Violent Protests in Hng Kong

See this report from NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hong-kong-police-fire-tear-gas-water-cannon-protests-turn-n1048596

Associated Press coverage is at
https://apnews.com/7e789a51a2204ce98077ab32889ab263

Insect-Based Pet Food

The BBC reports that British veterinarians endorse insect-based food for our companion animals such as dogs.  The protein is good and raising insects has a much smaller environmental impact that raising beef.  See https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49450935

Negative Interest Rate Policies Backfire

Unintended consequence of unconventional stimulus initiative is to stifle domestic demand as commercial bank profits are squeezed

University of Bath – August 29, 2019 -- Negative interest rate policies – where nominal rates are set below zero percent – have been introduced in Europe and Japan to stimulate flagging economies but research from the University of Bath shows the unconventional monetary strategy may be doing more harm than good.

Recently, several major European banks announced plans to pass on negative interest rates to corporations and wealthy individuals. Since 2012 Japan and six European economies – the Eurozone, Denmark, Hungary, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland - introduced negative interest rates, making it costly for commercial banks to hold their excess reserves with central banks.

Negative interest rates are supposed to stimulate the domestic economy by facilitating an increase in the demand for bank loans. In theory this could increase new capital investment by firms and domestic consumption, via credit creation. But the research showed bank margins were being squeezed, curbing loan growth and damaging banking profits.

“This is a good example of unintended consequences. Our study shows negative interest rate policy has backfired, particularly in an environment where banks are already struggling with profitability, slow economic recovery, historically high levels of non-performing loans, and a post banking-crisis deleveraging phase,” said Dr. Ru Xie of the university’s School of Management.

“If bank margins are compressed due to low long term yields, and if there is limited loan growth, then bank profits will fall accordingly. The decline in profits can erode bank capital bases and hitherto further limit credit growth, thus stifling any positive impact on domestic demand from negative interest rate policy monetary transmission effects,” Xie said.

Xie, working with researchers from Bangor Business School, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the University of Sharjah in United Arab Emirates, identified new evidence that bank margins and profitability fared worse in countries where negative interest rates were adopted than in countries that did not pursue this policy.

The results also suggested that following the introduction of negative interest rates, bank lending was weaker than in countries that did not adopt the policy. This was largely driven by the compressed net interest margin from a long term low yield.
Xie said negative interest rates also appear to have cancelled out the stimulus impact of other forms of unconventional monetary policy such as quantitative easing.

The findings of the research projects on Negative Interest Rates were presented at the International Rome Conference on Money, Banking and Finance and the Bank and Financial Markets Workshop at Deutsche Bundesbank.

The research team is Dr Ru Xie, Philip Molyneux from the University of Sharjah, Alessio Reghezza from Bangor Business School and John Thornton from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The research papers have been published in the Journal of Banking and Finance, and the Journal of Financial Services Research.

https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/negative-interest-rate-policies-are-backfiring-new-research/

How Memories Form and Fade

Strong memories are encoded by teams of neurons working together in synchrony

California Institute of Technology ­-- August 23. 2019 -- Why is it that you can remember the name of your childhood best friend that you haven't seen in years yet easily forget the name of a person you just met a moment ago? In other words, why are some memories stable over decades, while others fade within minutes?

Using mouse models, Caltech researchers have now determined that strong, stable memories are encoded by "teams" of neurons all firing in synchrony, providing redundancy that enables these memories to persist over time. The research has implications for understanding how memory might be affected after brain damage, such as by strokes or Alzheimer's disease.

The work was done in the laboratory of Carlos Lois, research professor of biology, and is described in a paper that appears in the August 23 of the journal Science. Lois is also an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.

Led by postdoctoral scholar Walter Gonzalez, the team developed a test to examine mice's neural activity as they learn about and remember a new place. In the test, a mouse was placed in a straight enclosure, about 5 feet long with white walls. Unique symbols marked different locations along the walls -- for example, a bold plus sign near the right-most end and an angled slash near the center. 

Sugar water (a treat for mice) was placed at either end of the track. While the mouse explored, the researchers measured the activity of specific neurons in the mouse hippocampus (the region of the brain where new memories are formed) that are known to encode for places.

When an animal was initially placed in the track, it was unsure of what to do and wandered left and right until it came across the sugar water. In these cases, single neurons were activated when the mouse took notice of a symbol on the wall. But over multiple experiences with the track, the mouse became familiar with it and remembered the locations of the sugar. As the mouse became more familiar, more and more neurons were activated in synchrony by seeing each symbol on the wall. 

Essentially, the mouse was recognizing where it was with respect to each unique symbol.

To study how memories fade over time, the researchers then withheld the mice from the track for up to 20 days. Upon returning to the track after this break, mice that had formed strong memories encoded by higher numbers of neurons remembered the task quickly. Even though some neurons showed different activity, the mouse's memory of the track was clearly identifiable when analyzing the activity of large groups of neurons. In other words, using groups of neurons enables the brain to have redundancy and still recall memories even if some of the original neurons fall silent or are damaged.

Gonzalez explains: "Imagine you have a long and complicated story to tell. In order to preserve the story, you could tell it to five of your friends and then occasionally get together with all of them to re-tell the story and help each other fill in any gaps that an individual had forgotten. Additionally, each time you re-tell the story, you could bring new friends to learn and therefore help preserve it and strengthen the memory. In an analogous way, your own neurons help each other out to encode memories that will persist over time."

Memory is so fundamental to human behavior that any impairment to memory can severely impact our daily life. Memory loss that occurs as part of normal aging can be a significant handicap for senior citizens. Moreover, memory loss caused by several diseases, most notably Alzheimer's, has devastating consequences that can interfere with the most basic routines including recognizing relatives or remembering the way back home. This work suggests that memories might fade more rapidly as we age because a memory is encoded by fewer neurons, and if any of these neurons fail, the memory is lost. The study suggests that one day, designing treatments that could boost the recruitment of a higher number of neurons to encode a memory could help prevent memory loss.

"For years, people have known that the more you practice an action, the better chance that you will remember it later," says Lois. "We now think that this is likely, because the more you practice an action, the higher the number of neurons that are encoding the action. The conventional theories about memory storage postulate that making a memory more stable requires the strengthening of the connections to an individual neuron. Our results suggest that increasing the number of neurons that encode the same memory enables the memory to persist for longer."

The paper is titled "Persistence of neuronal representations through time and damage in the hippocampus." In addition to Gonzalez and Lois, co-authors are undergraduate Hanwen Zhang and former lab technician Anna Harutyunyan. Funding was provided by the American Heart Association, the Della Martin Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and a BRAIN Initiative grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

---

Story Source:

Materials provided by California Institute of Technology. Original written by Lori Dajose. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

                            https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190823140729.htm

Crows Consciously Control Their Calls

From PLOS    

August 27, 2019 -- Crows can voluntarily control the release and onset of their calls, suggesting that songbird vocalizations are under cognitive control, according to a study published August 27 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Katharina Brecht of the University of Tübingen [in Germany] and colleagues.

Songbirds are renowned for their acoustically elaborate songs; these show a degree of flexibility, potentially indicating that they are under conscious control. However, the observed variability in vocalizations might simply be driven by involuntary mechanisms, and need not be based on cognitive control. In the new study, Brecht and colleagues directly tested the idea that songbirds deliberately control their calls, in the sense that they can be emitted or inhibited at will, as opposed to being knee-jerk responses to food, mates, or predators.

The findings show that trained carrion crows (Corvus corone), songbirds of the corvid family, can exert control over their calls in a goal-directed manner. In a detection task, three male carrion crows rapidly learned to emit calls in response to a visual cue (colored squares) with no inherent meaning ("go-trials"), and to withhold calls in response to another cue. Two of these crows were then trained on a task with the cue colors reversed, in addition to being rewarded for withholding vocalizations to yet another cue ("nogo-trials").

Vocalizations in response to the detection of the go-cue were precise timed and highly reliable in all three crows. The crows also quickly learned to withhold calls in nogo-trials, showing that vocalizations weren't produced by an anticipation of a food reward in correct trials. According to the authors, further work is needed to evaluate the neurobiological basis of such cognitive vocal control in birds.

"Our study shows that crows can be thaught to control their vocalizations, just like primates can, and that their vocalizations are not just a reflexive response. This finding not only demonstrates once again the cognitive sophistication of the birds of the crow family. It also advances our understanding of the evolution of vocal control."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190827145730.htm

Highest Fall Without a Parachute

Vesna Vulović (January 1950 – 23 December 2016) was a Serbian flight attendant. She holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 metres (33,330 ft). Her fall took place after an explosion tore through the baggage compartment of JAT Flight 367 on 26 January 1972, causing it to crash near Srbská Kamenice, Czechoslovakia. She was the sole survivor of the crash that air safety investigators attributed to a briefcase bomb. The Yugoslav authorities suspected that Croatian nationalists were to blame, but no one was ever arrested.

Following the crash, Vulović spent days in a coma and was hospitalized for several months. She suffered a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, two broken legs, broken ribs and a fractured pelvis. These injuries resulted in her being temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. She made an almost complete recovery but continued to walk with a limp. Vulović had no memory of the incident and had no qualms about flying in the aftermath of the crash. Despite her willingness to resume work as a flight attendant, Jat Airways gave her a desk job negotiating freight contracts, feeling her presence on flights would attract too much publicity. Vulović became a celebrity in Yugoslavia and was deemed a national hero.

In 1985, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized Vulović as the world record holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. She was fired from JAT in the early 1990s after taking part in anti-government protests, but avoided arrest as the government was concerned about the negative publicity that her imprisonment would bring. She continued her work as a pro-democracy activist until the Socialist Party of Serbia was ousted from power during the Bulldozer Revolution of October 2000. Vulović later campaigned on behalf of the Democratic Party of Serbia, advocating Serbia's entry into the European Union. Her final years were spent in seclusion and she struggled with survivor's guilt. Having divorced, she lived alone in her Belgrade apartment on a small pension until her death in 2016. 

JAT Flight 367

The secondary crew of JAT Flight 367, flying from Stockholm to Belgrade with stopovers in Copenhagen and Zagreb, arrived in Denmark on the morning of 25 January 1972. According to Vulović, she was not scheduled to be on Flight 367 and JAT had confused her for another flight attendant also named Vesna. Nevertheless, Vulović said that she was excited to travel to Denmark because it was her first time visiting the country. The crew had the entire afternoon and the following morning to themselves. Vulović wished to go sightseeing but her colleagues insisted that they go shopping. "Everybody wanted to buy something for his or her family," she recalled. "So I had to go shopping with them. They seemed to know that they would die. They didn't talk about it, but I saw ... I felt for them. And the captain was locked in his room for 24 hours. He didn't want to go out at all. In the morning, during breakfast, the co-pilot was talking about his son and daughter as if nobody else had a son or daughter."

Flight 367 departed from Stockholm Arlanda Airport at 1:30 p.m. on 26 January. The aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, landed at Copenhagen Airport at 2:30 p.m., where it was taken over by Vulović and her colleagues. "As it was late, we were in the terminal and saw it park," Vulović said. "I saw all the passengers and crew deplane. One man seemed terribly annoyed. It was not only me that noticed him either. Other crew members saw him, as did the station manager in Copenhagen. I think it was the man who put the bomb in the baggage. I think he had checked in a bag in Stockholm, got off in Copenhagen and never re-boarded the flight."

Flight 367 departed from Copenhagen Airport at 3:15 p.m. At 4:01 p.m., an explosion tore through the DC-9's baggage compartment. The explosion caused the aircraft to break apart over the Czechoslovak village of Srbská Kamenice. Vulović was the only survivor of the 28 passengers and crew. She was discovered by villager Bruno Honke, who heard her screaming amid the wreckage. Her turquoise uniform was covered in blood and her 3-inch (76 mm) stiletto heels had been torn off by the force of the impact. Honke had been a medic during World War II and was able to keep her alive until rescuers arrived.

Between 1962 and 1982, Croatian nationalists carried out 128 terror attacks against Yugoslav civilian and military targets. The Yugoslav authorities suspected that they were to blame for bringing down Flight 367. The day of the crash, a bomb exploded aboard a train travelling from Vienna to Zagreb, injuring six. A man, describing himself as a Croatian nationalist, called the Swedish newspaper Kvällsposten the following day and claimed responsibility for the bombing of Flight 367. No arrests were ever made. The Czechoslovak Civil Aviation Authority later attributed the explosion to a briefcase bomb.

Paralysis and Recovery

Following the crash, Vulović spent days in a coma, having fractured her skull and then hemorrhaged. She also suffered two broken legs and three broken vertebrae, one of which was crushed completely. Her pelvis was fractured and several ribs broken. Her injuries resulted in her being temporarily paralyzed below the waist. She had total amnesia from the hour preceding her fall until one month afterwards. Vulović's parents told her that she first learned of the crash about two weeks after it occurred. She fainted upon being shown a newspaper headline by her doctor and had to be tranquilized. The last thing that Vulović could remember from before the crash was greeting passengers as they boarded. The next thing she remembered was seeing her parents in her hospital room about one month later.

Vulović underwent treatment in a Prague hospital until 12 March 1972, after which she was flown to Belgrade. She was offered a hypnotic injection to help her sleep during the flight back to Yugoslavia, but declined, explaining that she was not afraid of flying because she had no memory of the crash. In Belgrade, Vulović's hospital room was placed under 24-hour police protection because the authorities feared that the perpetrators of the bombing would want to kill her. The guards changed shifts every six hours, and no one was allowed in to see her except for her parents and doctors.

Her hospitalization lasted until June 1972, after which she travelled to Montenegro to recuperate at a seaside resort, where her doctors visited her every two or three days. Vulović underwent several operations to restore her movement. At first, she could only move her left leg, and one month thereafter, she was able to move her right. Vulović's parents had to sell both of their cars to pay for her medical bills. Within ten months of her fall, Vulović had regained the ability to walk, but limped for the rest of her life, her spine permanently twisted. In total, she spent 16 months recuperating. "Nobody ever expected me to live this long," she recounted in 2008. Vulović attributed her recovery to her "Serbian stubbornness" and "a childhood diet that included chocolate, spinach, and fish oil".

Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food cart in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact. Vulović's physicians concluded that her history of low blood pressure caused her to pass out quickly after the cabin depressurized and kept her heart from bursting on impact. Vulović said that she was aware of her low blood pressure before applying to become a flight attendant and knew that it would result in her failing her medical examination, but she drank an exorbitant amount of coffee beforehand and was accepted.

Fame

In September 1972, Vulović expressed willingness to resume working as a flight attendant. The airline felt that her presence on flights would attract too much publicity and instead gave her a desk job negotiating freight contracts. In Yugoslavia, Vulović was celebrated as a national hero. Her reputation as a "Cold War heroine" also extended to the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. After the crash, Vulović received a decoration from the President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, and the Serbian folk singer Miroslav Ilić recorded a song titled Vesna stjuardesa ("Vesna the Stewardess"). She was soon made an honorary citizen of Srbská Kamenice. Honke's granddaughter, born six weeks after Vulović's fall, was named Vesna in her honour. Vulović continued to fly regularly, stating that other passengers were surprised to see her on flights and wanted to sit next to her.

Vulović's parents both died within a few years of her fall. In 1977, she married mechanical engineer Nikola Breka after a year of dating. Although Vulović was advised by physicians that her injuries would not have an adverse effect on her reproductive function, she experienced an ectopic pregnancy that nearly proved fatal and was never able to have children. In 1985, The Guinness Book of World Records recognized her as the world record holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 metres (33,330 ft). She received the recognition at a London gala from musician Paul McCartney. Vulović was thus officially acknowledged as having surpassed the records of other fall survivors, such as Alan Magee, Nicholas Alkemade, and Ivan Chisov.

In the early 1990s, Vulović and her husband divorced. Vulović attributed the divorce to her chain smoking, which her husband disapproved of. Around the same time, Vulović was fired from JAT for speaking out against Serbian statesman Slobodan Milošević and taking part in anti-government protests. She avoided arrest because the government was concerned about the negative publicity that her imprisonment would bring. In response to her activism, pro-Milošević tabloids launched a smear campaign against her, claiming that Flight 367 had been shot down by a Czechoslovak surface-to-air missile and that she had fallen from a lesser height than previously believed. Vulović continued taking part in anti-government demonstrations throughout the 1990s. When Milošević and his Socialist Party of Serbia were ousted in the Bulldozer Revolution of October 2000, Vulović was among several celebrities who took to the balcony of Belgrade's city hall to make victory addresses. She later campaigned on behalf of the Democratic Party of Serbia and advocated for Serbia's entry into the European Union, which she believed would bring economic prosperity.

Deteriorating Health and Death

Vulović told reporters that she did not think of her fall every day, but admitted to struggling with survivor's guilt. "Whenever I think of the accident, I have a prevailing, grave feeling of guilt for surviving it and I cry ... Then I think maybe I should not have survived at all." Vulović declined therapy to help cope with her experiences and instead turned to religion, becoming a devout Orthodox Christian. She stated that her ordeal had turned her into an optimist. "If you can survive what I survived," she said, "you can survive anything."

In 2005, Vulović's fall was recreated by the American television program MythBusters.

In 2009, Peter Hornung-Andersen and Pavel Theiner, two Prague-based journalists, claimed that Flight 367 had been mistaken for an enemy aircraft and shot down by the Czechoslovak Air Force at an altitude of 800 metres (2,600 ft), far lower than the official altitude of 10,160 metres (33,330 ft). 

The two claimed that the Czechoslovak State Security had conjured up Vulović's record fall as part of a cover-up. They also hypothesized that the call received by the Kvällsposten, claiming responsibility for the aircraft's downing, was a hoax. The Czech Civil Aviation Authority dismissed the journalists' claim, calling it a conspiracy theory. Hornung-Andersen conceded that the pair's evidence was only circumstantial. Vulović said that she was aware of the journalists' claims, but stated that because she had no memory of the event, she could not confirm or deny the allegations. Guinness World Records continues to list her as the record-holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.

In the last years of her life, Vulović lived on a pension of €300 per month in her dilapidated Belgrade apartment. "I don't know what to say when people say I was lucky," she remarked. "Life is so hard today." Vulović lamented that her mother and father might not have died prematurely had she not been aboard Flight 367, stating that the incident not only ruined her life, but also that of her parents. She only occasionally granted interviews and declined numerous requests, most notably from Oprah Winfrey and the BBC, saying that she was "tired" of discussing her fall. By the time she had reached her sixties, Vulović's deteriorating health prevented her from taking part in annual commemorations at Srbská Kamenice, which she had previously attended for many years. In December 2016, Vulović's friends became concerned for her well-being after she abruptly stopped answering her telephone. On 23 December, locksmiths discovered Vulović's lifeless body in her apartment after forcing open the door. Vulović's friends said that she had struggled with heart ailments in the years leading up to her death. She was buried in Belgrade's New Cemetery on 27 December.

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

Amelia Earhart's Plane Not Found

-- even after an Exhaustive New Search.



See: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tantalizing-clue-marks-end-of-amelia-earhart-expedition/ar-AAGloC4?ocid=spartandhp

What Is Stigler's Law of Eponymy?

It “holds that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”  This may sound like a snotty, defiant observation that must be false, but there is a strong argument for this opinion made here:



https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/08/22/why_no_scientific_discovery_is_named_after_its_discoverer.html?utm_campaign=distroscale&utm_medium=video-player&utm_source=__BODY_CLASS__

Protecting Laptops and Phones

Atomically thin heat shields could be up to 50,000 times thinner than current insulating materials in cell phones and laptops

Stanford University – August 19, 2019 -- Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode.

To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users.

Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically thin materials, stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can provide the same insulation as a sheet of glass 100 times thicker. In the near term, thinner heat shields will enable engineers to make electronic devices even more compact than those we have today, said Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering and senior author of a paper published Aug. 16 in Science Advances.

"We're looking at the heat in electronic devices in an entirely new way," Pop said.

Detecting sound as heat

The heat we feel from smartphones or laptops is actually an inaudible form of high-frequency sound. 

If that seems crazy, consider the underlying physics. Electricity flows through wires as a stream of electrons. As these electrons move, they collide with the atoms of the materials through which they pass. With each such collision an electron causes an atom to vibrate, and the more current flows, the more collisions occur, until electrons are beating on atoms like so many hammers on so many bells -- except that this cacophony of vibrations moves through the solid material at frequencies far above the threshold of hearing, generating energy that we feel as heat.

Thinking about heat as a form of sound inspired the Stanford researchers to borrow some principles from the physical world. From his days as a radio DJ at Stanford's KZSU 90.1 FM, Pop knew that music recording studios are quiet thanks to thick glass windows that block the exterior sound. A similar principle applies to the heat shields in today's electronics. If better insulation were their only concern, the researchers could simply borrow the music studio principle and thicken their heat barriers. But that would frustrate efforts to make electronics thinner. Their solution was to borrow a trick from homeowners, who install multi-paned windows -- usually, layers of air between sheets of 

glass with varying thickness -- to make interiors warmer and quieter.

"We adapted that idea by creating an insulator that used several layers of atomically thin materials instead of a thick mass of glass," said postdoctoral scholar Sam Vaziri, the lead author on the paper.

Atomically thin materials are a relatively recent discovery. It was only 15 years ago that scientists were able to isolate some materials into such thin layers. The first example discovered was graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms and, ever since it was found, scientists have been looking for, and experimenting with, other sheet-like materials. The Stanford team used a layer of graphene and three other sheet-like materials -- each three atoms thick -- to create a four-layered insulator just 10 atoms deep. Despite its thinness, the insulator is effective because the atomic heat vibrations are dampened and lose much of their energy as they pass through each layer.

To make nanoscale heat shields practical, the researchers will have to find some mass production technique to spray or otherwise deposit atom-thin layers of materials onto electronic components during manufacturing. But behind the immediate goal of developing thinner insulators looms a larger ambition: Scientists hope to one day control the vibrational energy inside materials the way they now control electricity and light. As they come to understand the heat in solid objects as a form of sound, a new field of phononics is emerging, a name taken from the Greek root word behind telephone, phonograph and phonetics.

"As engineers, we know quite a lot about how to control electricity, and we're getting better with light, but we're just starting to understand how to manipulate the high-frequency sound that manifests itself as heat at the atomic scale," Pop said.

Eric Pop is an affiliate of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Stanford authors include former postdoctoral scholars Eilam Yalon and Miguel Muñoz Rojo, and graduate students Connor McClellan, Connor Bailey, Kirby Smithe, Alexander Gabourie, Victoria Chen, Sanchit Deshmukh and Saurabh Suryavanshi. Other authors are from Theiss Research and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

                   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190819112723.htm

Six injured by lightning at golf event

Lightning strike at a PGA event injured six people today.  See:

https://apnews.com/4de295e646a740ce9013af0fe1c279e7

Storms Alter Jupiter's Belts

Storms on Jupiter Are Disturbing the Planet’s Colorful Belts

By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Media Relations

Storm clouds rooted deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere are affecting the planet’s white zones and colorful belts, creating disturbances in their flow and even changing their color.

Thanks to coordinated observations of the planet in January 2017 by six ground-based optical and radio telescopes and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer and her colleagues have been able to track the effects of these storms — visible as bright plumes above the planet’s ammonia ice clouds — on the belts in which they appear.

The observations will ultimately help planetary scientists understand the complex atmospheric dynamics on Jupiter, which, with its Great Red Spot and colorful, layer cake-like bands, make it one of the most beautiful and changeable of the giant gas planets in the solar system.

One such plume was noticed by amateur astronomer Phil Miles in Australia a few days before the first observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and photos captured a week later by Hubble showed that the plume had spawned a second plume and left a downstream disturbance in the band of clouds, the South Equatorial Belt. The rising plumes then interacted with Jupiter’s powerful winds, which stretched the clouds east and west from their point of origin.

Three months earlier, four bright spots were seen slightly north of the North Equatorial Belt. Though those plumes had disappeared by 2017, the belt had since widened northward, and its northern edge had changed color from white to orangish brown.

“If these plumes are vigorous and continue to have convective events, they may disturb one of these entire bands over time, though it may take a few months,” said study leader Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor emerita of astronomy. “With these observations, we see one plume in progress and the aftereffects of the others.”

The analysis of the plumes supports the theory that they originate about 80 kilometers below the cloud tops at a place dominated by clouds of liquid water. A paper describing the results has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and is now online.

Into the Stratosphere

Jupiter’s atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and water. The top-most cloud layer is made up of ammonia ice and comprises the brown belts and white zones we see with the naked eye. Below this outer cloud layer sits a layer of solid ammonium hydrosulfide particles. Deeper still, at around 80 kilometers below the upper cloud deck, is a layer of liquid water droplets.

The storm clouds de Pater and her team studied appear in the belts and zones as bright plumes and behave much like the cumulonimbus clouds that precede thunderstorms on Earth. Jupiter’s storm clouds, like those on Earth, are often accompanied by lightning.

Optical observations cannot see below the ammonia clouds, however, so de Pater and her team have been probing deeper with radio telescopes, including ALMA and also the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which is operated by the National Science Foundation-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

ALMA array’s first observations of Jupiter were between Jan. 3 and 5 of 2017, a few days after one of these bright plumes was seen by amateur astronomers in the planet’s South Equatorial Belt. A week later, Hubble, the VLA, the Gemini, Keck and Subaru observatories in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile captured images in the visible, radio and mid-infrared ranges.

De Pater combined the ALMA radio observations with the other data, focused specifically on the newly brewed storm as it punched through the upper deck clouds of ammonia ice.

The data showed that these storm clouds reached as high as the tropopause — the coldest part of the atmosphere — where they spread out much like the anvil-shaped cumulonimbus clouds that generate lightning and thunder on Earth.

“Our ALMA observations are the first to show that high concentrations of ammonia gas are brought up during an energetic eruption,” de Pater said.

The observations are consistent with one theory, called moist convection, about how these plumes form. According to this theory, convection brings a mix of ammonia and water vapor high enough — about 80 kilometers below the cloud tops — for the water to condense into liquid droplets. The condensing water releases heat that expands the cloud and buoys it quickly upward through other cloud layers, ultimately breaking through the ammonia ice clouds at the top of the atmosphere.

The plume’s momentum carries the supercooled ammonia cloud above the existing ammonia-ice clouds until the ammonia freezes, creating a bright, white plume that stands out against the colorful bands encircling Jupiter.

“We were really lucky with these data, because they were taken just a few days after amateur astronomers found a bright plume in the South Equatorial Belt,” said de Pater. “With ALMA, we observed the whole planet and saw that plume, and since ALMA probes below the cloud layers, we could actually see what was going on below the ammonia clouds.”

Hubble took images a week after ALMA and captured two separate bright spots, which suggests that the plumes originate from the same source and are carried eastward by the high altitude jet stream, leading to the large disturbances seen in the belt.

Coincidentally, three months before, bright plumes had been observed north of the Northern Equatorial Belt. The January 2017 observations showed that that belt had expanded in width, and the band where the plumes had first been seen turned from white to orange. De Pater suspects that the northward expansion of the North Equatorial Belt is a result of gas from the ammonia-depleted plumes falling back into the deeper atmosphere.

De Pater’s colleague and co-author Robert Sault of the University of Melbourne in Australia used special computer software to analyze the ALMA data to obtain radio maps of the surface that are comparable to visible-light photos taken by Hubble.

“Jupiter’s rotation once every 10 hours usually blurs radio maps, because these maps take many hours to observe,” Sault said. “In addition, because of Jupiter’s large size, we had to ‘scan’ the planet, so we could make a large mosaic in the end. We developed a technique to construct a full map of the planet.”

Among the co-authors of the paper with de Pater and Sault are graduate students Chris Moeckel and Charles Goullaud and research astronomers Michael Wong and David DeBoer, all of UC Berkeley, and Bryan Butler of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Each was involved in obtaining and analyzing the Hubble, Gemini, ALMA and VLA data. The VLT data were contributed by Leigh Fletcher and Padraig Donnelly of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, while Glenn Orton and James Sinclair of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and Yasuma Kasaba of Tokyo University in Japan supplied the SUBARU data. Gordon Bjoraker of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Máté Ádámkovics of Clemson University in South Carolina analyzed the Keck data.

The work was supported by a NASA Planetary Astronomy award (NNX14AJ43G) and a Solar System Observations award (80NSSC18K1001).

https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/08/22/storms-on-jupiter-are-disturbing-the-planets-colorful-belts/

Emergency Economic Powers

Introduction

On August 23. 2019. President Trump correctly claimed that he has the authority to order U.S. businesses to discontinue activities in China due to legislation signed into law late in 1977 by then-President Jimmy Carter.

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The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Title II of Pub.L. 95–223, 91 Stat. 1626, enacted October 28, 1977, is a United States federal law authorizing the president to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States.

The H.R. 7738 legislation was passed by the United States 95th congressional session and signed by President Jimmy Carter on December 28, 1977.

Provisions of IEEPA

In the United States Code, the IEEPA is Title 50, §§1701–1707. The IEEPA authorizes the president to declare the existence of an "unusual and extraordinary threat... to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States" that originates "in whole or substantial part outside the United States." It further authorizes the president, after such a declaration, to block transactions and freeze assets to deal with the threat. In the event of an actual attack on the United States, the president can also confiscate property connected with a country, group, or person that aided in the attack.

The IEEPA falls under the provisions of the National Emergencies Act (NEA), which means that an emergency declared under the act must be renewed annually to remain in effect.

History

Curtailment of emergency executive powers

Congress enacted the IEEPA in 1977 to clarify and restrict presidential power during times of declared national emergency under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 ("TWEA"). Under TWEA, starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, presidents had the power to declare emergencies without limiting their scope or duration, without citing the relevant statutes, and without congressional oversight. The Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer limited what a president could do in such an emergency, but did not limit the emergency declaration power itself. A 1973 Senate investigation found (in Senate Report 93-549) that four declared emergencies remained in effect: the 1933 banking crisis with respect to the hoarding of gold, a 1950 emergency with respect to the Korean War, a 1970 emergency regarding the postal workers strike, and a 1971 emergency in response to the government's deteriorating economic and fiscal conditions. Congress terminated these emergencies with the National Emergencies Act, and then passed the IEEPA to restore the emergency power in a limited, overseeable form.

Unlike TWEA, IEEPA was drafted to permit presidential emergency declarations only in response to threats originating outside the United States. Beginning with Jimmy Carter in response to the Iran Hostage Crisis, presidents have invoked IEEPA to safeguard U.S. national security interests by freezing or "blocking" assets of belligerent foreign governments, or certain foreign nationals abroad. 

Since 9/11

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13224 under IEEPA to block the assets of terrorist organizations. The President delegated blocking authority to federal agencies led by the U.S. Treasury. In October 2001, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act which, in part, enhanced IEEPA asset blocking provisions under §1702(a)(1)(B) to permit the blocking of assets during the "pendency of an investigation." This statutory change gave the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control the power to block assets without the need to provide evidence of the blocking subject's wrongdoing nor to permit the blocking subject a chance to effectively respond to the allegations in court. Executing these blocking actions led to a series of legal cases challenging federal authority to indefinitely prevent charitable organizations from accessing their assets held in the United States.

On May 30 2019, the White House announced that President Donald Trump would use IEEPA powers to introduce tariffs on Mexican exports in response to the national security threat of illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States.

Violations of IEEPA

• In 1983, financier Marc Rich was accused of violating the act by trading in Iranian oil during the Iran hostage crisis. He was one of many people pardoned by President Bill Clinton in his last days in office.
• On August 23, 2006, Javed Iqbal was arrested through the U.S. Department of the Treasury with a charge of conspiracy to violate the IEEPA for airing material produced by al-Manar (The Beacon) in New York City during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.
• On December 16, 2009, it was announced that the U.S. Dept. of Justice reached a settlement with Credit Suisse over accusations that the bank assisted residents of IEEPA sanctioned countries to wire money in violation of the Act from 1995 to 2006. The settlement resulted in Credit Suisse forfeiting $536 million.

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

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See also:  
https://apnews.com/be18b8619cde4658a418dda4f416968a

Basics of Statistics

Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, displaying, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.



When census data cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample to the population as a whole. An experimental study involves taking measurements of the system under study, manipulating the system, and then taking additional measurements using the same procedure to determine if the manipulation has modified the values of the measurements. In contrast, an observational study does not involve experimental manipulation.



Two main statistical methods are used in data analysis: descriptive statistics, which summarize data from a sample using indexes such as the mean or standard deviation, and inferential statistics, which draw conclusions from data that are subject to random variation (e.g., observational errors, sampling variation).  Descriptive statistics are most often concerned with two sets of properties of a distribution (sample or population): central tendency (or location) seeks to characterize the distribution's central or typical value, while dispersion (or variability) characterizes the extent to which members of the distribution depart from its center and each other. Inferences on mathematical statistics are made under the framework of probability theory, which deals with the analysis of random phenomena.



A standard statistical procedure involves the test of the relationship between two statistical data sets, or a data set and synthetic data drawn from an idealized model. A hypothesis is proposed for the statistical relationship between the two data sets, and this is compared as an alternative to an idealized null hypothesis of no relationship between two data sets. Rejecting or disproving the null hypothesis is done using statistical tests that quantify the sense in which the null can be proven false, given the data that are used in the test. Working from a null hypothesis, two basic forms of error are recognized: Type I errors (null hypothesis is falsely rejected giving a "false positive") and Type II errors (null hypothesis fails to be rejected and an actual difference between populations is missed giving a "false negative"). Multiple problems have come to be associated with this framework: ranging from obtaining a sufficient sample size to specifying an adequate null hypothesis.



Measurement processes that generate statistical data are also subject to error. Many of these errors are classified as random (noise) or systematic (bias), but other types of errors (e.g., blunder, such as when an analyst reports incorrect units) can also occur. The presence of missing data or censoring may result in biased estimates and specific techniques have been developed to address these problems.



Statistics can be said to have begun in ancient civilization, going back at least to the 5th century BC, but it was not until the 18th century that it started to draw more heavily from calculus and probability theory. In more recent years statistics has relied more on statistical software to produce tests such as descriptive analysis.



Introduction to Statistics



Statistics is a mathematical body of science that pertains to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data, or as a branch of mathematics. Some consider statistics to be a distinct mathematical science rather than a branch of mathematics. While many scientific investigations make use of data, statistics is concerned with the use of data in the context of uncertainty and decision making in the face of uncertainty.



In applying statistics to a problem, it is common practice to start with a population or process to be studied. Populations can be diverse topics such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal".



Ideally, statisticians compile data about the entire population (an operation called census). This may be organized by governmental statistical institutes. Descriptive statistics can be used to summarize the population data. Numerical descriptors include mean and standard deviation for continuous data types (like income), while frequency and percentage are more useful in terms of describing categorical data (like education).



When a census is not feasible, a chosen subset of the population called a sample is studied. Once a sample that is representative of the population is determined, data is collected for the sample members in an observational or experimental setting. Again, descriptive statistics can be used to summarize the sample data. However, the drawing of the sample has been subject to an element of randomness, hence the established numerical descriptors from the sample are also due to uncertainty. To still draw meaningful conclusions about the entire population, inferential statistics is needed. It uses patterns in the sample data to draw inferences about the population represented, accounting for randomness. These inferences may take the form of: answering yes/no questions about the data (hypothesis testing), estimating numerical characteristics of the data (estimation), describing associations within the data (correlation) and modeling relationships within the data (for example, using regression analysis). Inference can extend to forecasting, prediction and estimation of unobserved values either in or associated with the population being studied; it can include extrapolation and interpolation of time series or spatial data, and can also include data mining.



Founders of Statistics



The earliest writing on statistics was found in a 9th-century book entitled Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages, written by Arab scholar Al-Kindi (801–873). In his book, Al-Kindi gave a detailed description of how to use statistics and frequency analysis to decipher encrypted messages. This text laid the foundations for statistics and cryptanalysis. Al-Kindi also made the earliest known use of statistical inference, while he and other Arab cryptologists developed the early statistical methods for decoding encrypted messages. Arab mathematicians including Al-Kindi, Al-Khalil (717–786) and Ibn Adlan (1187–1268) used forms of probability and statistics, with one of Ibn Adlan's most important contributions being on sample size for use of frequency analysis.



The earliest European writing on statistics dates back to 1663, with the publication of Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt. Early applications of statistical thinking revolved around the needs of states to base policy on demographic and economic data, hence its stat- etymology. The scope of the discipline of statistics broadened in the early 19th century to include the collection and analysis of data in general. Today, statistics is widely employed in government, business, and natural and social sciences.



The mathematical foundations of modern statistics were laid in the 17th century with the development of the probability theory by Gerolamo Cardano, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. Mathematical probability theory arose from the study of games of chance, although the concept of probability was already examined in medieval law and by philosophers such as Juan Caramuel. The method of least squares was first described by Adrien-Marie Legendre in 1805.



The modern field of statistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century in three stages. The first wave, at the turn of the century, was led by the work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who transformed statistics into a rigorous mathematical discipline used for analysis, not just in science, but in industry and politics as well. Galton's contributions included introducing the concepts of standard deviation, correlation, regression analysis and the application of these methods to the study of the variety of human characteristics—height, weight, eyelash length among others. Pearson developed the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, defined as a product-moment, the method of moments for the fitting of distributions to samples and the Pearson distribution, among many other things. Galton and Pearson founded Biometrika as the first journal of mathematical statistics and biostatistics (then called biometry), and the latter founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London.



Ronald Fisher coined the term null hypothesis during the Lady tasting tea experiment, which "is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation".



The second wave of the 1910s and 20s was initiated by William Sealy Gosset, and reached its culmination in the insights of Ronald Fisher, who wrote the textbooks that were to define the academic discipline in universities around the world. Fisher's most important publications were his 1918 seminal paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, which was the first to use the statistical term, variance, his classic 1925 work Statistical Methods for Research Workers and his 1935 The Design of Experiments, where he developed rigorous design of experiments models. He originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillary statistics, Fisher's linear discriminator and Fisher information. In his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection he applied statistics to various biological concepts such as Fisher's principle). Nevertheless, A.W.F. Edwards has remarked that it is "probably the most celebrated argument in evolutionary biology". (about the sex ratio), the Fisherian runaway, a concept in sexual selection about a positive feedback runaway affect found in evolution.



The final wave, which mainly saw the refinement and expansion of earlier developments, emerged from the collaborative work between Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman in the 1930s. They introduced the concepts of "Type II" error, power of a test and confidence intervals. Jerzy Neyman in 1934 showed that stratified random sampling was in general a better method of estimation than purposive (quota) sampling.



Today, statistical methods are applied in all fields that involve decision making, for making accurate inferences from a collated body of data and for making decisions in the face of uncertainty based on statistical methodology. The use of modern computers has expedited large-scale statistical computations and has also made possible new methods that are impractical to perform manually. Statistics continues to be an area of active research for example on the problem of how to analyze Big data.



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

Podcast Giant Joe Rogan

Joseph James Rogan (born August 11, 1967) is an American stand-up comedian, mixed martial arts color commentator, podcast host, and former actor and television host.


Rogan began a career in comedy in August 1988 in the Boston area. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1994, Rogan signed an exclusive developmental deal with Disney and appeared as an actor on several television shows including Hardball and NewsRadio. In 1997, he started working for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) as an interviewer and color commentator. Rogan released his first comedy special in 2000. In 2001, Rogan put his comedy career on hold after becoming the host of Fear Factor and would resume his stand-up career shortly after the show's end in 2006. In 2009, Rogan launched his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.


Podcasts and his Current Career


Rogan hosted short-lived CBS show Game Show in My Head that aired for eight episodes in January 2009 and produced by Ashton Kutcher. The show involved contestants who try to convince people to perform or take part in increasingly bizarre situations for money. He agreed to host the show as the idea intrigued him, calling it "a completely mindless form of entertainment".

In December 2009, Rogan launched a free podcast with his friend and fellow comedian Brian Redban. The first episode was recorded on December 24 and was initially a live weekly broadcast on Ustream, with Rogan and Redban "sitting in front of laptops bullshitting".  By August 2010, the podcast was named The Joe Rogan Experience  and entered the list of Top 100 podcasts on iTunes, and in 2011, was picked up by SiriusXM Satellite Radio. The podcast features an array of guests who discuss current events, political views, philosophy, comedy, hobbies and numerous other topics. In January 2015, the podcast was downloaded over 11 million times. By October that year, the podcast was downloaded 16 million times each month, making it one of the most popular free podcasts.


In 2010, Rogan accused comedian Dane Cook of joke thievery.


In 2011, Rogan resumed his role as Fear Factor host for its seventh and final season, until 2012. Rogan took the job as he "would hate to see somebody else do it."


In 2011, Rogan played his first major character in a movie in Zookeeper. He was also working on a book that he tentatively titled Irresponsible Advice from a Man with No Credibility, based on his blog entries on his website. He played himself in Here Comes the Boom, another action-comedy starring Kevin James released in 2012.


In December 2012, Rogan released his sixth comedy special Live from the Tabernacle exclusively as a download on his website for $5. He was inspired to release it that way after Louis C.K. did the same thing.


In 2013, Rogan hosted the television show Joe Rogan Questions Everything on the SyFy network which aired for six episodes. The show covered topics discussed on his podcasts, including the existence of Bigfoot and UFOs, and featured several comedians, experts, and scientists with the aim of trying to "put some subjects to bed ... with an open-minded perspective".  SyFy accepted to produce the show without a pilot episode; the production team gave Rogan some creative control over the program and aimed to present it in his own words where possible.


What Rogan Advocates


Rogan is not affiliated with any political party but was described as having mostly libertarian views. He has described himself as being "pretty liberal" and supports gay marriage, gay rights, women's rights, recreational drug use, universal healthcare, and universal basic income, while also supporting the Second Amendment. He has also criticized American foreign policy of military adventurism. He endorsed Ron Paul in the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign and Gary Johnson in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Rogan has publicly supported Tulsi Gabbard and encouraged her to run for US presidency in 2020.


The Joe Rogan Experience has featured many members of what has been dubbed the Intellectual Dark Web.


Rogan supports the legalized use of cannabis and believes it holds numerous benefits. He hosted the documentary film The Union: The Business Behind Getting High and was featured in Marijuana: A Chronic History and The Culture High. He also supports the use of LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and DMT toward the exploration and enhancement of consciousness, as well as introspection. He was the presenter in the 2010 documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule.


Rogan is an avid hunter and is part of the "Eat What You Kill" movement, which attempts to move away from factory farming and the mistreatment of animals raised for food.


Rogan is opposed to routine infant circumcision and has claimed there is a lack of significant 
scientific evidence for any benefits to the practice, which he considers not entirely different from female genital mutilation due to its non-consensual nature.


Rogan has an interest in sensory deprivation and using an isolation tank. He has stated that his personal experiences with meditation in isolation tanks has helped him explore the nature of consciousness as well as improve his performance in various physical and mental activities and overall well-being.

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



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Devin Gordon recently wrote on August 19^th for The Atlantic about Joe Rogan.  See this link:  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/my-joe-rogan-experience/594802/