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)
Why You'll Never Understand Mezcal Like You Understand Scotch
ONE IS A PSYCHOTROPIC HALLUCINOGEN THE OTHER IS JUST ALCOHOL
There's more to the agave spirit than smoke and worm salt. JEFF GORDINIERMAY 17, 2018
LAURA MURRAY
In the folklore of my family, there is one night that remains legendary. We had traveled to Cancún, the gabachos-in-big-sombreros Mexican resort city that was built on the concept of a never-ending spring break, to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the proper measure of ridiculousness. I don’t remember much about it, but my siblings do. They remember gazing out at a dance floor in a nightclub after midnight and seeing me, then in my early 20s, writhing around in a manner that was perhaps meant to summon the spirit of Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican deity usually depicted as a feathered serpent. My brother and sister could find me in the crowd because I had managed to climb on top of a giant amplifier, which meant that my euphoric contortions were on full display for everyone in the club.
Beverage director Yana Volfson of New York’s Atla and Cosme. Laura Murray
This Walpurgisnacht of wild abandon was later attributed to a lone culprit: mezcal. I had downed a lot of cheap mezcal that night, although I had no idea what it was. In those days, American tourists still liked to cling to the myth that the “worm” floating around in the bottle would make them hallucinate. (You can’t blame the locals for perpetuating this prank.) By now, of course, U.S. drinkers have graduated from such callow delusions, and this infinitely complex agave spirit, whether stirred into cocktails or sipped on its own, has been treated with the reverence it deserves for more than a decade. In fact, there are so many compelling bottles on store shelves that it’s hard to keep track, and it’s a telling indicator of popular thirst that George Clooney and his billionaire Casamigos comrades have announced their own plans to move into the mezcal marketplace.
If I’m being honest, though, I still can’t pretend to have a grasp on what mezcal is all about. It’s the sort of spirit that has a habit of eluding anyone who tries to pin it down. Which is why I met up with Yana Volfson, the beverage director at Mexican chef Enrique Olvera’s two outposts in New York, Atla and Cosme, for an afternoon agave tutorial. Joining Volfson at Atla was Jorsand Díaz, the head bartender and self-described “mezcal nerd” at both restaurants. And the first thing the two of them stressed to me was that mezcal mastery is even more slippery than an amateur may realize.
It’s a telling indicator of popular thirst that George Clooney and his billionaire Casamigos comrades have announced their own plans to move into the mezcal marketplace.
“We strive so hard for that idea of consistency,” Volfson said. “There’s really no such thing.” Surrender to flux—from bottle to bottle, day to day, she advised. “Mezcal can taste one way one day and taste different the next day. Just like no two chiles are ever going to taste the same.”
“The more passion that I have, the more questions I have,” Díaz added.
But where to begin, if mezcal qualifies as such a moving target? It helps to start off by forgoing stereotypes. Perhaps you’re prone to bluffing your way through a bar order by asking for something “smoky,” which is like saying “funky” in a natural-wine bar or “hoppy” in a craft brewery. Stop. Smoke is not always the most pronounced element in mezcal, nor must it be viewed as the chief virtue. Pairings with El Jolgorio and Rey Campero mezcals. Laura Murray
Instead of pairing mezcal with the clichéd worm salt and wedge of citrus, Volfson and Díaz will, at Atla, entice customers with curveball accompaniments that come across as a revelation. I sampled three bottles. Each bloomed on my palate when hitched to an unexpected nibble. The first was an espadín (from the most commonly used agave plant) that mezcalero Joel Barriga had made for Vago; it was “milky” and “buttery,” Volfson said, and she paired it with chocolate-covered espresso beans. Then she described Rómulo Sánchez Parada’s 2015 madre-cuishe, for Rey Campero, as “stemmy,” green-grassy, eucalyptus-tinged; she had me drink that one with slices of smoked salmon. The third portal, Reynaldo Altamirano’s wild-agave tepeztate, for El Jolgorio, brought out the poetry in Volfson. She paired it with blue cheese, declaring that it would take me “far up into the sky and deep, deep into the ocean, in terms of its flavor.”
Wait. Maybe mezcal can make you hallucinate after all. I suppose the trick is to open your mind first. “Walk through one door,” Volfson told me, “and then I’ll open up another door for you.” This article appears in the May ’18 issue of Esquire. Alexi Lubomirski
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Should we tax robots?
Study suggests a robot levy — but only a modest one — could help combat the effects of automation on income inequality in the U.S.
What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used. Thus far, South Korea has reduced incentives for firms to deploy robots; European Union policymakers, on the other hand, considered a robot tax but did not enact it.
Now a study by MIT economists scrutinizes the existing evidence and suggests the optimal policy in this situation would indeed include a tax on robots, but only a modest one. The same applies to taxes on foreign trade that would also reduce U.S. jobs, the research finds.
“Our finding suggests that taxes on either robots or imported goods should be pretty small,” says Arnaud Costinot, an MIT economist, and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. “Although robots have an effect on income inequality … they still lead to optimal taxes that are modest.”
Specifically, the study finds that a tax on robots should range from 1 percent to 3.7 percent of their value, while trade taxes would be from 0.03 percent to 0.11 percent, given current U.S. income taxes.
“We came in to this not knowing what would happen,” says Iván Werning, an MIT economist and the other co-author of the study. “We had all the potential ingredients for this to be a big tax, so that by stopping technology or trade you would have less inequality, but … for now, we find a tax in the one-digit range, and for trade, even smaller taxes.”
A key to the study is that the scholars did not start with an a priori idea about whether or not taxes on robots and trade were merited. Rather, they applied a “sufficient statistic” approach, examining empirical evidence on the subject.
For instance, one study by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Boston University economist Pascual Restrepo found that in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, adding one robot per 1,000 workers reduced the employment-to-population ratio by about 0.2 percent; each robot added in manufacturing replaced about 3.3 workers, while the increase in workplace robots lowered wages about 0.4 percent.
In conducting their policy analysis, Costinot and Werning drew upon that empirical study and others. They built a model to evaluate a few different scenarios, and included levers like income taxes as other means of addressing income inequality.
“We do have these other tools, though they’re not perfect, for dealing with inequality,” Werning says. “We think it’s incorrect to discuss this taxes on robots and trade as if they are our only tools for redistribution.”
Still more specifically, the scholars used wage distribution data across all five income quintiles in the U.S. — the top 20 percent, the next 20 percent, and so on — to evaluate the need for robot and trade taxes. Where empirical data indicates technology and trade have changed that wage distribution, the magnitude of that change helped produce the robot and trade tax estimates Costinot and Werning suggest. This has the benefit of simplicity; the overall wage numbers help the economists avoid making a model with too many assumptions about, say, the exact role automation might play in a workplace.
“I think where we are methodologically breaking ground, we’re able to make that connection between wages and taxes without making super-particular assumptions about technology and about the way production works,” Werning says. “It’s all encoded in that distributional effect. We’re asking a lot from that empirical work. But we’re not making assumptions we cannot test about the rest of the economy.”
Costinot adds: “If you are at peace with some high-level assumptions about the way markets operate, we can tell you that the only objects of interest driving the optimal policy on robots or Chinese goods should be these responses of wages across quantiles of the income distribution, which, luckily for us, people have tried to estimate.”
Beyond robots, an approach for climate and more
Apart from its bottom-line tax numbers, the study contains some additional conclusions about technology and income trends. Perhaps counterintuitively, the research concludes that after many more robots are added to the economy, the impact that each additional robot has on wages may actually decline. At a future point, robot taxes could then be reduced even further.
“You could have a situation where we deeply care about redistribution, we have more robots, we have more trade, but taxes are actually going down,” Costinot says. If the economy is relatively saturated with robots, he adds, “That marginal robot you are getting in the economy matters less and less for inequality.”
The study’s approach could also be applied to subjects besides automation and trade. There is increasing empirical work on, for instance, the impact of climate change on income inequality, as well as similar studies about how migration, education, and other things affect wages. Given the increasing empirical data in those fields, the kind of modeling Costinot and Werning perform in this paper could be applied to determine, say, the right level for carbon taxes, if the goal is to sustain a reasonable income distribution.
“There are a lot of other applications,” Werning says. “There is a similar logic to those issues, where this methodology would carry through.” That suggests several other future avenues of research related to the current paper.
In the meantime, for people who have envisioned a steep tax on robots, however, they are “qualitatively right, but quantitatively off,” Werning concludes.
###
Written by Peter Dizikes, MIT News
Additional background
Paper: “Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation”
VIDEO: YOU CAN SEE THIS ROBOTIC ARM IS PUSHING A TOOL. IT’S ONE OF FOUR TASKS PRINCETON RESEARCHERS GAVE THE SIMULATED ARM. THEY ALSO ASKED IT TO LIFT THE TOOL; USE IT TO SWEEP A CYLINDER ALONG A TABLE; AND HAMMER – OR TRY TO HAMMER -- A PEG INTO A HOLE. IN A NEW APPROACH TO ROBOT TOOL MANIPULATION, THEY FOUND THAT HUMAN-LANGUAGE DESCRIPTIONS OF TOOLS COULD HELP THE ROBOT LEARN TO USE THE TOOLS FASTER, AND BOOST ITS PERFORMANCE ON A TEST SET OF UNFAMILIAR TOOLS. THE RESEARCH IS PART OF AN EFFORT TO IMPROVE ROBOTS’ ABILITY TO FUNCTION IN NOVEL SITUATIONS THAT DIFFER FROM THEIR TRAINING ENVIRONMENTS.view more
CREDIT: ALLEN Z. REN ET AL./AARON NATHANS
Exploring a new way to teach robots, Princeton researchers have found that human-language descriptions of tools can accelerate the learning of a simulated robotic arm lifting and using a variety of tools.
The results build on evidence that providing richer information during artificial intelligence (AI) training can make autonomous robots more adaptive to new situations, improving their safety and effectiveness.
Adding descriptions of a tool’s form and function to the training process for the robot improved the robot’s ability to manipulate newly encountered tools that were not in the original training set. A team of mechanical engineers and computer scientists presented the new method, Accelerated Learning of Tool Manipulation with LAnguage, or ATLA, at the Conference on Robot Learning on Dec. 14.
Robotic arms have great potential to help with repetitive or challenging tasks, but training robots to manipulate tools effectively is difficult: Tools have a wide variety of shapes, and a robot’s dexterity and vision are no match for a human’s.
The team obtained tool descriptions by querying GPT-3, a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020 that uses a form of AI called deep learning to generate text in response to a prompt. After experimenting with various prompts, they settled on using “Describe the [feature] of [tool] in a detailed and scientific response,” where the feature was the shape or purpose of the tool.
“Because these language models have been trained on the internet, in some sense you can think of this as a different way of retrieving that information,” more efficiently and comprehensively than using crowdsourcing or scraping specific websites for tool descriptions, said Karthik Narasimhan, an assistant professor of computer science and coauthor of the study. Narasimhan is a lead faculty member in Princeton’s natural language processing (NLP) group, and contributed to the original GPT language model as a visiting research scientist at OpenAI.
This work is the first collaboration between Narasimhan’s and Majumdar’s research groups. Majumdar focuses on developing AI-based policies to help robots — including flying and walking robots — generalize their functions to new settings, and he was curious about the potential of recent “massive progress in natural language processing” to benefit robot learning, he said.
For their simulated robot learning experiments, the team selected a training set of 27 tools, ranging from an axe to a squeegee. They gave the robotic arm four different tasks: push the tool, lift the tool, use it to sweep a cylinder along a table, or hammer a peg into a hole. The researchers developed a suite of policies using machine learning training approaches with and without language information, and then compared the policies’ performance on a separate test set of nine tools with paired descriptions.
This approach is known as meta-learning, since the robot improves its ability to learn with each successive task. It’s not only learning to use each tool, but also “trying to learn to understand the descriptions of each of these hundred different tools, so when it sees the 101st tool it’s faster in learning to use the new tool,” said Narasimhan. “We’re doing two things: We’re teaching the robot how to use the tools, but we’re also teaching it English.”
The researchers measured the success of the robot in pushing, lifting, sweeping and hammering with the nine test tools, comparing the results achieved with the policies that used language in the machine learning process to those that did not use language information. In most cases, the language information offered significant advantages for the robot’s ability to use new tools.
One task that showed notable differences between the policies was using a crowbar to sweep a cylinder, or bottle, along a table, said Allen Z. Ren, a Ph.D. student in Majumdar’s group and lead author of the research paper.
“With the language training, it learns to grasp at the long end of the crowbar and use the curved surface to better constrain the movement of the bottle,” said Ren. “Without the language, it grasped the crowbar close to the curved surface and it was harder to control.”
The research was supported in part by the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), and is part of a larger TRI-funded project in Majumdar’s research group aimed at improving robots’ ability to function in novel situations that differ from their training environments.
“The broad goal is to get robotic systems — specifically, ones that are trained using machine learning — to generalize to new environments,” said Majumdar. Other TRI-supported work by his group has addressed failure prediction for vision-based robot control, and used an “adversarial environment generation” approach to help robot policies function better in conditions outside their initial training.
The article, Leveraging language for accelerated learning of tool manipulation, was presented Dec. 14 at the Conference on Robot Learning. Besides Majumdar, Narasimhan and Ren, coauthors include Bharat Govil, Princeton Class of 2022, and Tsung-Yen Yang, who completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton this year and is now a machine learning scientist at Meta Platforms Inc.
In addition to TRI, support for the research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University through the generosity of William Addy ’82.
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Leveraging Language for Accelerated Learning of Tool Manipulation
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Regina police union defends budget, controversial tweet as calls to defund service grow BY MICKEY DJURIC GLOBAL NEWS Updated June 11, 2020 WATCH: Emerging from the anti-racism protests is a growing political movement to reduce funding to police forces, including the VPD. Rumina Daya reports.
On Tuesday, a communications officer with the union tweeted the Regina Police Service would lose its cultural unit — which works with Indigenous communities — should the service face budget cuts.
Do you support the “de-funding” of Police in Regina? If you do, this amazing work by our members will be one of the first to go. Choose wisely. https://t.co/G2PYD5La4a — Regina Police Assoc. (@QueenCityPolice) June 9, 2020
Residents were quick to criticize the union, with some questioning the tone of the tweet.
“The cultural unit should be the last thing that should be cut,” pointed out residents. Others felt the tweet was threatening.
But Tuesday’s tweet came a day after similar comments were made by Regina police Chief Evan Bray, whose responsibility it is to find budget cuts.
During a press conference, Bray told reporters social programs within the service would be the first to go should cuts be made to the city’s $96-million police budget.
“If we have to reduce our budget…we have to focus on core responsibilities like 911 response, serious crimes and investigations,” Bray said. “Some of our ancillary programs [that] deal with at-risk youth, mental health, dealing with those in schools — those programs would be looked at if we’re looking to tighten the purse strings. We’d have to focus more on delivering our core responsibilities.”
Regina’s police budget represents about 20 per cent of the city’s 2020 budget, which has been the same proportion for 30 years, Bray said.
Yet the department is still understaffed, said Casey Ward, president of the Regina Police Association, which represents 410 officers and 200 civilians.
“By underfunding or defunding the police, a couple things could happen: job losses for our members, or it could mean members don’t have safe members out there. With the city growing, it puts officers where they’re being burnt out physically and mentally,” Ward said.
This would be a challenge as many officers are already “struggling mentally” as a result from dealing with gun and gang violence and the rise of meth in the community. Regina currently has the second-highest crime severity index in Canada behind Lethbridge, Atla.
“We have a very busy police service, and our officers have trouble keeping their head above water,” said Bray.
In one day, the Regina Police Service receives 19 calls for domestic disputes, more than two calls a day for overdoses, and numerous firearm calls, Bray said.
“Our resources are in a state where they haven’t kept pace with growth of the city. Our challenges are really tough with current resources we have.”
A counter-petition has since popped up to keep funding the Regina Police Service. Within a day, the petition received 500 signatures.
But calls to transfer money to health care, education or housing are issues that are dealt with provincially says the police chief.
As for the petition asking to defund the Regina Police Service, Ward says his members are more concerned about the divide it’s creating on social media and in the community.
“Our members cherish our relationship with the community, and it seems people are trying to drive that wedge between us,” said Ward, who is fielding members’ questions to “why people on social media are trying to pin us against each other.”
“That’s not what policing is about,” Ward said. “There’s no ‘us’ versus ‘them’. There’s ‘us’ as a whole.”
VIDEO Black female Toronto police officer reflects on challenges service is facing Black female Toronto police officer reflects on challenges service is facing
FOR MORE ON REGINA AND ITS HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE AS THE HQ OF THE RCMP WHEN THEY WERE PUTTING DOWN THE PRAIRIE UPRISINGS OF THE CREE AND METIS ORGANIZED BY LOUIS RIEL
A recent study has illuminated the intricate genetic mechanisms behind crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) photosynthesis in Agave hybrid NO.11648. This research is a landmark in understanding how plants adapt to extreme water scarcity, offering fresh insights into the genomic blueprint of CAM—a photosynthetic pathway critical for plant survival in arid climates. The findings could revolutionize agricultural practices in drought-prone regions, providing a scientific foundation for developing more resilient crops.
Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) photosynthesis, a unique metabolic strategy, enables plants to conserve water by capturing carbon dioxide during the night. This adaptation is a lifeline for species in arid environments, yet its genetic underpinnings remain enigmatic. Despite its ecological importance, gaps in understanding the molecular controls of CAM pose challenges to designing water-efficient crops for a warming world. Exploring the genomes of CAM plants, particularly the drought-resilient Agave genus, is essential to unlocking the genetic secrets of this extraordinary adaptation.
On December 19, 2023, researchers from the Zhanjiang Key Laboratory of Tropical Crop Genetic Improvement achieved a major milestone in CAM research. Published (DOI: 10.1093/hr/uhad269) in Horticulture Research, their study provides a chromosome-level genome assembly of Agave hybrid NO.11648, uncovering key genes and regulatory pathways that govern CAM photosynthesis.
The researchers employed cutting-edge techniques, including high-throughput chromosome conformation capture and next-generation sequencing, to achieve a highly detailed assembly of the Agave genome. The resulting genome spans 4.87 Gb, organized into 30 pseudo-chromosomes with an N50 of 186.42 Mb. This comprehensive analysis revealed a genome abundant in repetitive sequences, particularly I-type repeats, and identified 58,841 protein-coding genes. Among the findings was a lineage-specific whole-genome duplication event post-dating the divergence from the Asparagoideae subfamily. The study also highlighted a duplication within the phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase kinase (PEPCK) gene family, identifying three PEPCK genes—PEPCK3, PEPCK5, and PEPCK12—as central to CAM regulation. Furthermore, the researchers identified transcription factors linked to circadian rhythms, MAPK signaling, and hormone signal transduction pathways that modulate PEPCK3 expression, shedding light on the complexity of CAM's genetic control.
Dr. Wenzhao Zhou, the corresponding author and a renowned authority in tropical crop genetics, emphasized the significance of this discovery: "Our chromosome-level genome assembly of Agave hybrid NO.11648 represents a monumental step in plant science. By decoding the genetic architecture of CAM photosynthesis, we not only enhance our understanding of plant resilience but also provide invaluable genomic resources for breeding crops that thrive under challenging environmental conditions. This work lays a solid foundation for sustainable agriculture in the face of climate change."
The implications of this research extend far beyond Agave. Understanding CAM photosynthesis at a genomic level opens the door to developing drought-resistant crops capable of optimizing water use. These insights could transform agricultural practices, enabling crops to thrive in water-scarce regions and contributing to global food security. As the world grapples with climate change and diminishing water resources, this study serves as a beacon for innovation in plant genomics and sustainable farming.
This study was sponsored by the Earmarked fund for the China Agriculture Research System (grant No. CARS-19), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 31801679), Guangdong Provincial Team of Technical System Innovation for Sugarcane Sisal Hemp Industry (grant No. 2023KJ104-03), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (grant Nos 2021A1515012421 and 2022A1515011841), Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (321QN300 and 323MS099), and Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund for Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (grant Nos. 1630062019016, 1630062020015, 1630062022002, and 1630062021015).
Horticulture Research is an open access journal of Nanjing Agricultural University and ranked number one in the Horticulture category of the Journal Citation Reports ™ from Clarivate, 2022. The journal is committed to publishing original research articles, reviews, perspectives, comments, correspondence articles and letters to the editor related to all major horticultural plants and disciplines, including biotechnology, breeding, cellular and molecular biology, evolution, genetics, inter-species interactions, physiology, and the origination and domestication of crops.
