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)
Friday, October 21, 2022
'That's democracy': Protester disrupts Canadian defence minister's event
By Chris Gallagher - Canada's Minister of National Defence Anita Anand takes part in a news conference about the federal government's response to Hurricane Fiona, later downgraded to post-tropical storm, in Ottawa, Canada
(Reuters) - Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand's appearance at a democracy forum on Friday was disrupted by a protester who stood before the stage holding a "STOP THE WAR" sign, prompting Anand to take a break in the middle of the programme when the protester refused to leave.
Anand was speaking about Canada's support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion at Toronto Metropolitan University when the protester, a woman wearing a winter cap and glasses, displayed the sign addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Anand and other Canadian ministers. "STOP LYING. STOP SENDING WEAPONS. STOP NATO," read the sign. "PEACE IN UKRAINE."
"Can I see your sign please?" Anand asked the protester.
"Thank you for sharing that with me and I want to say that the aid that we have sent to Ukraine is aid that is in support of democracy, and sovereignty and rules-based international order - that same order that has kept you, everyone in this room, and our country, safe since the end of the Second World War," Anand said.
The protester, however, refused to leave and event host Martin Regg Cohn, a Toronto Star columnist, warned that she was getting to close to the minister's personal space.
"I'm going to take a break, Martin. Thank you so much," said a clearly uncomfortably Anand before she walked off the stage.
The defence minister, who announced a new military aid package for Ukraine earlier this month, retook the stage about 10 minutes later.
Canada has donated or committed about C$600 million in military equipment since Russia began its invasion on Feb. 24.
"Thank you for coming back," Cohn said.
"No problem. That's democracy," Anand replied.
(Reporting by Chris Gallagher in Washington; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Public schools ‘unable to compete’ with private sector as thousands of K-12 staffers quit during back-to-school season
Zoe Han -
Janitors, cafeteria workers and teachers appear to have one thing in common: They’re fed up.
To put those figures in context: In March 2020, before the coronavirus took a toll on the U.S. economy, more than 8 million public-school staff were in the workforce.
Schools have been struggling to fill positions across the board, said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association. “It is every position in our schools,” he told MarketWatch.
“Custodians and maintenance workers, cafeteria workers, paraprofessionals who are also known as teacher assistants, front-office staff, school counselors, school social workers, and then, of course, our instructional teachers,” he added.
“So it runs the gamut, everyone is struggling to fill positions throughout the state and throughout the nation, and it’s all positions in our public schools,” Spar said.
Public education remains one of the least recovered sectors of the pandemic. Teachers reported high levels of stress during the early days of the pandemic, dealing with long working hours, less pay and navigating technical difficulties related to remote teaching.
The labor shortage in other service sectors also made school workers harder to retain, Spar said.
Teachers reported high levels of stress early in the pandemic, dealing with long working hours, less pay, and remote teaching.
The private sector has been boosting benefits to attract more workers, with many companies raising wages and offering better perks.
“In some cases, the share of lower-wage, in-person job postings advertising key benefits more than doubled from August 2019 to August 2022,” according to an analysis by Indeed Hiring Lab. Those improved benefits related to health insurance, paid time off and retirement plans, wrote AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab.
At the same time, public education has faced underfunding at the state level, which resulted in underpaying all school staff, not only teachers, Spar said. One 2020 study found that schools were underfunded by $150 billion, a situation that impacts up to 30 million K-12 students.
Case in point: Many support staff in Florida school districts are earning “poverty wages,” according to the Florida Education Association. A “living wage” for a single person is $35,858 a year in Florida and $70,504 for a single parent with one child, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator.
Spar said the public-school system was “just not able to compete” with the private sector.
K-12 school vacancies hovered at 10,771 in Florida by August 2022. This included 6,006 teachers and 4,765 support staff, according to calculations by the Florida Education Association. A few weeks into the school year, some positions were filled, but the state is still facing more than 5,000 vacancies for teachers and support staff each, Spar said.
Last month, Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news outlet covering education, spoke to 80 teachers who had left the profession. Among the reasons they gave for leaving: lack of respect and support, the need for higher pay, and more job flexibility.
Ingrid Fournier, a former teacher in Branch, Mich. who left her 25-year teaching career in 2022, told Chalkbeat: “Class sizes increase, pay and benefits have decreased, support for teachers and administrators has drastically decreased. Privatized busing, custodial, and substitute programs have really taken a toll because the sense of community has dwindled as a result.”
‘What keeps me up at night is how to keep schools open and operating during the pandemic and amid staffing shortages.’
Salaries vary widely for school workers. Kindergarten and elementary-school teachers earn a median of $61,350 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That compares to $29,760 per year for school janitors and building cleaners, and $27,170 for dining-room and cafeteria workers.
It’s difficult for some teachers to even afford to live in the area where they work. The Milpitas Unified School District’s Board of Education in California approved a workforce housing resolution Aug. 23 that detailed how moderate-income people working for the district were finding it difficult to get places to rent close to their jobs, according to KRON-TV in San Francisco and a copy of the resolution provided to MarketWatch.
The district told parents via a school communication app that it had lost seven teachers in the past school year over cost-of-living issues, and requested that parents with extra room rent the space to teachers, according to KNTV, an NBC affiliate in the Bay Area.
Such stories provide context for the vacancy rate in public education. In August there were 292,000 openings, a record high, in state and local government education, which contains all public K-12 and higher education, according to separate data provided by the American Federation of Teachers, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
A school district superintendent in North Carolina told MarketWatch in August that zero applicants applied for the six openings in his district, and that was two weeks before the school year started.
A nationwide school bus-driver shortage is also affecting students’ ability to arrive at school on time: 88% of school transportation professionals and educational leaders surveyed said bus-driver shortages have constrained their transportation operations, according to a recent survey by HopSkipDrive, a school ride-service company.
Some 94% of respondents said they have staffing shortages from teachers to librarians and administrators, the survey found. “What keeps me up at night is how to keep schools open and operating during the pandemic and amid staffing shortages,” said John French, a superintendent in the survey.
The staffing shortage affects all students, but some could be more vulnerable to the impacts. Not having enough teaching assistants, for instance, could mean not enough people to help with students with special needs, Spar said.
“Teachers and staff who work in our public schools care about kids and they want to do right by kids. But so often they are faced with so many obstacles that they ultimately give up and walk away,” he said.
(Emma Ockerman contributed to this story.)
FAUX OUTRAGE FROM FAUX NEWS Georgetown students walk out during Pence speech, chant 'hate has no home here!"
Andrew Miller - Yesterday - FOX NEWS
Video from a speech delivered by former Vice President Mike Pence at Georgetown University shows students walking out during the speech while other students unveiled a sign saying "reproductive rights are human rights."
The video, posted by the Young America’s Foundation from a speech it hosted at the Washington, D.C., university, shows dozens of students walking out of the room while Pence spoke and as other students in the balcony of the venue unfurled a flag with pro-choice messaging.
Several of the students were wearing masks, and one could be seen waving a gay pride flag on the way out the door.
"It seems to me that having served many years in Washington, leaders in this nation’s capital have never been more out of touch," Pence said as the students were exiting the building. "More intent on imposing their agenda or walking out on people that might have a different point of view."
The audience remaining in the auditorium cheered and applauded after Pence delivered that line.
"Hate has no home here," protesters gathered outside the event could be seen chanting in a video posted by Young America's Foundation.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Young America's Foundation said it was quickly able to fill the seats with Pence supporters waiting outside.
"Campus leftists thought they could successfully derail Vice President Mike Pence’s YAF-sponsored lecture by walking out and displaying signs promoting the left’s radical agenda," YAF spokesperson Nick Baker told Fox News Digital. "Within minutes, they were proven wrong. YAF easily filled the room to capacity with students legitimately interested in hearing Vice President Pence’s pro-freedom message."
A representative for Pence did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
"Thank you @yaf and @GUPolitics!" Pence tweeted Wednesday night. "It was great to be at Georgetown tonight with so many great young Americans!"
Pence, who many believe is considering a presidential run in 2024, emphasized a message of tolerance during the speech and called for the restoration of civil discourse.
"I really do believe you can say to somebody they’ve got bad ideas without saying they’re a bad person," Pence told the crowd. "I hold the view and have for many years that democracy depends on heavy doses of civility."
Pence hedged when asked during a question-and-answer session following the speech whether he would support a Trump presidency in 2024.
"Well, there might be somebody else I prefer more," he said with a smirk.
"All my focus has been on the midterm elections, and it’ll stay that way for the next 20 days. But after that, we’ll be thinking about the future," Pence continued. "Ours and the nation's. And, I'll keep you posted. OK?"
ISIS OR USA THEY DID THE SAME
Archaeologists restoring ISIS damage in Iraq discover Assyrian reliefs unseen for millennia
Christian Edwards - CNN
Archaeologists in northern Iraq have uncovered some extraordinary Assyrian rock carvings dating back around 2,700 years.
The discovery was made in Nineveh, east of Mosul, by a joint US-Iraqi excavation team completing reconstruction work on the Mashki Gate, which ISIS militants destroyed in 2016.
Iraq was home to some of the world’s oldest cities and earliest civilizations, including the Babylonians, the Sumerians and the Assyrians.
In around 700 BC, the Assyrian King Sennacherib made Nineveh his capital and built the Mashki Gate – meaning the “Gate of God” – to guard its entrance.
It was reconstructed in the 1970s, but was then destroyed with a bulldozer by ISIS soldiers during their occupation of Iraq.
During the occupation, University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Michael Danti “directed a project to preserve and protect cultural heritage in Iraq,” he told CNN, adding: “Mashki Gate was one of the sites on which I reported when ISIS deliberately destroyed it.”
When the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program, which Danti directs, began work to rebuild the gate, they made a discovery he described as “so rare it was unimaginable.”
Buried beneath the gate’s ruins were seven slabs of marble bearing ornate carvings depicting Assyrian soldiers firing arrows – as well as palm trees, pomegranates and figs – all belonging to Sennacherib’s palace.
“We were all awestruck and virtually speechless. It was like a dream,” Danti said. “No one predicted that we would be finding Sennacherib reliefs in a city gate.”
Although there had been archaeological digs on the site before, in the 1960s and 1970s, this particular room had never previously been excavated, according to Danti.
While the gate was destroyed, “these remains were protected because they were buried,” he said.
The discovery offers exciting new opportunities for research, with archaeologists now returning to Mosul to dig deeper into the history of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Whereas previous discoveries like this have been taken abroad – such as to the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – these slabs will remain in Iraq.
“These slabs are the official state property of the government of Iraq and the Iraqi people,” Danti told CNN – adding that his fellow researchers at Pennsylvania and the University of Mosul “are absolutely delighted to have found these reliefs.”
“Access to cultural heritage is a human right, and groups like ISIS want to sever those links forever as part of their campaign of cultural cleansing and genocide,” he said.
An archaeological park
More extraordinary finds in the area were revealed in a ceremony on Sunday.
Faida Archaeological Park – about 19 miles from Nineveh – was uncovered after the completion of excavation works that began in 2019.
The Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project of Italy’s University of Udine found 13 reliefs carved into the walls of a six-mile-long irrigation canal.
Speaking to CNN, Udine archaeologist Daniele Morandi Bonacossi described the reliefs as “unique” and “without parallel in Near Eastern rock art.”
“The Faida reliefs constitute a monumental complex of remarkable interest through which Assyrian royal power implemented a sculptural program aimed at celebrating the creation of the hydraulic system that gave fertility and wealth to the surrounding countryside,” he said.
While some of the carvings were initially discovered in 1973 by British archaeologist Julian Reade, they were not fully uncovered until now.
China moon mission samples upend theories of lunar volcanism
An analysis of lunar samples returned by China's Chang'e 5 moon mission has produced a new possible answer for volcanism late in the moon's history.
Lunar samples returned by the Apollo and Luna missions are all older than about 3 billion years, but samples returned by Chang'e 5 in late 2020 confirmed remote sensing analysis that rocks in the area were relatively young, at only 2 billion years old.
Scientists previously speculated that either a relatively high water content or the presence of radioactive, heat-producing elements in the lunar interior might have driven volcanism in a late stage of the moon's life in some areas, but new Chang'e-5 data published in Nature appears to have ruled out these hypotheses.
Researchers led by Chen Yi from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS) found that a lower melting point for portions of the lunar mantle could be due to the presence of fusible, easily melted components, leading to young lunar volcanism.
"Recent melting of the lunar mantle can be achieved by either raising the temperature or lowering the melting point. To better understand this problem, we should estimate the temperature and pressure in which the young volcanism was created," Chen said in a statement.
The researchers conducted a series of fractional crystallization and lunar mantle melting simulations to compare 27 samples of Chang'e 5 basalt clasts with Apollo basalts. They found that the young magma collected by Chang'e 5 had higher calcium oxide and titanium dioxide contents than older Apollo magmas. These are calcium-titanium-rich late-stage lunar magma ocean cumulates are more easily melted than early cumulates.
"This is a fascinating result, indicating a significant contribution of late-stage lunar magma ocean cumulates to the Chang'e 5 volcanic formation," said Dr. Su Bin, first author of the study.
The research presents evidence for the first viable mechanism to account for young volcanism on the Moon that is compatible with the newly returned Chang'e 5 samples and could help understanding of the Moon's thermal and magmatic evolution.
A lot of AI challenges are human challenges, just to summarize.
Blake Montgomery - Gizmodo
The MacArthur Foundation announced last week that University of Washington computer science professor, 45, was one of 25 recipients of its eponymous fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant.” Choi thought the foundation’s attempts to contact her were spam calls, and then, when the organization was finally in touch, that the calls concerned consulting work. She’s not alone. Multiple fellows told the Washington Post that they ignored the foundation’s attempts to reach them. One blocked its calls entirely.
The Genius Grant comes with a no-strings-attached prize of $800,000, given over five years. In its citation, the foundation’s board wrote, “Choi’s research brings us closer to computers and artificial intelligence systems that can grasp more fully the complexities of language and communicate accurately with humans.” Her work concerns teaching AI to understand the concepts that ripple beneath the surface of language, or, in her words, “very trivial knowledge that you and I share about the world that machines don’t.”
Gizmodo spoke to Choi shortly after the foundation’s announcement of the 2022 fellows. She said the award will allow her to TK. She also accidentally activated her Amazon Alexa.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Gizmodo: Where were you when you got the call from the MacArthur Foundation?
Yejin Choi: I was just at home working and doing Zoom meetings, and I ignored all the calls, thinking that they must be spam.
How many calls did you end up getting?
I actually didn’t even realize until the announcement that they actually did call me on the phone, which I did ignore. I remember—I just didn’t think that it was them. When they did get in touch, I thought it was about consulting work they wanted me to do.
How do you describe your work?
I build AI systems for primarily for natural language understanding. It’s in the field of natural language understanding, which is a subfield of AI—building AI systems for human language understanding, that’s broadly the field that I belong to. And more concretely, what I do has to do with generally reading between the lines of text to so that we can infer the implied messages, the intent of people. Recently, I started focusing more on common sense knowledge and reasoning, because that’s important background knowledge that people rely on when they interpret language.
I’ve heard what you do called natural language processing, do you intentionally use the word ‘understanding’ instead of ‘processing’?
NLP, or natural language processing, is the name of the field. It’s about either natural language understanding or generation of natural language. Right now, neural networks are almost like a parrot or mouth without a brain in that it is able to speak, but it may or may not actually make sense, and it generally doesn’t really understand the underlying concepts of text. It’s very easy for them to make mistakes and say silly things, and if you try to do question-and-answer with neural language models, then sometimes they say very silly things.
So you’re trying to help them say less than less silly things?
Yeah. But it’s very difficult actually to fix the fundamental challenge, which is that AI systems fundamentally lack knowledge about how the world works, whereas humans have more conceptual understanding of how the world works, how the physical world works, and how the social world works. It’s very trivial knowledge that you and I share about the world that machines don’t.
Why do you think that’s an important field of study? What will it do for humanity when machines understand that?
Because that’s how humans communicate with each other. It’s all about the subtext and the messages and understanding each other’s intent behind what they say. You know, when you ask someone, “Can you pass the salt?”, you’re never really asking literally, whether you’re capable of passing the salt or not. You’re just asking them to give it to you, right? And so human language is like that: There’s always this figurative or implied meaning, and that is what does matter, and that is what’s hard for machines to correctly understand. Part of that requires common sense reasoning.
What do you think machines and AI will be able to do if they achieve that understanding?
AI systems today are more capable of language processing than before, so now we can ask questions in natural language. We all know that there’s some limitation to it, though, so right now, it’s not very reliable. You don’t speak in complex language yet. But it’s going to really improve the interactibility with AI systems. It’s also going to enhance the robustness of AI systems. So you may have heard about the Alexa Amazon system, making a mistake.
Choi paused because her Alexa activated.
I will not say the name again. But that system recommended a child touch an electrical socket with a penny. Apparently, that happened because of an internet meme. Fortunately, the child was with her mom, and she knew enough not to do that. It’s a very bad idea. But currently, because the AI system doesn’t truly understand what it means to touch the electric socket with a penny, it’s just going to repeat what people said on the internet without filtering. That’s one example where, in terms of robustness of AI systems as well as the safety of AI systems when they interact with humans, we need to teach them what what language actually means and the implications.
There’s been quite a lot of high-profile AI in the news recently: DALL-E won an art contest, a Google engineer was fired because he hired a lawyer to represent an AI he claimed was sentient. I was wondering what you make of what you made of those particular stories.
They reflect that AI is advancing fast in some capacities. It’s likely that it’s going to be more interior integrated with the human lives in the coming years more and more so, but people also talk about how DALL-E make silly mistakes when you ask a very simple compositional question like putting something on top of something else.
We’ve talked a little bit about like the abstract nature and the ultimate goals of your work. Can you tell me a little bit about what experiments you’re working on now in what you’re researching now?
Maybe I can tell you a little bit about the common sense route. Common sense was the lofty goal of the AI field in early days—the 70s and 80s. That was the number one goal back then. People quickly realized that, although it was super easy for humans, it’s strangely difficult to write programs that encode common sense and then build a machine that can do anything like trivial things that humans can do. So AI, researchers then decided that it’s such a stupid idea to work on it because it’s just too hard. So saying even the word was supposed to be bad. You’re not going to get taken seriously if you say the word because it was such a taboo for some decades that followed the initial AI period. So when I started working on common sense a few years ago, that was exactly the reaction that I got from other people that thought I was too naive.
We had a hunch that it could work much better than before, because things change a lot since the 70s and 80s. And today, now we have a deep learning neural network. So now we have a lot of data. Now we have a lot of computing power. And also we have crowdsourcing platforms that can support scientific research as well. Collectively, we studied making neural common sense models that can learn simple common sense knowledge and reason about causes and effects of everyday events, like what a person might do as a reaction to particular events. We built neural models and that was much better than what people anticipated. The recipe that goes to that work is a symbolic knowledge graph that is being used as a textbook to teach neural networks.
What do you think the MacArthur award will allow you to do that you weren’t doing before?
We’ve made some exciting progress toward common sense, but it’s still very far from making a real world impact, so there’s a lot more to be done. Pursuing a research direction that’s potentially seen as overly ambitious and therefore risky can be hard in terms of gaining resources or in terms of gaining community support.
I really didn’t imagine that I would ever get this kind of recognition, especially by doing research such as common sense AI models. It just seemed too adventurers for me to have this kind of recognition from the field. I did it primarily because I was excited about it. I was curious about it. I thought that somebody has to try, and even if I fail, the insights coming from the failure should be useful to the community. I was willing to take that risk because I didn’t care too much about following a safe route for success. I just wanted to have fun and adventure with a life that I live only once. I wanted to do what I am excited about, as opposed to living my life for chasing success. I’m still having a hard time every morning convincing myself that this is all for real, that this happened, despite all these challenges that I had to go through working on this line of research over the past few years. I had very long-term impostor syndrome. Altogether, this was a big surprise.
This award has two meanings. One is resources that can be so helpful for me to pursue this road less taken. It’s wonderful to have the financial support towards that. But also, it’s spiritual support and mental support so that it doesn’t feel like too many failures along the way. When you take roads not taken, there’s so many obstacles. It’s only romantic at the beginning. The whole route can be a lot of loneliness and struggle. Being in that mode for prolonged time can be hard, so I really appreciate the encouragement that this award will give me and my collaborators.
I mentioned that I was interviewing you to a friend of mine who’s a computer science researcher as well. He said he was really interested in a paper you were involved with, called “The Delphi Experiment: Can Machines Learn Morality?” It was a bit controversial, highly discussed within the community. Were there any lessons you drew from working on that paper and the subsequent reaction to it?
That was a total surprise how much attention it drew. If I knew in advance how much attention it would have drawn, I would have approached it a little bit differently, especially the online demo initial version. We had a disclaimer, but people don’t pay attention to disclaimers and then take a screenshot in a way that’s very misleading. But here’s what I learned: First of all, I do think that it’s very important that we do think about how to teach AI some sort of ethical, moral, and cultural norms so that they can interact with humans more safely and respectfully.
There are so many challenges, though: It needs to support diverse viewpoints and understand where the ethical norms might be ambiguous or diverse. There are cases when everyone might agree. For example, killing a person is one of the worst things that you probably don’t want to commit versus maybe cutting a line in a long line. If somebody’s really sick and needs to cut the line, probably everybody’s okay with that. Then there are many other contexts in which cutting the line becomes a little bit harder to decide whether it’s okay or not. Even the awareness of the fact that, depending on the context, the decision varies a lot. They’re ambiguous cases. I think this is all an important aspect of the knowledge that we need to teach AI to better understand.
Perhaps one misunderstanding is that it’s not the case that AI always have to make binary decisions such that there’s only one correct answer and then that’s the only correct answer, which is actually different from my moral framework. Then it can be a big problem. But I don’t think AI should be doing it. It should understand where the ambiguous cases are, but minimally, it should learn so that it doesn’t violate human norms that are important, for example, asking the child to touch the electric circuit.
AI systems are already making decisions that do have moral implications, not addressing it is not a solution. It’s already doing it.
Those are all the questions that I have. Is there anything you think I haven’t asked about that I should be? Maybe I can add a bit about the moral disagreement speak. I’m quite interested in reducing biases in language such as racism and sexism. What I found a very interesting phenomenon in the world is that two people may not agree on whether something is sexist or not. Even within left-leaning people, depending on how left you are, you may not agree on whether something is a microaggression or not. That makes it so difficult to build an AI that would make everyone happy. The AI might disagree with your level of understanding of sexism, for example. That’s one challenge. Another challenge is that this would be like a step towards building an AI system that’s perfectly good, which in itself would be really hard. And then there’s this other challenge, which is the “good” label can be subjective or controversial in itself. With all this in mind, when you build a system, you try to reduce the bias. You can imagine that from some people’s perspective, that AI that’s presumably reducing or detecting sexism isn’t adequate because it’s not catching the example that I want to catch. The problem actually comes from humans, because it is the humans who had all these issues from which AI learned.
A lot of AI challenges are human challenges, just to summarize.
NY TIMES NONFICTION REVIEW Why Chelsea Manning Went to WikiLeaks, and What It Cost Her
In a new memoir, “README.txt,” the former military intelligence analyst tells her life story and explains her decision to blow the whistle on U.S. actions in the Middle East.
In a new memoir, Chelsea Manning discusses her 2013 court-martial for revealing military secrets, as well as her gender transition and other details of her life.
Credit...Bert Van Den Broucke / Photonews via Getty Images
On a Georgetown University stage in early 2017, the most famous government leaker of the previous century expressed his fervent and longstanding wish.
“Something like the Pentagon Papers should be coming out several times a year,” Daniel Ellsberg, then 85, told the audience at a free-speech symposium. There is far too much government secrecy keeping important information from the American public, a reality that makes courageous whistle-blowers a necessity, asserted the former military analyst who in 1971 had given The New York Times thousands of pages of classified documents — the secret history of America’s role in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg, though he was charged under the Espionage Act, escaped being locked up for life because of legal technicalities. In that onstage appearance 46 years after the Pentagon Papers were published, he offered warm praise for Chelsea Manning, another military insider turned whistle-blower, whose prison sentence had been commuted by President Obama shortly before he left office.
But any potential leaker who reads Manning’s new memoir would be extremely unlikely to step forward in fulfillment of Ellsberg’s wish. “README.txt” describes in painful, affecting detail what happened as a result of the U.S. Army intelligence analyst’s decision in 2010, while still in her early 20s, to alert the world — largely through illegally transferring huge amounts of classified or sensitive military data to WikiLeaks — to some portion of what really was happening in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I didn’t have an overarching ideological agenda,” she writes, “but I had a clear objective: I wanted to complicate the retrofitted, sanitized version of the war that was spreading like wildfire back home, where any questioning of a clear narrative was perceived as disloyal.” That she surely did, especially with the release of a grainy video from 2007 that showed an Apache helicopter airstrike that killed several Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in New Baghdad. “The most shocking thing about this video, in which innocent people are killed simply for being in the wrong place,” she writes, “is that everything about it was perfectly legal under the Geneva Conventions and our own rules of engagement.”
Arrested and removed from her post in Iraq in May 2010, after the leaks were traced to her, the analyst then known publicly as Pfc. Bradley Manning was put in solitary confinement in a Kuwaiti jail.
“It was like no prison cell I’d ever imagined,” she writes. “Inside the tent was an iron cage, sized for a large animal.” Within weeks, she was so disoriented and unable to function that she had come to believe she would be in that cage forever: “My world had shrunk to an 8-by-8-foot metal jaw clenching around me.” It took a brutal toll on her mental and emotional well-being, already weakened by all she had seen and experienced in Iraq. “One day, I started to babble, to scream, to bang my head against the wall.”
In the outside world, far from the steel cage, the huge leak of classified documents hit hard. Every major media organization, led by The Guardian, The New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, was covering the disclosures. The embarrassment caused to world leaders by the meant-to-be-secret details of diplomatic cables (including diplomats’ commentary on their host nations and their leadership) caused Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian, to say that, with the exception of a war or a terrorist attack, “I’ve never known a story that created such mayhem.”
Manning intends this memoir to explain and to instruct — that much is clear from its title. To the cyber-savvy, “README” is an old-school internet term for an explanatory file, a kind of road map accompanying a package of software, so dubbed to make it easy to find. This particular “README” has hard lessons to impart; it is less instruction manual than frightening cautionary tale.
Manning in 2013, en route to the hearing where her name was legally changed.
Credit...Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Manning weaves together her role as a whistle-blower — utterly disillusioned by what she saw and experienced in the military — with her sad personal story. Her childhood was marred by a violent father’s physical and emotional abuse, as well as her mother’s tragic alcoholism. The narrator’s gender dysphoria, which began to play out in childhood and culminated in her triumphant coming out as a woman while still in prison, brought about soul-deadening nastiness and physical attacks by schoolmates and military colleagues alike. Especially appalling was the treatment from some Army higher-ups, who — while supposedly adhering to the often cruel “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules of the time — took every opportunity to bully and mock the talented young analyst.
Though many of the facts here were previously known through extensive news reporting over more than a decade, Manning’s memoir fills in some blanks and, most important, adds a searing personal element. The writing in “README.txt” is vivid, as its narrative moves from an Oklahoma childhood to community college in Maryland to an unpredictable decision to enlist — brought about partly by dire financial need — which eventually brought her to the Middle East. She describes the Army base east of Baghdad where she was first stationed in late 2009, with its constant acrid smell, as “bleak and beige and above all boring.”
Manning conjures, too, a different kind of torture: her court-martial, during much of which she was convinced she would be locked up for life. Lawyers might have reached a plea deal if Manning had been willing to admit to malicious intent but she resisted the pressure to make what she called a “moral compromise.” She disputed, all along, that aiding the enemy was either the intention or the result of her actions, and she refers to the former defense secretary Robert Gates’s view, stated at a news conference, that the leaked information did no significant harm to U.S. foreign policy.
Although Manning’s tale is troubling to read, it manages to be uplifting as well. In addition to describing the abuse she was so often subjected to, she writes of small but touching acts of kindness, as when one prison barber — knowing how much she detested the ritual buzz-cutting of her hair because it meant she was being treated as a man — asked if he could shape her eyebrows. From then on, “he’d thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was.” That she and her advocates managed to get the U.S. military to agree to her gender-transitioning in prison, including providing hormone therapy, is remarkable; her sense of accomplishment in becoming her true self gives the memoir something of a redemptive ending.
Was she right to blow the whistle? That’s a debate that rages around the leaks of classified material by Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Thomas Drake and others. Accusations of treason will never cease, nor will the claims, however dubious, that there’s a better way to follow one’s conscience — either by advocating for change, legally and conscientiously, from the inside, or by leaving an organization to become an activist. No one who has followed those cases, however, can argue that the punishments have not been harsh. Reality Winner, who leaked a single classified report, was sent away for years as President Trump (himself no scrupulous handler of classified information, we now know) found the scapegoat for leaking to the press that he wanted. It seemed a fulfillment of what the F.B.I. director James B. Comey had earlier promised him: “a head on a pike” to make the point that leaking is unacceptable.
Was it all worthwhile? On that Georgetown stage, Daniel Ellsberg reflected, “Manning and Snowden and I all thought the same words, which I heard them say: ‘No one else was going to do it, someone had to do it — so I did it.’”
Manning describes what she did as “an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civil disobedience,” and as an important American tradition. It is one that often, and certainly in her case, comes at a high price.
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor at The Times from 2012 to 2016, is a former media columnist for The Washington Post and the author, most recently, of “Newsroom Confidential.”
Hear why Chelsea Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks
In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, former US Army soldier and whistleblower Chelsea Manning described her new tell-all memoir and why she chose to leak 750 classified documents to WikiLeaks.
A memoir in which everything is classified and nothing is secret
Chelsea Manning’s “README.txt: A Memoir” refuses the confessional mode — and offers something more radical in its place
Review by Jordy Rosenberg October 18, 2022 Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, was convicted in 2013 for leaking military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. Her sentence was commuted in 2017. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
When we meet Chelsea Manning in the electrifying opening of her new memoir, “README.txt,” she is 22 years old, on leave from a deployment in Iraq and attempting to upload classified documents to WikiLeaks from a Barnes & Noble computer with a guttering internet connection. Downing a triple grande mocha in a Maryland mall while wrestling with a cumbersome upload to a website she’d only recently learned about had not been Manning’s first choice for releasing this information. She’d initially tried to speak with various news outlets. No one bit. She then planned to go directly to the Politico offices in Northern Virginia, only to be derailed by a historic blizzard.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
So, due to redeploy in less than 24 hours, Manning white-knuckled it through unplowed streets in search of a non-traceable computer from which to release the trove of documents she had emancipated from a military computer on DVDs “labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix.” We may know some facts of this story, but what we cannot know as an abstract fact — what we can only feel through Manning’s unfurling of narrative detail — is the texture of her choices: not only the anomie of an aughts chain bookstore, but the material conditions of a young millennial finding the cracks in the smooth, implacable face of mall culture and the doldrums of a major recession.
The arc of “README.txt” reaches back from here, then forward again, spanning Manning’s early years in Oklahoma City, enlistment in the military, deployment to Iraq, trials and incarceration, public announcement of herself as transgender, and finally her commutation. In May 2010, Manning was arrested for disclosing military and diplomatic documents that included, as the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, “evidence of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. attempts to cover up the CIA torture program, and other matters of public interest.” Manning was incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and sentenced to 35 years. Her imprisonment included long periods in solitary confinement and other forms of severe and inhumane punishment, including the denial of gender-affirming hormones. In 2015, after more than a year of litigation, and other forms of resistance by Manning herself, including a hunger strike, Manning received hormone treatment. Responding to massive public pressure, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, and she was released on May 17, 2017.
In revisiting these events, “README.txt” serves as an insider confessional turned inside out for the 21st century. The perverse secret of our era, one that Manning details in multiple surreal encounters with military bureaucracy, is that everything is already known. Manning is canny in her refusal to simply embrace the confessional mode often demanded of trans writers and whistleblowers alike. Other insider memoirs may open with men in power suits stalking through the halls of the Pentagon while poring over “For the President’s Eyes Only” documents. But Manning’s opens onto the hellscape of the post-2008 financial crash. The hushed sublimity of the halls of the Rand Corp. circa 1970 has given way. In 2010 the distinction between the crucibles of power and the strip mall has dissolved in a monochromatic late-capitalist soup, or something like what critic Anna Kornbluh terms “Fifty Billion Shades of Gray.”
This world is Manning’s milieu, and her evocation of it is agile and granular. It matters that “README.txt” begins in a Barnes & Noble. Manning’s scene of whistleblowing isn’t the scowling apple-pie-faced consternation of a James Spader, Matt Damon or Adam Driver. It’s Manning, exhausted and precarious, darting between parking lots and coffee shops with a thumb drive and a set of headphones, hijacking and rerouting power from deep within the heart not of the Rand Corp. but a chain store. Treading water in a sea of mass-market books and muffins, Manning conducts a pitched battle against the mass-marketization of death.
In the world to which Manning has access, everything is classified and nothing is secret. Not Manning’s gayness, which she reveals to her father only to be met with an “Okay?” as he throws up his hands. Not the contents of military computers in Iraq: “In our supposedly high-security office, people kept the passwords to laptops containing government secrets stuck to those same laptops, written on Post-its.” And not the “classified courier box” continuing a report on “significant actions” in Iraq that Manning is asked to create “for internal purposes only.” When Manning turned over the report, the public affairs office “removed the classified stamps” and sent it directly to the Iraqi press. The “classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe,” Manning writes. “It exists to control the media.
Non-confession is an apt approach to this American feint, whereby imperial aggression is alternately cloistered and flaunted at will. And anyway, what other kind of memoir could be written by someone whose life has been made so extensively, excruciatingly public? Manning’s tremendous bravery, much of the information she released, and the ways in which she was punished and tortured in the wake of her disclosures are all a matter of extremely public record. As Manning puts it, “Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully … for bringing to light the truth about its own actions.”
So disclosure isn’t the road she travels in this memoir. Instead, she highlights the extent to which she’s chosen not to address some aspects of her story that “the media has made public”: “I have already faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest,” she says. “I am uninterested in facing them again.” Manning’s memoir may thus give us less, not more, of what we may think we know about her. But this is an artful refusal, and an important one.
As a non-confession, “README.txt” functions in part to correct the ways Manning was compelled to frame her identity in the context of her legal travails. She articulates regret about how her gender was made to serve a particular narrative function for her legal case: “My legal team used everything it could, including arguing that gender identity had pushed me to a breaking point. This strategy continues to weigh on me,” she writes. “I worried that the argument we were forced to make gave ammunition to those who want to pathologize trans people.” Manning’s memoir decompresses the false equivalences that have been required of her and reconstructs the epiphanies that cemented her political convictions. One key moment comes in 2008, when Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage in California, passes while Manning is training as an analyst at Fort Drum in New York. “This was my worldview shattering,” she writes. “My whole life, I’d been told that things were always going to get better … that liberal society meant slow but steady ‘progress’ toward democratic inclusion.” This moment is transformative: “My intellectual and political life can be divided into pre- and post-Proposition 8. It made me think long and hard about my blind faith in nationalism.”
While the military still paints leakers as perverts (“nuts and sluts,” as Manning tells us), queerness and transness do not necessarily put anyone at odds with the state, as we well know from the proliferation of rainbow-garnished police cars and fighter jets during Pride Month. Manning’s memoir reckons with this complex relationship of sex and gender to political radicalism, a legacy fraught with Cold War demonization and red-baiting, by showing us the process of her political bildung — that is, the way she came to be herself, especially as Proposition 8 opened a fissure around nationalism for her. But she also shows us how her experiences with homelessness, familial estrangement, sub-minimum-wage jobs and other forms of precarity opened the fissure wider. She is right to be concerned about the ways in which transness has been made to carry the whole weight of her actions. And because it is a memoir and not a legal brief, “README.txt” can refract the vexations of this tangled history while allowing the reader to experience Manning’s layered feelings about these issues.
Late in the book, Manning charts her organization of and involvement in a prison strike at Leavenworth. Her absorbing account begins with her years-long struggle to receive hormones. While awaiting the outcome of this legal battle, Manning builds friendships within the prison, notably with the barbers. Though she is required to receive biweekly haircuts, the barbers treat her kindly, soothing her through the violent, dysphoria-inducing procedure, even improvising to provide the feel of a salon experience: “Sometimes they’d wash my hair to make it feel more like a beauty appointment than a ritual shearing.” Are all these barbers queer and trans? Do they treat her gently because they are bolstering their own ranks? No. “The other inmates were supportive of my pursuit of gender reassignment, not necessarily because they believed deeply in trans rights, but because compelling the government to allow me to take hormones was fighting back against the prison. A victory for me would be a victory for prisoners.”
Just as the prison barbers support Manning through the torment of a forced haircut, she stakes her own welfare with the welfare of the rest of the incarcerated population, organizing a general strike against the guards’ arbitrary disruption of mealtime. The narrative progression that unfolds over these pages forms a sublime arc within the memoir. These sections give us a peek into Manning’s political passions and allow us to experience the feelings that have informed her decisions to stand in solidarity with others. For serious legal reasons, Manning simply cannot say certain things about her actions around the WikiLeaks releases (indeed, sections are still classified and blacked out). But this Leavenworth section carries the broad, revolutionary affect that the rest of the memoir must be more cautious around.
Chelsea Manning, author of "README.txt: A Memoir" (Matt Barnes)
Together with the Barnes & Noble disclosure sequence and the events that follow, Manning’s description of the prison strike makes up the heart of her memoir. The two narratives can be read as binary stars, poles of a single, embedded fable in which we don’t have to adjudicate between our passions or parse them for a legal argument. Instead, we can just, as Angela Davis reminded us in a speech that celebrated Manning’s then-impending release, aspire to freedom for all political prisoners. Jordy Rosenberg is a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of the novel “Confessions of the Fox” and the forthcoming hybrid work “The Day Unravels What the Night Has Wove"
'Changed my life': Trans teen testifies against nation's first ban on gender-affirming care
Jo Yurcaba - Yesterday
The nation’s first trial on a state law that restricts gender-affirming medical care for minors began in Arkansas this week and, after emotional testimony, the plaintiffs rested their case Wednesday.
The Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act bars minors in the state from receiving certain gender-affirming medical care, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, vetoed the bill in April, calling it a “vast government overreach,” but the Legislature overrode the veto, making Arkansas the first in the country to pass a restriction on transition-related health care.
“Nothing about this law prohibits someone after the age of 18 from making this decision,” she said. “What we’re doing in Arkansas is protecting children from life-altering, permanent decisions.”
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge speaks to reporters at Trump Tower
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in May on behalf of four trangsgender youths and their parents, as well as two physicians who provide gender-affirming care. In July, about a week before it was slated to take effect, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction.
This week, ACLU attorneys made their case against the law in three days of testimony from the families and doctors they are representing, as well as other experts.
Evidence for gender-affirming care
The ACLU called nearly half- dozen medical experts — including plaintiffs Dr. Michele Hutchinson, a pediatric endocrinologist who founded the Gender Spectrum clinic at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, and Dr. Kathryn Stambough, a gynecologist who also works in the Gender Spectrum clinic — to explain how gender-affirming medical care works, its benefits and the risks of abruptly stopping it should a law like Arkansas’ be allowed to take effect.
On Monday, Dr. Dan Karasic, a psychiatrist who has worked with transgender people for nearly three decades, responded to arguments made against gender-affirming care for minors, according to Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the ACLU. For example, critics of the care often cite controversial research that found that most trans youth come to identify with their birth sex as they get older.
Karasic said that, in his experience treating thousands of trans people, none of his patients have detransitioned, or stopped identifying as trans.
Dr. Anne Adkins, an endocrinologist who practiced at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, explained to the court the nature of puberty blockers, which are generally recommended to trans youth at the onset of puberty to delay it, and hormone therapy, such as estrogen or testosterone, which is most often prescribed to teenagers.
During the cross-examination of Adkins, the state focused on the side effects of the medications, according to KARK-TV, an NBC affiliate based in Little Rock, Arkansas. Adkins said side effects can include blood clots, liver dysfunction, irregular ovulation, weight gain, slowed down calcium production and a delayed growth rate, KARK reported. Adkins also said side effects are rare and closely monitored.
“In general, my patients do quite well,” she said of puberty blockers, KARK reported. “They’re able to focus on the important parts of growing up.”
On Wednesday, the ACLU called Dr. Michele Hutchinson, who treated three of the teens who are also plaintiffs in the suit, and walked the court through her usual treatment protocol. She said that she will usually see patients for 10 months or more before recommending a treatment, according to KARK.
She said that after the bill passed the Arkansas House of Representatives in the spring, four of her patients attempted suicide, and she’s worried about what will happen should the law go into effect.
“Forcing a kid to wait until they’re 18, I just worry these kids are going to hurt themselves,” she said, according to KARK.
Stambough said she has the same fears. “Not every patient could make it to 18,” she said. ‘Changed my life for the better’
The parents of four transgender young people represented in the suit spoke to how gender-affirming care has improved their children’s lives.
Donnie Saxton of Vilonia, Arkansas, said his 17-year-old son, Parker, became “a new person” after coming out as trans and receiving gender-affirming medical care, according to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
“A complete turnaround of the broken, anxious, depressed shell that he was before testosterone. It’s amazing. Truly amazing,” he said.
He said Parker now has “huge confidence” and laughed while adding, “almost too much at times, but that’s good. He’s kind of like his old dad, so that’s good.”
In response to a question about what would happen if Parker lost access to his care, Saxton said, “I’m not going to think about that,” according to Branstetter at the ACLU.
Aaron Jennen, a U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, became emotional during his testimony about his 17-year-old daughter, Sabrina, local radio station KUAR reported.
He said “it’s not an option” for Sabrina to stop the hormone therapy she began in January 2021.
“I worry about her withdrawing back into the person she was before she started it, a person who was unhappy, who said things to her mother and me like, ‘What’s the point of life?’ and things like, ‘I don’t see a future for myself,’” Jennen said, according to KUAR.
The last plaintiff to take the stand on Wednesday was 17-year-old Dylan Brandt, who will be the only transgender person to testify during the trial, according to Branstetter.
He said he started hormone therapy in August 2020 and that he’s much happier and more confident in himself.
“My outside finally matches the way I feel on the inside,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “I have my days, but for the most part this has changed my life for the better. I can look in the mirror and be OK with the way I look and it feels pretty great.”
He said that if the law is allowed to take effect, he and his mother Joanna would have to move.
“It would mean uprooting our entire lives, everything that we have here,” he said.
Chase Strangio, one of the ACLU attorneys arguing the case, said that he called Brandt, his “hero,” to the stand so that the court could hear from a trans person.
“We will reclaim the truth of our lives from these insidious and noxious debates,” Strangio said.
The defense will begin its arguments Friday, according to Branstetter.
Three other states — Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee — have also passed measures restricting gender-affirming care for minors. Arizona’s law doesn’t take effect until May 2023, and a federal judge blocked part of Alabama’s law this past May. Similar laws have been proposed in at least 19 other states this year, according to the ACLU.
Decolonizing Queer Identities in Latin America: Latinx vs. Latine Dylan Muñoz - 5h ago
A person with a rainbow over their shirt and in the background
Pronouns matter. While discussing the use of personal pronouns has been a topic of debate over the past few years when it comes to common pronouns like he/him, she/her and they/them, it’s also important to unpack and consider the history and preferences of the people who use them. This brings us to the case of the term “Latinx” for the Latin American queer community.
Many argue that issues surrounding the use of pronouns stem from a heteronormative system of identities established by cisgender men. Others believe traditional binary terms to be sufficient. The most common pronouns to date are he/him, she/her and they/them. While there are those who may refute the existence of they/them as a viable pronoun, all I have to say is look at the centuries of English literature then come back and talk to me.
It begs the question though: are these terms universal by their English definition? What we know is that gender-neutral terms have been used since at least the 1300s. But how do gender-neutral pronouns fit when it comes to the Latin American community? Let’s explore.
The introduction of “Latinx”
When the term “Latinx” started popping up across the United States in the mid 2000s, people started to question its origins, significance and, by virtue, its definition. “Latinx” was first used by people and organizations as a way to encompass all those who identified as non-binary or trans within the Latin community. With over 37 million Mexicans living in the United States alone, you would think this new pronoun would catch on quickly, right? Well, it didn’t.
Like most countries in the Global South, Latin America has seen its share of challenges in a post-colonial world. And like many other countries, they continue to navigate through the process of dismantling outdated customs introduced by settlers and religious factions.
…while the term Latinx was introduced with good intentions, the movement neglected to do one simple thing: ask the people
One of outdated customs is the frustratingly persistent “macho” culture. Macho or machismo culture is an inherently misogynistic behavioural pattern towards those that Latino men believe to be “inferior.” That could be a laundry list of people, however queer people seem to get the brunt of that aggression.
In contrast, through the progression of Catholicism in Latin America, it has introduced a regressive understanding that one’s identity can only be binary, eliminating the acknowledgement of those who do not conform. These two major obstacles have made it extremely difficult to forward any significant change for trans and non-binary rights in LATAM, despite other members of the queer community seeing some progress.
So, while the term Latinx was introduced with good intentions, the movement neglected to do one simple thing: ask the people.
Did these organizations consult enough people within the community? Did these organizations reach out to multi-generational Latin Americans to get their take? Did they even consider what the use of “x” looks like in Spanish grammar? I’m going to lean on the side of no on these.
Structurally, the use of “x” in Latinx is not compatible with conventional Spanish grammar. By consequence, promoting the use of Latinx to non-English speakers has proved to be an immovable task with many refuting the purpose of the cause all together. It comes across as irresponsible to the movement at large, when the issue could have been alleviated by having simply consulted impacted groups.
So how do queer Latin Americans work to decolonize this grammatical misstep?
Phonetically, grammatically and structurally, Latine just makes more sense.
Latin American youth leaders across Central and South America have connected over the past decade to reform the use of Latinx into something that is better representative of the language and culture.
The result of these discussions introduced the term “Latine” – an organic alternative to Latinx that fills an immense gap in the language barrier. Phonetically, grammatically and structurally, Latine just makes more sense.
The movement to implement Latine has done the work of consulting communities while taking considerations of traditional language and culture. Now if only Gen Z TikTokers would get on board, Latine would be more than just a trend, but commonplace.
So, while the gendered terms of Latino and Latina continue to be widely used (and misused), many in the new generation hopes Latine will catch on and become just as equally respected and understood as its gendered counterparts.
"In the past, we've used cement products. And cement products have their issues. They can crack and become porous over time and they can leak," said Fred Wassmuth, a researcher with InnoTech Alberta.
But inside the Calgary laboratory, Wassmuth and his team are trying out alternatives.
"We've come up with approximately 50 different products that have been recommended at one time or another for shutting off wells or fixing leaks in leaky wellbores," said Wassmuth.
The inventory includes a variety of resins, geopolymers and other materials - tested for things like strength, endurance and shrinkage - to see how they stand up to the highly corrosive environment standard in Alberta wellbores.
"This isn't going to happen with one testing protocol. It's going to be a package of work that goes on and on until we have a menu of appropriate products that are proven and well-defined with where they should be applied in the wellbore," said engineer and project partner Gerry Boyer.
If successful, cement alternatives could be used for thousands of remediations in Alberta every year - with the potential to save the province billions of dollars in interventions for leaking wells.
What's more, the new materials have the potential to reign in fugitive emissions by hundreds of thousands of tonnes every year.
If successful, the technology could also be applied elsewhere.
"This isn't only a local problem. It's an international problem. We can potentially sell our services and techniques nationally and internationally," said Wassmuth.
There's hope the first products will be ready for market sometime next year.
