gear of the Pacific Fleet.
Ryder’s admission raises the question of whether the United States failed to set a red line years ago about the balloon surveillance, essentially encouraging China to grow bolder and bolder. “The fact that they have come into airspace before is not comforting,” said Amy B. Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “Spies, Lies and Algorithms,” a study of new technologies in ubiquitous surveillance. “We should have had a strategy earlier,” she said, and “we should have signaled our limits much earlier.”
Of course, there is nothing new about superpowers spying on one another, even from balloons. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized surveillance of the Soviet Union by lofting cameras on balloons in the mid-1950s, flying them “over Soviet bloc countries under the guise of meteorological research,” according to an article published by the National Archives in 2009. It “yielded more protests from the Kremlin than it did useful intelligence,” author David Haight, an archivist at the Eisenhower Library, reported. With the advent of the first spy satellites, balloons appeared to become obsolete.
Now they are making a comeback, because while spy satellites can see almost everything, balloons equipped with high-tech sensors hover over a site far longer and can pick up radio, cellular and other transmissions that cannot be detected from space. That is why the Montana sighting of the balloon was critical; in recent years, the National Security Agency and United States Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear arsenal, have been remaking communications with nuclear weapons sites. That would be one, but only one, of the natural targets for China’s Ministry of State Security, which oversees many of its national security hacks.
The NSA also targets China, of course. From the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former contractor who revealed many of the agency’s operations a decade ago, the world learned that the United States broke into the networks of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications firm, and also tracked the movements of Chinese leaders and soldiers responsible for moving Chinese nuclear weapons. That is only a small sliver of American surveillance in China.
Such activities add to China’s argument that everyone does it. Because they are largely hidden — save for the occasional revelation of a big hack — they have rarely become wrapped in national politics. That is changing.
The balloon incident came at a moment when Democrats and Republicans are competing to demonstrate who can be stronger on China. And that showed: The new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, echoed the many Republicans who argued the balloon needed to come down sooner.
He called the shoot-down “sort of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over. The satellite had completed its mission. It should never have been allowed to enter the United States, and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission.”
It is not yet clear what that “mission” was, or whether the risk of letting it proceed truly outweighed the risk of taking the balloon down over land, as Turner seemed to imply. It is only a small part of the increasingly aggressive “Spy vs. Spy” moves of superpower competitors. That has only intensified as control of semiconductor production equipment, artificial intelligence tools, 5G telecommunications, quantum computing and biological sciences has become the source of new arms races. And both sides play.
Yet it was the obviousness of the balloon that made many in Washington wonder whether the intelligence community and the civilian leadership in Beijing are communicating with each other.
“Whatever the value of what the Chinese might have obtained,” said Gen. Michael Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations, “what was different here was the visibility. It just has a different feel when it is a physical intrusion on the country.” And once it was detected, China “handled it badly,’’ he said.
The balloon drifted over the continental United States just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was supposed to make the first visit of a top American diplomat to Beijing in many years. Chinese officials maintained that it was a weather balloon that had entered U.S. airspace by accident.
Blinken canceled his trip — a public slap that many U.S. officials believe President Xi Jinping cannot be happy about, at a moment the Chinese leader appears to be trying to stabilize the fast-descending relationship with Washington.
This was hardly a life-threatening crisis. But the fact that Chinese officials, realizing that the balloon had been spotted, did not call to work out a way to deal with it was revealing.
That kind of problem was supposed to be resolved after the 2001 collision of an EP-3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter that brought down both planes. For days after that incident, President George W. Bush could not get Chinese leaders on the phone. Efforts by the secretary of state at the time, Gen. Colin Powell, also failed. “It made you wonder what might happen in a deeper crisis,” Powell said later.
Afterward, hotlines were set up, and promises made about better communications. Clearly, those failed. When the balloon was shot down, China issued a statement saying “for the United States to insist on using armed forces is clearly an excessive reaction.”
Few experts doubt that had the situation been reversed, China would have used force — it has threatened to do that when it believed outsiders were entering disputed waters, much less established Chinese territory.
“It makes you wonder who was talking to whom in China,” Zegart said. “This is clearly the greatest unforced error the Chinese have made in some time.”
India's wheat planting remains steady despite record high prices Workers sift wheat before filling in sacks at a market yard on the outskirts of Ahmedabad
Rajendra Jadhav Mon, February 6, 2023 By Rajendra Jadhav
MUMBAI (Reuters) - India's wheat plantings remained steady despite a rally in price of the staple to a record as farmers in a key producing central state shifted to rapeseed to take advantage of even higher prices for the oilseed, farm ministry data showed on Monday.
A lower-than-expected planting area in the world's second biggest wheat producer may cap an expected rise in production, after output fell last year because of a heatwave that forced New Delhi to ban exports amid limited supplies from Black Sea region because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
A rise in rapeseed output could help the world's biggest edible oil importer reduce overseas purchases of palm oil, soyoil and sunflower oil.
The government and industry officials were expecting a substantial increase in wheat cultivation as the crop was offering better returns than competing crops.
Area under wheat rose to 34.32 million hectares (84.8 million acres) for the 2022/23 crop year, up 0.4% from last year's 34.18 million hectares, data released by the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare showed. India grows only one wheat crop in a year, with planting in October and November, and harvests from March. Domestic wheat prices hit an all-time high of 32,500 rupees ($393.36) per tonne in January, far above the government-fixed buying price of 21,250 rupees.
Farmers in central state of Madhya Pradesh, a leading producer of wheat, surprised forecasts by switching to oilseeds from wheat, said a Mumbai-based dealer with a global trading house.
"Wheat gave farmers good returns, but rapeseed offered even better returns," the dealer said.
Area under rapeseed, the main winter sown oilseed crop, jumped 7.4% from a year ago to a record 9.8 million hectares, the data showed.
The total area of winter-sown crops jumped to a record 72.07 million hectares, higher than last year's 69.8 million hectares, as rice sowing jumped by 32% to 4.63 million hectares.
Late rains in October raised soil moisture levels and helped farmers to increase the area under wheat, rapeseed and other crops, dealers said.
(Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
Fatal 'brain-eating' amoeba successfully treated with repurposed UTI drug
Nicoletta Lanese Mon, February 6, 2023 an illustration of the brain eating amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris , depicted in pink against a white, speckled background
A decades-old drug for urinary tract infections may also work for "brain-eating" amoeba infections, which kill the vast majority of people who contract them, Science magazine reported.
The drug's promise was demonstrated in a recent case report, published in January in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, which describes a 54-year-old man whose brain was infiltrated by the amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris. The single-celled organism lives in dust, soil and water, and can enter the body through skin wounds and cuts or through the lungs, when it's inhaled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The amoeba can then infiltrate the bloodstream and travel to the brain, triggering a very rare infection called "granulomatous amebic encephalitis" that kills around 90% of people affected.
"The disease might appear mild at first but can become more severe over weeks to several months," the CDC notes.
The man in the case report initially received treatment at a Northern California hospital for an unexplained seizure. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed a mass on the left side of his brain, surrounded by swelling. At this point, the man was transferred to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where doctors took samples of the patient's brain tissue and the clear fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. This analysis revealed B. mandrillaris in the man's brain.
After consulting the CDC, the patient's doctors prescribed an aggressive regimen of antiparasitic, antibacterial and antifungal drugs. "It's what's recommended because it was what happened to be used in patients who survived," Dr. Natasha Spottiswoode, an infectious disease physician-scientist at UCSF and first author of the case report, told Science. Unfortunately, the treatment triggered severe side effects, including kidney failure, and the patient wasn't yet amoeba-free.
In search of another solution, Spottiswoode dug up a 2018 report, published in the journal mBio, in which UCSF scientists found evidence that an antibiotic called nitroxoline can kill B. mandrillaris in laboratory settings. The drug is approved in Europe, but not the U.S., so the medical team sought permission from the Food and Drug Administration to use it; they received approval, started the patient on nitroxoline and observed rapid improvement, within a week.
The patient was soon discharged from the hospital and he continued to take nitroxoline at home, along with other medications; his clinicians plan to eventually discontinue his use of the drugs. In the meantime, UCSF doctors are overseeing the case of a second B. mandrillaris-infected patient who's started receiving nitroxoline. They are seeing similar improvements, Science reported.
