Fastest Speed for Writing Embedded Memory

Researchers Develop 128Mb STT-MRAM with World’s Fastest Write Speed for Embedded Memory

December 28, 2018 -- A research team, led by Professor Tetsuo Endoh at Tohoku University, has successfully developed 128Mb-density STT-MRAM (spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive random access memory) with a write speed of 14 ns for use in embedded memory applications, such as cache in IOT and AI. This is currently the world's fastest write speed for embedded memory application with a density over 100Mb and will pave the way for the mass-production of large capacity STT-MRAM.

STT-MRAM is capable of high-speed operation and consumes very little power as it retains data even when the power is off. Because of these features, STT-MRAM is gaining traction as the next-generation technology for applications such as embedded memory, main memory and logic. Three large semiconductor fabrication plants have announced that risk mass-production will begin in 2018.

As memory is a vital component of computer systems, handheld devices and storage, its performance and reliability are of great importance for green energy solutions.

The current capacity of STT-MRAM is ranged between 8Mb-40Mb. But to make STT-MRAM more practical, it is necessary to increase the memory density. The team at the Center for Innovative Integrated Electronic Systems (CIES) has increased the memory density of STT-MRAM by intensively developing STT-MRAMs in which magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) are integrated with CMOS. This will significantly reduce the power-consumption of embedded memory such as cache and eFlash memory.

MTJs were miniaturized through a series of process developments. To reduce the memory size needed for higher-density STT-MRAM, the MTJs were formed directly on via holes - small openings that allow a conductive connection between the different layers of a semiconductor device. By using the reduced size memory cell, the research group has designed 128Mb-density STT-MRAM and fabricated a chip.

In the fabricated chip, the researchers measured a write speed of subarray. As a result, high-speed operation with 14ns was demonstrated at a low power supply voltage of 1.2 V. To date, this is the fastest write speed operation in an STT-MRAM chip with a density over 100Mb in the world.

The results of this research were presented at the 2018 International Electron Devices Meeting held in San Francisco, U.S.A., on December 5, 2018.

       https://www.tohoku.ac.jp/en/press/128mb_stt_mram_worlds_fastest_write_speed.html

Snopes Fact Checking Site

Snopes, formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is one of the first online fact-checking websites. It has been termed a "well-regarded source for sorting out myths and rumors" on the internet. It has also been seen as a source for validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.

History of Snopes

In 1994, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com. Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, that mainly presented search results of user discussions. The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes predated the search engine concept where people could go to check facts by searches. David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) as a username in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.

In 2002, the site had become well known enough that a television pilot called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host. However, it did not air on major networks. Christopher Richmond and Drew Schoentrup later became owners with Mikkelson through a partnership with the founders of a company called Proper Media. By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for the site "in several years" and David hired employees to assist him from Snopes.com's message board. The Mikkelsons divorced around that time, and Barbara no longer has an ownership stake in Snopes.com.

On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated a brokering agreement with Proper Media, the company that provides Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support. This prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav—the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com—started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations. They raised $500,000 in 24 hours. Later, in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending.

Main Site

Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and The New York Times. By March 2009, the site had more than 6 million visitors per month. Mikkelson runs the website out of his home in Tacoma, Washington.

Mikkelson has stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" when there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim.

Lost Legends

In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on the internet as authority, Snopes assembled a series of fabricated urban folklore tales that it terms "The Repository of Lost Legends". The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to the early 1990s definition of the word troll, meaning an Internet prank, of which David Mikkelson was a prominent practitioner.

Accuracy

Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist who has written a number of books on urban legends and modern folklore, considered the site so comprehensive in 2004 that he decided not to launch one of his own to similarly discuss the accuracy or various legends and rumors.

In 2012, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes' responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases. In 2012, The Florida Times-Union reported that About.com's urban legends researcher found a "consistent effort to provide even-handed analyses" and that Snopes' cited sources and numerous reputable analyses of its content confirm its accuracy. Mikkelson has said that the site receives more complaints of liberal bias than conservative bias, but added that the same debunking standards are applied to all political urban legends.

Funding

Critics of the site have falsely asserted that it is funded by businessman and philanthropist George Soros, or linked sites. Snopes said in 2016 that its revenue was derived from advertising. In 2016, it also received an award of $75,000 from the James Randi Educational Foundation, an organization formed to debunk paranormal claims. In 2017, it raised approximately $700,000 from a crowd-sourced GoFundMe effort and received $100,000 from Facebook as a part of a fact-checking partnership.

Traffic and Users

As of December 2017, Snopes.com's web traffic rank in the world stood at 3,798 with approximately 72% originating from the U.S. with web traffic declining from previous months. As of April 2017, Snopes.com's Alexa rating was 1,794. Approximately 80% of its visitors originate from within the United States. In 2017, the site attracted 20 million unique visitors in one month.

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

Kipling's Mowgli Explained

Mowgli /ˈmaʊɡli/ is a fictional character and the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book stories. He is a naked feral child from the Pench area in Seoni, India, who originally appeared in Kipling's short story "In the Rukh" (collected in Many Inventions, 1893) and then went on to become the most prominent and memorable character in his collections The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (1894–1895), which also featured stories about other characters.

                                                           Mowgli illustration by John

                                                            Lockwood Kipling in 1895 

The Name Mowgli

In the stories, the name Mowgli is said to mean "frog", describing his lack of fur. Kipling made up the name, and it "does not mean 'frog' in any language other than the language of the forest."

Kipling stated that the first syllable of "Mowgli" should rhyme with "cow".

Kipling’s Mowgli Stories

The Mowgli stories, including "In the Rukh", were first collected in chronological order in one volume as The Works of Rudyard Kipling Volume VII: The Jungle Book (1907) (Volume VIII of this series contained the non-Mowgli stories from the Jungle Books), and subsequently in All the Mowgli Stories (1933).

"In the Rukh" describes how Gisborne, an English forest ranger in the Pench area in Seoni at the time of the British Raj, discovers a young man named Mowgli, who has extraordinary skills in hunting, tracking, and driving wild animals (with the help of his wolf brothers). He asks him to join the forestry service. Mueller, the head of the Department of Woods and Forests of India as well as Gisborn's boss, meets Mowgli, checks his elbows and knees, noting the callouses and scars, and figures Mowgli is not using magic or demons, having seen a similar case in 30 years of service. Muller also offers Mowgli to join the service, to which Mowgli agrees. Later, Gisborne learns the reason for Mowgli's almost superhuman talents; he was raised by a pack of wolves in the jungle (explaining the scars on his elbows and knees from going on all fours). Mowgli marries the daughter of Gisborne's butler, Abdul Gafur. By the end of the story, Mowgli has a son and is back to living with his wolf brothers.

Kipling then proceeded to write the stories of Mowgli's childhood in detail in The Jungle Book. Lost by his parents as a baby in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, he is adopted by the Wolf Mother (Raksha) and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli (frog) because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still. Shere Khan the tiger demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with the pack, hunting with his brother wolves. In the pack, Mowgli learns he is able to stare down any wolf, and his unique ability to remove the painful thorns from the paws of his brothers is deeply appreciated as well.

Bagheera, the black panther, befriends Mowgli because both he and Mowgli have parallel childhood experiences; as Bagheera often mentions, he was "raised in the King's cages at Oodeypore" from a cub, and thus knows the ways of man. Baloo the bear, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in "The Law of the Jungle".

Shere Khan continues to regard Mowgli as fair game, but eventually Mowgli finds a weapon he can use against the tiger - fire. After driving off Shere Khan, Mowgli goes to a human village where he is adopted by Messua and her husband, whose own son Nathoo was also taken by a tiger. It is uncertain if Mowgli is actually the returned Nathoo, although it is stated in "Tiger! Tiger!" that the tiger who carried off Messua's son Messua would like to believe that her son has returned, however, she herself realises that this is unlikely.

While herding buffalo for the village, Mowgli learns that the tiger is still planning to kill him, so with the aid of two wolves, he traps Shere Khan in a ravine where the buffalo trample him. The tiger dies and Mowgli sets to skin him. After being cast out of the village after being accused of witchcraft, Mowgli returns to the jungle with Shere Khan's hide and reunites with his wolf family.

In later stories in The Jungle Book's sequel, The Second Jungle Book, Mowgli learns that the villagers are planning to kill Messua and her husband for harboring him. He rescues them and sends elephants, water buffaloes, and other animals to trample the village and it's fields to the ground. Later, finds and then discards an ancient treasure ("The King's Ankus") not realising it is so valuable that men would kill to own it. With the aid of Kaa the python, he leads the wolves in a war against the Dhole ("Red Dog").

Finally, Mowgli stumbles across the village where his adopted human mother (Messua) is now living, which forces him to come to terms with his humanity and decide whether to rejoin his fellow humans in "The Spring Running".

Influences Upon Other Works

Only six years after the first publication of The Jungle Book, E. Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods (1899) included a passage in which some children act out a scene from the book.

Mowgli has been cited as a major influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs who created and developed the character Tarzan. Mowgli was also an influence for a number of other "wild boy" characters.

Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson used the Mowgli stories as the basis for their humorous 1957 science fiction short story "Full Pack (Hokas Wild)". This is one of a series featuring a teddy bear-like race called Hokas who enjoy human literature but cannot quite grasp the distinction between fact and fiction. In this story, a group of Hokas get hold of a copy of The Jungle Book and begin to act it out, enlisting the help of a human boy to play Mowgli. The boy's mother, who is a little bemused to see teddy bears trying to act like wolves, tags along to try to keep him (and the Hokas) out of trouble. The situation is complicated by the arrival of three alien diplomats who just happen to resemble a monkey, a tiger and a snake. This story appears in the collection Hokas Pokas! (1998) ( ISBN 0-671-57858-8), and is also available online.

                                       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowgli
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Kipling's first Mowgli story, "In the Rukh," is for adults and not for children.  It was written in 1893 and is available at http://www.telelib.com/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/ManyInventions/rukh.html

 

Boeing 314 Clipper

The Boeing 314 Clipper was a long-range flying boat produced by the Boeing Airplane Company between 1938 and 1941. One of the largest aircraft of the time, it used the massive wing of Boeing’s earlier XB-15 bomber prototype to achieve the range necessary for flights across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Twelve Clippers were built; nine were brought into service for Pan Am.

                                                         Boeing 314 Clipper flying low

Design and Development

Pan American had requested a flying boat with unprecedented range that could augment the airline's trans-Pacific Martin M-130. Boeing's bid was successful and on July 21, 1936, Pan American signed a contract for six. Boeing engineers adapted the cancelled XB-15's 149 ft (45 m) wing, and replaced the 850 hp (630 kW) Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp radial engines with the 1,600 hp (1,200 kW) Wright Twin Cyclone. Pan Am ordered six more aircraft with increased engine power and capacity for 77 daytime passengers as the Boeing 314A.

The huge flying boat was assembled at Boeing's Plant 1 on the Duwamish River in Seattle, and towed to Elliott Bay for taxi and flight tests. The first flight was on June 7, 1938, piloted by Edmund T. "Eddie" Allen. At first the aircraft had a single vertical tail, and Allen found he had inadequate directional control. The aircraft returned to the factory and was fitted with the endplates on the ends of the horizontal tail in place of the single vertical fin. This too was found to be lacking and finally the centerline vertical fin was restored, after which the aircraft flew satisfactorily.

The 314 used a series of heavy ribs and spars to create a robust fuselage and cantilevered wing, eliminating the need for external drag-inducing struts to brace the wings. Boeing also incorporated Dornier-style sponsons into the hull structure. The sponsons, broad lateral extensions at the waterline on both sides of the hull, served several purposes: they provided a wide platform to stabilize the craft while floating on water, they acted as an entryway for passengers boarding the flying boat, and they possessed intentional shaping to contribute additional aerodynamic lift in flight. Passengers and their baggage were weighed, with each passenger allowed up to 77 pounds (35 kg) free baggage allowance (in the later 314 series) but then charged $3.25 per pound ($7.2/kg) (equivalent to $57 in 2017) for exceeding the limit. To fly the long ranges needed for trans-Pacific service, the 314 carried 4,246 US gallons (16,070 l; 3,536 imp gal) of gasoline. The later 314A model carried a further 1,200 US gallons (4,500 l; 1,000 imp gal). A capacity of 300 US gallons (1,100 l; 250 imp gal) of oil was required for operation of the radial engines.

Pan Am's "Clippers" were built for "one-class" luxury air travel, a necessity given the long duration of transoceanic flights. The seats could be converted into 36 bunks for overnight accommodation; with a cruising speed of 188 miles per hour (303 km/h) (typically flights at maximum gross weight were flown at 155 miles per hour (249 km/h)) in 1940 Pan Am's schedule San Francisco to Honolulu was 19 hours. The 314s had a lounge and dining area, and the galleys were crewed by chefs from four-star hotels. Men and women were provided with separate dressing rooms, and white-coated stewards served five and six-course meals with gleaming silver service. The standard of luxury on Pan American's Boeing 314s has rarely been matched on heavier-than-air transport since then; they were a form of travel for the super-rich, priced at $675 (equivalent to $12,000 in 2017) return from New York to Southampton. Most of the flights were transpacific, with a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Hong Kong via the "stepping-stone" islands posted at $760 (equivalent to $13,000 in 2017). The Pan Am Boeing 314 Clippers brought exotic destinations like the Far East within reach of air travelers and came to represent the romance of flight. Transatlantic flights to neutral Lisbon and Ireland continued after war broke out in Europe in September 1939 (and until 1945), but military passengers and cargoes necessarily got priority, and the service was more spartan.

Equally critical to the 314's success was the proficiency of its Pan Am flight crews, who were extremely skilled at long-distance, over-water flight operations and navigation. For training, many of the transpacific flights carried a second crew. Only the very best and most experienced flight crews were assigned Boeing 314 flying boat duty. Before coming aboard, all Pan Am captains as well as first and second officers had thousands of hours of flight time in other seaplanes and flying boats. Rigorous training in dead reckoning, timed turns, judging drift from sea current, astral navigation, and radio navigation were conducted. In conditions of poor or no visibility, pilots sometimes made successful landings at fogged-in harbors by landing out to sea, then taxiing the 314 into port.

Operational History

The first 314 flight on the San Francisco-Hong Kong route left Alameda on February 23, 1939 with regular passenger and Foreign Air Mail Route #14 service beginning on March 29. A one-way trip on this route took over six days to complete. Commercial passenger service lasted less than three years, ending when the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

The Yankee Clipper flew across the Atlantic on a route from Southampton to Port Washington, New York with intermediate stops at Foynes, Ireland, Botwood, Newfoundland, and Shediac, New Brunswick. The inaugural trip occurred on June 24, 1939.

The success of the six initial Clippers had led Pan Am to place an order for six improved 314A models to be delivered in 1941, with the goal of doubling the service on both Atlantic and Pacific routes. However, the fall of France in 1940 caused some doubt about whether the Atlantic service could continue; passenger numbers were already reduced due to the war, and if Spain or Portugal were to join the Axis, then the flights to Lisbon would be forced to stop. Pan Am began to consider reducing their order and, in August 1940, reached an agreement to sell three of the six under construction to the United Kingdom. The aircraft were to be operated by the British Overseas Airways Corporation and were primarily intended for the UK – West Africa route, as existing flying boats could not travel this route without stopping in Lisbon. The sale made a small net profit for Pan Am – priced at cost plus 5% – and provided a vital communications link for Britain, but was politically controversial. In order to arrange the sale, the junior minister Harold Balfour had to agree to the contract with no government approval, leading to stern disapproval from Winston Churchill and lengthy debate by the Cabinet over the propriety of the purchase. Churchill later flew on the Bristol and Berwick, which he praised intensely, adding to the Clippers’ fame during the war.

At the outbreak of the war in the Pacific in December 1941, the Pacific Clipper was en route to New Zealand from San Francisco. Rather than risk flying back to Honolulu and being shot down by Japanese fighters, it was directed to fly west to New York. Starting on December 8, 1941 at Auckland, New Zealand, the Pacific Clipper covered over 31,500 miles (50,694 km) via such exotic locales as Surabaya, Karachi, Bahrain, Khartoum and Leopoldville. The Pacific Clipper landed at Pan American's LaGuardia Field seaplane base at 7:12 on the morning of January 6, 1942, completing the first commercial plane flight to circumnavigate the world.

The Clipper fleet was pressed into military service during World War II, and the flying boats were used for ferrying personnel and equipment to the European and Pacific fronts. The aircraft were purchased by the War and Navy Departments and leased back to Pan Am for a dollar, with the understanding that all would be operated by the Navy once four-engined replacements for the Army's four Clippers were in service. Only the markings on the aircraft changed: the Clippers continued to be flown by their experienced Pan Am civilian crews. American military cargo was carried via Natal, Brazil to Liberia, to supply the British forces at Cairo and even the Russians, via Teheran. The Model 314 was then the only aircraft in the world that could make the 2,150-statute-mile (3,460 km) crossing over water, and was given the military designation C-98. Since the Pan Am pilots and crews had extensive expertise in using flying boats for extreme long-distance over-water flights, the company's pilots and navigators continued to serve as flight crew. In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled to the Casablanca Conference in a Pan-Am crewed Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper.

After the war, several Clippers were returned to Pan American hands. However, even before hostilities had ended, the Clipper had become obsolete. The flying boat's advantage had been that it didn't require long concrete runways, but during the war a great many such runways were built for heavy bombers. New long-range airliners such as the Lockheed Constellation and Douglas DC-4 were developed. The new landplanes were relatively easy to fly, and did not require the extensive pilot training programs mandated for seaplane operations. One of the 314's most experienced pilots said, "We were indeed glad to change to DC-4s, and I argued daily for eliminating all flying boats. The landplanes were much safer. No one in the operations department... had any idea of the hazards of flying boat operations. The main problem now was lack of the very high level of experience and competence required of seaplane pilots.”

Retirement of the 314 Seaplane

The last Pan Am 314 to be retired, the California Clipper NC18602, in 1946, had accumulated more than a million flight miles. Of the 12 Boeing 314 Clippers built three were lost to accidents, although only one of those resulted in fatalities: 24 passengers and crew aboard the Yankee Clipper NC18603 lost their lives in a landing accident at Cabo Ruivo Seaplane Base, in Lisbon, Portugal on February 22, 1943. Among that flight's passengers were prominent American author and war correspondent Benjamin Robertson, who was killed, and the American singer and actress Jane Froman, who was seriously injured.

Pan-Am's 314 was removed from scheduled service in 1946 and the seven serviceable B-314s were purchased by the start-up airline New World Airways. These sat at San Diego's Lindbergh Field for a long time before all were eventually sold for scrap in 1950. The last of the fleet, the Anzac Clipper NC18611(A), was resold and scrapped at Baltimore, Maryland in late 1951.

BOAC's 314As were withdrawn from the Baltimore-to-Bermuda route in January 1948, replaced by Lockheed Constellations flying from New York and Baltimore to Bermuda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_314_Clipper

Cheaper Hydrogen Catalyst

Researchers Use jiggly Jell-O to Make Powerful New Hydrogen Fuel Catalyst
By Kara Manke

December 13, 2018 -- A cheap and effective new catalyst developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, can generate hydrogen fuel from water just as efficiently as platinum, currently the best — but also most expensive — water-splitting catalyst out there.

The catalyst, which is composed of nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide, is manufactured using a self-assembly process that relies on a surprising ingredient: gelatin, the material that gives Jell-O its jiggle.

“Platinum is expensive, so it would be desirable to find other alternative materials to replace it,” said senior author Liwei Lin, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “We are actually using something similar to the Jell-O that you can eat as the foundation, and mixing it with some of the abundant earth elements to create an inexpensive new material for important catalytic reactions.”

The work appears in the Dec. 13 print edition of the journal Advanced Materials.

A zap of electricity can break apart the strong bonds that tie water molecules together, creating oxygen and hydrogen gas, the latter of which is an extremely valuable source of energy for powering hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen gas can also be used to help store energy from renewable yet intermittent energy sources like solar and wind power, which produce excess electricity when the sun shines or when the wind blows, but which go dormant on rainy or calm days.

But simply sticking an electrode in a glass of water is an extremely inefficient method of generating hydrogen gas. For the past 20 years, scientists have been searching for catalysts that can speed up this reaction, making it practical for large-scale use.

“The traditional way of using water gas to generate hydrogen still dominates in industry. However, this method produces carbon dioxide as byproduct,” said first author Xining Zang, who conducted the research as a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “Electrocatalytic hydrogen generation is growing in the past decade, following the global demand to lower emissions. Developing a highly efficient and low-cost catalyst for electrohydrolysis will bring profound technical, economical and societal benefit.”

To create the catalyst, the researchers followed a recipe nearly as simple as making Jell-O from a box. They mixed gelatin and a metal ion — either molybdenum, tungsten or cobalt — with water, and then let the mixture dry.

“We believe that as gelatin dries, it self-assembles layer by layer,” Lin said. “The metal ion is carried by the gelatin, so when the gelatin self-assembles, your metal ion is also arranged into these flat layers, and these flat sheets are what give Jell-O its characteristic mirror-like surface.”

Heating the mixture to 600 degrees Celsius triggers the metal ion to react with the carbon atoms in the gelatin, forming large, nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide. The unreacted gelatin burns away.

The researchers tested the efficiency of the catalysts by placing them in water and running an electric current through them. When stacked up against each other, molybdenum carbide split water the most efficiently, followed by tungsten carbide and then cobalt carbide, which didn’t form thin layers as well as the other two. Mixing molybdenum ions with a small amount of cobalt boosted the performance even more.

“It is possible that other forms of carbide may provide even better performance,” Lin said.

The two-dimensional shape of the catalyst is one of the reasons why it is so successful. That is because the water has to be in contact with the surface of the catalyst in order to do its job, and the large surface area of the sheets mean that the metal carbides are extremely efficient for their weight.

Because the recipe is so simple, it could easily be scaled up to produce large quantities of the catalyst, the researchers say.

“We found that the performance is very close to the best catalyst made of platinum and carbon, which is the gold standard in this area,” Lin said. “This means that we can replace the very expensive platinum with our material, which is made in a very scalable manufacturing process.”

Co-authors on the study are Lujie Yang, Buxuan Li and Minsong Wei of UC Berkeley, J. Nathan Hohman and Chenhui Zhu of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Wenshu Chen and Jiajun Gu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Xiaolong Zou and Jiaming Liang of the Shenzhen Institute; and Mohan Sanghasadasa of the U.S. Army RDECOM AMRDEC.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/12/13/researchers-use-jiggly-jell-o-to-make-powerful-new-hydrogen-fuel-catalyst/

Scorsese List of Horror Movies

[from The Daily Beast, October 28, 2009]

"When it comes to ripe old frighteners — or to any other overheated genre — Scorsese is the most ardent of proselytizers," writes the New Yorker's Anthony Lane in a review of that respected director's ripe-old-frightener-flavored Shutter Island, "so much so that I would prefer to hear him enthuse about Hammer Horror films, say, than to watch a Hammer Horror film." And though no Hammer productions appear on it, Scorsese, who often seems as much film enthusiast as filmmaker, has put together a solid list of his personal eleven scariest horror movies for The Daily Beast. At its very top we have Robert Wise's The Haunting, whose trailer you can watch above. Scorsese promisingly describes the story of the film, originally ballyhooed with the tagline “You may not believe in ghosts but you cannot deny terror!,” as "about the investigation of a house plagued by violently assaultive spirits." His full and frightening list runs as follows:

• The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
• Isle of the Dead (Val Lewton, 1945)
• The Univited (Lewis Allen, 1944)
• The Entity (Frank de Felitta, 1983)
• Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, 1945)
• The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
• The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
• The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
• Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
• The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

You can watch clips of all these movies over at The Daily Beast. With only 351 days until next Halloween, this should help you plan your next midcentury-centered, British-inflected horror movie marathon. (And if you simply can't get enough of the things, see also  Time Out London’s list of the 100 best horror films.) Such tastes make it no surprise to see a Hitchcock film make Scorsese's list; so much does Scorsese love Hitchcock's work — "one of my guiding lights,” he calls the maker of Psycho — that he once spoofed his own fanboyism in a commercial for Freixenet sparkling wine. For those who'd prefer a more conventional Scorsese-inspired binge watch, we've also featured his list of twelve favorite films overall and his list of 39 Essential Foreign Films. Whatever genre you favor, you could do much worse than taking his recommendations.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/martin-scorsese-names-the-11-scariest-horror-films-kubrick-hitchcock-tourneur-more.html

Apollo 8 (Fifty Years Ago)

Apollo 8, the second manned spaceflight mission flown in the United States Apollo space program, was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. The three-astronaut crew—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to witness and photograph an Earthrise and to escape the gravity of a celestial body. Apollo 8 was the third flight and the first crewed launch of the Saturn V rocket and was the first human spaceflight from the Kennedy Space Center, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Originally planned as the second crewed Apollo Lunar Module and command module test, to be flown in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in early 1969, the mission profile was changed in August 1968 to a more ambitious command-module-only lunar orbital flight to be flown in December, as the lunar module was not yet ready to make its first flight. Astronaut Jim McDivitt's crew, who were training to fly the first lunar module flight in low Earth orbit, became the crew for the Apollo 9 mission, and Borman's crew were moved to the Apollo 8 mission. This left Borman's crew with two to three months' less training and preparation time than originally planned, and replaced the planned lunar module training with translunar navigation training.

Apollo 8 took 68 hours (almost three days) to travel the distance to the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times over the course of twenty hours, during which they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first ten verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. president John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their spacecraft splashed down in the northern Pacific Ocean. The crew members were named Time magazine's "Men of the Year" for 1968 upon their return.

Background

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States was engaged in the Cold War, a geopolitical rivalry with the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. This unexpected success stoked fears and imaginations around the world. It not only demonstrated that the Soviet Union had the capability to deliver nuclear weapons over intercontinental distances, it challenged American claims of military, economic, and technological superiority. The launch precipitated the Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race.

President John F. Kennedy believed that not only was it in the national interest of the United States to be superior to other nations, but that the perception of American power was at least as important as the actuality. It was therefore intolerable to him for the Soviet Union to be more advanced in the field of space exploration. He was determined that the United States should compete, and sought a challenge that maximized its chances of winning.

The Soviet Union had better booster rockets, which meant that Kennedy needed to choose a goal that was beyond the capacity of the existing generation of rocketry, one where the US and Soviet Union would be starting from a position of equality – something spectacular, even if it could not be justified on military, economic, or scientific grounds. After consulting with his experts and advisors, he chose such a project: to land a man on the Moon and return him to the Earth. This project already had a name: Project Apollo.

An early and crucial decision was the adoption of lunar orbit rendezvous, under which a specialized spacecraft would land on the lunar surface. The Apollo spacecraft therefore had three primary components: a command module (CM) with a cabin for the three astronauts, and the only part that would return to Earth; a service module (SM) to provide the command module with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen, and water; and a two-stage lunar module (LM), which comprised a descent stage for landing on the Moon and an ascent stage to return the astronauts to lunar orbit. This configuration could be launched by the Saturn V rocket that was then under development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

Big Data = Science in Crisis

Scientists are facing a reproducibility crisis
The Conversation, December 13, 2018

There’s an increasing concern among scholars that, in many areas of science, famous published results tend to be impossible to reproduce.

This crisis can be severe. For example, in 2011, Bayer HealthCare reviewed 67 in-house projects and found that they could replicate less than 25 percent. Furthermore, over two-thirds of the projects had major inconsistencies. More recently, in November, an investigation of 28 major psychology papers found that only half could be replicated.

Similar findings are reported across other fields, including medicine and economics. These striking results put the credibility of all scientists in deep trouble.

What is causing this big problem? There are many contributing factors. As a statistician, I see huge issues with the way science is done in the era of big data. The reproducibility crisis is driven in part by invalid statistical analyses that are from data-driven hypotheses – the opposite of how things are traditionally done.

Scientific method

In a classical experiment, the statistician and scientist first together frame a hypothesis. Then scientists conduct experiments to collect data, which are subsequently analyzed by statisticians.

A famous example of this process is the “lady tasting tea” story. Back in the 1920s, at a party of academics, a woman claimed to be able to tell the difference in flavor if the tea or milk was added first in a cup. Statistician Ronald Fisher doubted that she had any such talent. He hypothesized that, out of eight cups of tea, prepared such that four cups had milk added first and the other four cups had tea added first, the number of correct guesses would follow a probability model called the hypergeometric distribution.

Such an experiment was done with eight cups of tea sent to the lady in a random order – and, according to legend, she categorized all eight correctly. This was strong evidence against Fisher’s hypothesis. The chances that the lady had achieved all correct answers through random guessing was an extremely low 1.4 percent.

That process – hypothesize, then gather data, then analyze – is rare in the big data era. Today’s technology can collect huge amounts of data, on the order of 2.5 exabytes a day.

While this is a good thing, science often develops at a much slower speed, and so researchers may not know how to dictate the right hypothesis in the analysis of data. For example, scientists can now collect tens of thousands of gene expressions from people, but it is very hard to decide whether one should include or exclude a particular gene in the hypothesis. In this case, it is appealing to form the hypothesis based on the data. While such hypotheses may appear compelling, conventional inferences from these hypotheses are generally invalid. This is because, in contrast to the “lady tasting tea” process, the order of building the hypothesis and seeing the data has reversed.

Data problems

Why can this reversion cause a big problem? Let’s consider a big data version of the tea lady — a “100 ladies tasting tea” example.

Suppose there are 100 ladies who cannot tell the difference between the tea, but take a guess after tasting all eight cups. There’s actually a 75.6 percent chance that at least one lady would luckily guess all of the orders correctly.

Now, if a scientist saw some lady with a surprising outcome of all correct cups and ran a statistical analysis for her with the same hypergeometric distribution above, then he might conclude that this lady had the ability to tell the difference between each cup. But this result isn’t reproducible. If the same lady did the experiment again she would very likely sort the cups wrongly – not getting as lucky as her first time – since she couldn’t really tell the difference between them.

This small example illustrates how scientists can “luckily” see interesting but spurious signals from a dataset. They may formulate hypotheses after these signals, then use the same dataset to draw the conclusions, claiming these signals are real. It may be a while before they discover that their conclusions are not reproducible. This problem is particularly common in big data analysis due to the large size of data, just by chance some spurious signals may “luckily” occur.

What’s worse, this process may allow scientists to manipulate the data to produce the most publishable result. Statisticians joke about such a practice: “If we torture data hard enough, they will tell you something.” However, is this “something” valid and reproducible? Probably not.

Stronger analyses

How can scientists avoid the above problem and achieve reproducible results in big data analysis? The answer is simple: Be more careful.

If scientists want reproducible results from data-driven hypotheses, then they need to carefully take the data-driven process into account in the analysis. Statisticians need to design new procedures that provide valid inferences. There are a few already underway.

Statistics is about the optimal way to extract information from data. By this nature, it is a field that evolves with the evolution of data. The problems of the big data era are just one example of such evolution. I think that scientists should embrace these changes, as they will lead to opportunities to develop of novel statistical techniques, which will in turn provide valid and interesting scientific discoveries.

https://theconversation.com/how-big-data-has-created-a-big-crisis-in-science-102835

 

Tramontina in Brazil

Tramontina is a Brazilian company that manufactures cookware, cutlery and home appliances headquartered in the city of Carlos Barbosa, Rio Grande do Sul.

                                                           Tramontina Pocket Knife

 

History of Tramontina

The company was founded in 1911 by Valentin Tramontina, the son of Italian immigrants from the village of Poffabro, town of Frisanco, in the Friuli region of northeast Italy. The current president is the entrepreneur Clovis Tramontina.

Today Tramontina is one of the most important companies of southern Brazil, having ten factory plants around Brazil, eight in Rio Grande do Sul, in the cities of Carlos Barbosa, Farroupilha, and Garibaldi, one in Belém, Pará, and the other in Recife, Pernambuco.

Product Lines

The company currently produces more than 17 thousand items intended for different segments. The company has a strong presence also in the international market, exporting to over 120 countries. The organization of the plants are given as follows:

1. Tramontina Belém, located in Belém / PA, produces wood furniture, cutting boards, wooden tool handles and utilities;
2. Tramontina cutlery, located in Carlos Barbosa / RS, produces knives (kitchen, professional sports), pocket knives, scissors, skewers, everyday cutlery, kitchen utensils and pots, shapes and aluminum non-stick sleepers;
3. Tramontina Delta, located in Recife / PE, produces plastic chairs and tables and toys;
4. Tramontina Eletrik, located in Carlos Barbosa / RS produces accessories for conduits, switches and sockets, junction boxes and aluminum accessories for electricity transmission networks;
5. Tramontina Farroupilha, located in Farroupilha / RS, producing cookware, tableware, cutlery and utensils for stainless steel kitchen;
6. Forjasul Canoas, located in Canoas / RS, produces forged eletroferragens for lines and electrical transmission up to 1000 kV, forged custom parts up to 100 kg (closed matrix) or up to 300 kg (partially forgings), hooks rod as DIN15401 with capacity up to 110 tons, eyelet hooks with capacity up to 50 tons, forged banking lathes, tools – axes and sledgehammers.
7. Tramontina Garibaldi, located in Garibaldi / RS produces hammers, hatchets, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, pincers, chisels, planes, levels, saws and handsaws;
8. Forjasul Woods, located in Crossroads of the South / RS produces pine panels, straight and corner shelves, bookcases and housewares.
9. Tramontina Multi, located in Carlos Barbosa / RS, produced wheelbarrows, rakes, hoes, picks, shovels, scythes, sickles, rakes, cavadeiras, lawn mowers, gardening and pruning shears;
10. Tramontina Teec, located in Carlos Barbosa / RS, produces sinks, vats, tanks, hoods, cooktops, ovens, trash cans, cachepôs and accessories.

Distribution Centers

In the domestic market, the company has six distribution centers – in Barueri, Belém, Carlos Barbosa, Goiânia, and Salvador, and four Regional Sales Offices – in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro.

Stores

The company has two retail stores in Rio Grande do Sul assembled exclusively with brand products, in the city of Carlos Barbosa and another in Farroupilha.

In 2013, Tramontina opened its first concept store in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the Tstore. The city was chosen, according to Clovis Tramontina, president of the company, due to its hosting of international proportion such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. According to him, the store will be a kind of laboratory where products will be offered first-hand to customers. In 2015 a second store in Brazil was inaugurated in Salvador, and the first outside Brazil was opened in Santiago, Chile.

International

Outside of Brazil, Tramontina has distribution and sales offices in South Africa, Germany, Australia, Chile, China, Singapore, Colombia, United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, United States, Honduras, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, Peru and United Kingdom.

Employment

Outside of Brazil, Tramontina has distribution and sales offices in South Africa, Germany, Australia, Chile, China, Singapore, Colombia, United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, United States, Honduras, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, Peru and United Kingdom.

Sports

Tramontina also sponsors Carlos Barbosa's Futsal team Associação Carlos Barbosa de Futsal (ACBF), the largest team in Brazil.

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

Xi JinPing Says Statism Works Fine

Terence Corcoran of Canada’s business publication Financial Post watched an entire 85 minute long speech by Xi JinPing about the economic success China has become over the last forty years.  Corcoran concludes that modern Chinese communism believes it has a superior economic/governmental model.  He further suspects that many in the west are open to this idea.  See:

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-chinas-most-dangerous-export-is-anti-market-ideology-and-were-buying-it

Mattis's Resignation Letter

Secretary of Defense [letterhead]

December 20, 2018

Dear Mr. President,

I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense which has allowed me to serve alongside our men and women of the Department in defense of our citizens and our ideals.

I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong U.S. global influence.

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world.
Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.

Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department’s interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February. Further, that a full transition to a new Secretary of Defense occurs well in advance of the transition of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September in order to ensure stability within the Department.

I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 DoD civilians receive undistracted attention of the Department at all times so that they can fulfill their critical, round-the-clock mission to protect the American people.

I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.
James N. Mattis
                           https://taskandpurpose.com/mattis-resignation-letter/

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930

The Tariff Act of 1930 (codified at 19 U.S.C. ch. 4), commonly known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff or Hawley–Smoot Tariff, was an Act implementing protectionist trade policies sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley and was signed into law on June 17, 1930. The act raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods.

                                                        Hawley and Smoot, April 1929

The tariffs under the act were the second-highest in the United States in 100 years, exceeded by a small margin by the Tariff of 1828. The Act and following retaliatory tariffs by America's trading partners were major factors of the reduction of American exports and imports by more than half during the Depression. Although economists disagree by how much, the consensus view among economists and economic historians is that "The passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.”

Sponsors and Legislative History

In 1922, Congress passed the Fordney–McCumber Tariff Act, which increased tariffs on imports.

The League of Nations' World Economic Conference met at Geneva in 1927, concluding in its final report: "the time has come to put an end to tariffs, and to move in the opposite direction." Vast debts and reparations could only be repaid through gold, services or goods; but the only items available on that scale were goods. However, many of the delegates' governments did the opposite, starting in 1928 when France passed a new tariff law and quota system.

By the late 1920s the economy of the United States had made exceptional gains in productivity due to electrification, which was a critical factor in mass production. Horses and mules had been replaced by motorcars, trucks and tractors. One-sixth to one-quarter of farmland, previously devoted to feeding horses and mules, was freed up, contributing to a surplus in farm produce. Although nominal and real wages had increased, they did not keep up with the productivity gains. As a result, the ability to produce exceeded market demand, a condition that was variously termed overproduction and underconsumption. Senator Smoot contended that raising the tariff on imports would alleviate the overproduction problem; however, the United States had actually been running a trade account surplus, and although manufactured goods imports were rising, manufactured exports were rising even faster. Food exports had been falling and were in trade account deficit; however the value of food imports were a little over half that of manufactured imports.

As the global economy entered the first stages of the Great Depression in late 1929, the US's main goal emerged to protect American jobs and farmers from foreign competition. Reed Smoot championed another tariff increase within the United States in 1929, which became the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Bill. In his memoirs, Smoot made it abundantly clear:

The world is paying for its ruthless destruction of life and property in the World War and for its failure to adjust purchasing power to productive capacity during the industrial revolution of the decade following the war.

Smoot was a Republican from Utah and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Willis C. Hawley, a Republican from Oregon, was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

When campaigning for president during 1928, one of Herbert Hoover's promises was to help beleaguered farmers by increasing tariffs on agricultural products. Hoover won, and Republicans maintained comfortable majorities in the House and the Senate during 1928. Hoover then asked Congress for an increase of tariff rates for agricultural goods and a decrease of rates for industrial goods.

The House passed a version of the act in May 1929, increasing tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods alike. The House bill passed on a vote of 264 to 147, with 244 Republicans and 20 Democrats voting in favor of the bill. The Senate debated its bill until March 1930, with many Senators trading votes based on their states' industries. The Senate bill passed on a vote of 44 to 42, with 39 Republicans and 5 Democrats voting in favor of the bill. The conference committee then aligned the two versions, largely by moving to the greater House tariffs. The House passed the conference bill on a vote of 222 to 153, with the support of 208 Republicans and 14 Democrats.

Opponents

In May 1930, a petition was signed by 1,028 economists in the United States asking President Hoover to veto the legislation, organized by Paul Douglas, Irving Fisher, James TFG Wood, Frank Graham, Ernest Patterson, Henry Seager, Frank Taussig, and Clair Wilcox. Automobile executive Henry Ford spent an evening at the White House trying to convince Hoover to veto the bill, calling it "an economic stupidity." J. P. Morgan's chief executive Thomas W. Lamont said he "almost went down on [his] knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot tariff."

Hoover opposed the bill and called it "vicious, extortionate, and obnoxious" because he felt it would undermine the commitment he had pledged to international cooperation. However, in spite of his opposition, Hoover yielded to influence from his own party and business leaders and signed the bill. Hoover's fears were well founded. Canada and other countries raised their own tariffs in retaliation after the bill had become law.

Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke against the act while campaigning for president during 1932.

Retaliation

Threats of retaliation by other countries began long before the bill was enacted into law in June 1930. As it passed the House of Representatives in May 1929, boycotts broke out and foreign governments moved to increase rates against American products, even though rates could be increased or decreased by the Senate or by the conference committee. By September 1929, Hoover's administration had received protest notes from 23 trading partners, but threats of retaliatory actions were ignored.

In May 1930, Canada, the country's most loyal trading partner, retaliated by imposing new tariffs on 16 products that accounted altogether for around 30% of U.S. exports to Canada. Canada later also forged closer economic links with the British Empire via the British Empire Economic Conference of 1932. France and Britain protested and developed new trade partners. Germany developed a system of trade via clearing.

In 1932, with the depression only having worsened for workers and farmers despite Smoot and Hawley's promises of prosperity from a high tariff, the two lost their seats in the elections that year.

End of the Tariffs

The 1932 Democratic campaign platform pledged to lower tariffs. After winning the election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the now-Democratic Congress passed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. This act allowed the President to negotiate tariff reductions on a bilateral basis, and also treated such a tariff agreement as regular legislation, requiring a majority, rather than as a treaty requiring a two-thirds vote. This was one of the core components of the trade negotiating framework that developed after World War II. The tit-for-tat responses of other countries were understood to have contributed to a sharp reduction of trade in the 1930s. After World War II this understanding supported a push towards multi-lateral trading agreements that would prevent similar situations in the future. While the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 focused on foreign exchange and did not directly address tariffs, those involved wanted a similar framework for international trade. President Harry S. Truman launched this process in December 1945 with negotiations for the creation of a proposed International Trade Organization (ITO). As it happened, separate negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) moved more quickly, with an agreement signed in October 1947; in the end, the United States never signed the ITO agreement. Adding a multilateral "most-favored-nation" component to that of reciprocity, the GATT served as a framework for the gradual reduction of tariffs over the subsequent half century.

Post–World War II changes to the Smoot–Hawley tariffs reflected a general tendency of the United States to reduce its tariff levels unilaterally while its trading partners retained their high levels. The American Tariff League Study of 1951 compared the free and dutiable tariff rates of 43 countries. It found that only seven nations had a lower tariff level than the United States (5.1%), while eleven nations had free and dutiable tariff rates higher than the Smoot–Hawley peak of 19.8% including the United Kingdom (25.6%). The 43-country average was 14.4%, which was 0.9% higher than the U.S. level of 1929, demonstrating that few nations were reciprocating in reducing their levels as the United States reduced its own.

               https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act