The Remittance Problem is a Trust Problem

What are Nakamotoan cryptocurrencies good for?

Many use cases have been proposed by crypto enthusiasts.  After all, Nakamoto aimed to disrupt money and reinvent everything.  Suffice it to say that there are, as yet, the most hyped use cases (retail commerce, serving the “unbanked”, remittances) have yet to become real.

For example, there have been a number of real world experiments, from China to Iran to Venezuela.  In each case, Nakamotoan cryptocurrencies have been seen as censorship proof, stable tokens, that can rescue people from government repression and mismanagement.  But this has yet to work.

Why?

This month Diana Aguilar reports that, despite a long running political economic insanity compounded by geopolitical conflict, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have found few users in Venezuela [1].  Suffering from economic collapse and hyperinflation, the people are struggling to survive.  Many are fleeing the country, and there are many who wish to transfer money home to their families.

In this human made disaster (probably mostly man made, in fact), cryptocurrencies could play a vital role both as a stable currency (that retains a value for more than a few hours) and as a simple mechanism for remitting earnings from overseas.  Furthermore, to the degree that Nakamotoan cryptocurrencies are pseudonymous and difficult to “censor”, they can continue to work in the face of strong government efforts at repression.

In short, Venezuela is a perfect real world cryptocurrency experiment.

But, as Aguilar reports, for most “crypto payments are merely a last resort”.  (Granted, Venezuelan is in dire straits, and many are on their last resorts.)

Cryptocurrency does seem to be useful for refugees, who have little money or legal status in their sanctuaries.  It is also useful for sending home money, especially by refugees with limited legal standing and in the face of government resistance.

However, cryptocurrency is little used in everyday commerce, unless there is no other choice.

Unless the grocery store will take Bitcoin (which implies that their suppliers, workers, utility companies, etc. will take Bitcoin from the merchant), then you probably have to convert Bitcoin into locally acceptable currency.

Legitimate currency exchanges are usually expensive and may be hard to find.  And remember, for remittance, you probably need to exchange twice, at the sender (into crypto) and the receiver (into local currency).

There is also an end-to-end problem.  While the Nakamotoan cryptocurrency may be decentralized and “trustless”, remittance requires a chain of trust that includes the exchanges and any other parties involved.

If you can’t use formal banks, or do not trust formal banks, then you need to deal with a party you do trust.  In some cases, there are local, trusted agents.  In other cases there are reliable, legal services if you can afford them.  And, unfortunately, there are also swindlers who will steal your money.

Worse, in a police state like Venezuela, mafias and/or the police may monitor exchanges, and might extort, confiscate, or punish users.  In a lawless environment, crypto users are on their own, and it can be very difficult to establish trust.

“there’s even the suspicion that exchange platforms’ transactions are being tracked by government police to extort bitcoin users”

Finally, I’ll note that the case for cryptocurrency is so compelling that the Venezuelan government has floated its own cryptocurrency, the Petro, along with associated exchange and remittance services.  Technically, this is technically similar to Bitcoin and other Nakamotoan currencies, but, unsurprisingly, has not been widely accepted because people don’t trust the government.  (In addition, the United States and other governments have done what they can to interfere with the Petro.)

The overall lesson here seems to be that Nakamotoan technology may be useful but is not sufficient to solve the remittance problem or to replace fiat currency even in the most dire situations.  There needs to be trust in the financial system, and this means trust in people, which cannot be achieved by technology alone.

Venezuela is in a crisis of confidence.  Nakamotoan technology alone cannot create confidence.

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1. Diana Aguilar (2019) Venezuelan Migrants Are Using Bitcoin for Remittances, But There’s a Catch. Coindesk, https://www.coindesk.com/venezuelan-migrants-are-using-bitcoin-for-remittances-but-theres-a-catch

 

Cryptocurrency Thursday

Yet More Improved Robot Skin

Just about six years ago, I predicted that “remote haptics” was the next big thing. This was perhaps premature, but I stand by my basic point:  teledildonics is—dare I say it—coming soon.

Recently I noted progress in haptic skin that can simulate touch.   This is the “output device” if you wish, that lets a computer touch the user (“partner?”).

To complete the picture, researchers from Paris report on a biomimetic artificial skin that is designed to be an “input device” [1]. This is a multilayer sensor skin that senses touch a lot like human skin does.

Their demo is strange and icky:  they wrap a mobile phone in skin, so you can communicate via touch.  They also demonstrate touch pads and wrist bands.  The latter suggests the potential for wearable interfaces.  These are rather icky because they look (and maybe feel) so much like skin, that it is like something out of a horror film.  Vat grown mutant “hone people” or something.

I’ll note that the prototype looks like “flesh”, and tellingly, it is ‘flesh colored’—the band-aid pink of European skin.  To be fair, the researchers discuss the range of colors possible, including interesting colors not natural to any human skin.  But I assume that they chose colors that appeal to themselves.

In their research article, the researchers discuss the possible uses, but stay in technical mode.  They suggest that the enhanced touch interface might be efficient, enhancing work and user productivity.  They briefly touch on “applications for emotional communication”, including the “embodiment” of virtual agents.

They demonstrate “mobile tactile expression”, by which they mean “a messaging application where users can express rich tactile emoticons on the artificial skin.” ([1], p. 316)  Essentially, you can tickle your phone to write an emoji.

This is obviously not even close to the real goal.  The paper indicates that future work must include “output” capabilities, which, as I have noted, have been demonstrated down the road at Lausanne.

Putting this all together, we see now that we can build remote haptic interfaces.  Wearing a full body suit (or however much of the body you want to play with), the computer can generate touches.  Given a robot or doll or whatever form factor you like, you can touch the skin of the computer.

The obvious application is a virtual world in which each person has an avatar which receives and sends touches from these interfaces.  These can be delivered via a network, along with whatever audio and video might make sense.  And we have achieve the Icky-arity:  actual Internet caresses.

(It will be interesting to find out how lag, jitter, dropped packets, and so on “feel” when you are using such a channel.)

Of course, this communication is digitally mediated, so any number of algorithms might—dare I say it—manipulate the data.  Autotune to “optimize” kissing?  Magnified personal capabilities? Replays of greatest hits?  Libraries of celebrity partners?

Finally, I’ll note the interesting opportunities for hacking or malicious use.  Who is really out there touching you?  Just how crazy could you make someone by taking over and messing with their haptic interface?   There will be fatalities, and they might be murder.

“Ick” doesn’t begin to cover it.   But it’s going to be here soon.

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1. Marc Teyssier, Gilles Bailly, Catherine Pelachaud, Eric Lecolinet, Andrew Conn, and Anne Roudaut, Skin-On Interfaces: A Bio-Driven Approach for Artificial Skin Design to Cover Interactive Devices, in Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2019: New Orleans. p. 307-322. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3332165.3347943
2. University of Bristol, Artificial skin creates first ticklish devices, in University of Bristol -News. 2019. https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/october/skin-on-interface.html

 

What is an “operating system” for a smart city?

“Smart city” is becoming a flavor of the month these days, even if it has so many different meanings to different people.

Inevitably, then, there must be not only “solutions”, but “platforms”, and yes, “operating systems” for smart cities.  The nexus between corporate sales pitches and municipal public relations is potent soil for vaporware.

As a (very) grey headed old OS hacker (who dates back to when we actually wrote our own operating systems, thank you very much [1]), I have to really wonder just what exactly such an animal might be.

My attention was caught by the headline in ZDnet, “This city runs on its own operating system” [2].  The city of Hull (which has also been fiddling with cryptocurrencies) is deploying what they call “CityOS”.  Huh?

Inquiring minds want to know, what is this?

Unwinding this term, Daphne Leprince-Ringuet reports that Hull actually lease a product from a company called Connexin, head quartered in, you guessed it, Hull [2].  Fair enough.  Connexin actually builds on a product built by Cisco. (It’s branding all the way down!)

What the product is, is data integration for sensor nets. Cities are deploying more and more “smart” things—lighting, traffic, environmental sensors, etc.—from many vendors.  These generate an ever growing and evolving mish-mash of data about the city.

The general idea of the CityOS is to fuse all of this data (actually, the company normalizes the data into what I suspect is a proprietary metadata format), and provide a single dashboard that tells you everything there is to know about the city.

What city manager or council wouldn’t want that dashboard?!

Interpreting the jargon, I think that what makes this an “operating system” is that there will be an open API to the data, enabling anyone to use it.  This creates, they say, a “programmable city”.  I don’t know about “programmable”, but this would be an IoT version of the “open data concept” that has been around for twenty years and more.

This all seems mostly harmless.

As I noted, this general concept has been around for quite a while, as have notions of how to use such data to “optimize” the city.  Leprince-Ringuet’s article and the company information cite a variety of proposed scenarios, such as optimizing waste pick up.  This scenario involves sensors to tell when a bin needs to be emptied, scheduling algorithms to “optimize” pickups, and pattern analysis to spot trends.  That’s all fine, though when I think of “intelligent waste management”, I generally think about reduction, separation, and recycling, not shaving minutes off the use of the trucks.

Leprince-Ringuet reports that the city government will decide what data is actually exposed through this dashboard and interface.  In any case, it likely will only have municipal data on it, which is a tiny fraction of the data from all sources that might be available.  I note that the same company sells similar products to businesses and homes, but these will likely not share data with the city or the public, at least not right now.  And there are plenty of other similar products out there.

(It would be interesting to negotiate data sharing agreements analogous to taxing and planning permissions. In order to hook up to city data networks, you have to “pay” with some of your own data.)

So, what can we expect from this?

My own observation about open data projects is that the data that is available is generally of such limited use that there isn’t much that can be done with it.  To date, such “open data” from governments is not terribly useful beyond its original intended use.  In part, this is because governments don’t have that much data, and they release only some of it.  In any case, cities are careful to try not to enable either stalking of citizens or law suits by citizens.  These contingencies tend to assure that the open datasets are completely harmless, and nearly useless.

For example, even if I was interested in optimizing the trash pickup in Hull (which, honestly, isn’t interesting to very many people), it’s not clear whether CityOS will have enough and good enough data to do so.  That remains to be seen. If the data is uncertain, incomplete, or misunderstood, then it will lead to useless or even dangerous errors.  I’ve also noticed that a lot of open data is not precisely located in time and space, which limits what you can do with it. Knowing that ‘a trash bin was full somewhere in a 6 block area as of yesterday’ is not particularly useful.

Let’s suppose that the data is actually good enough to be useful.  What might be done?

One thing that is always popular, at  least with the public, is reporting and tracking problems such as potholes, trash pickups, broken lights.  Also, in principle, such data could demonstrate unequal distributions of resources and services, which might or might not reflect intended policy.  That would be good to find out.  Even better, collecting data over time could help evaluate and validate how well goals are being met.

Of course, there is no escaping that open data also enables snooping on neighbors. The same algorithms that detect and monitor public events (such as games or concerts) can detect and monitor private events (such as parties or meetings).  Combined with surveillance imagery we can probably solve and prevent crimes, and also savagely harass anyone we want.

Along those lines, I think we will know that the open data is actually useful when rich and powerful people start censoring it because people are using it to effectively wield power.

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1. Roy H. Campbell, Nayeem Islam, David Raila, and Peter Madany, Designing and implementing Choices: an object-oriented system in C++. Communations of the ACM, 36 (9):117-126, 1993. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=162717
2. Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, Smart cities: This city runs on its own operating system, in ZDNet. 2019. https://www.zdnet.com/article/smart-cities-this-city-runs-on-its-own-operating-system/

 

More Chicxulub Results

In the last four decades, we have learned about the Chicxulub impact which seems to have caused a mass extinction and the end of the dinosaurs.  While it is easy to see that being hit by a mile-wide chunk of rock is bad, it has taken some work to figure out just how it could wipe out so many species all around the world, land, sea, and air.

This year, several studies report detailed models of the impact.  A sample core from the Chicxulub crater indicates that the sediments impacted included very large amounts of Sulfur, which would have ejected into the atmosphere and even the stratosphere and above.  In addition to the short term effects, the Sulfur would have been suspended as particulates, with world wide effects on climate akin to a nuclear winter scenario.

This fall, an international team of researchers report a study of fossil records of marine species [1]. These species are highly sensitive to pH, and thus mark the overall acidity of the ocean.  The study shows that populations were stable for 100,000 years (despite the Deccan vulcanism), but plunged dramatically right at the time of the  Chicxulub impact.  This suggests that the massive ejections of Sulfur into the atmosphere led to instant acidification of the ocean from fallout and acid rain.

These findings indicate that there was a massive die off of plankton, which would account for die off of many marine species which depend on them.  It also dramatically changed the Carbon cycle.

The study indicates that surface waters rapidly acidified and rapidly bounced back.  The latter would reflect the lack of plankton which absorb Carbon and Calcium from the water.  Modelling these effects at depths, the researchers hypothesize that the impact caused a substantial reduction, but not a complete collapse of plankton.  The oceans did not recover for 100,000 years or more.

This research does not support hypothesized role of outgassing from the Deccan traps, or any other increase in CO2.  These effects are “overwhelmed by the biogeochemical effect of extinction” ([1], p 3)

These results certainly make sense, especially in light of other recent research.  This is a nice, careful study.  Of course, this is based on limited data, and I can’t evaluate the models in detail.

If these hypotheses hold up, we begin so see that the Chicxulub impact did, indeed, kill off the dinosaurs and many other species.  At least part of the disastrous effect was due to the luck of where the object hit, in shallow water with Sulfur rich sediments.  The research suggests that such an impact would cause massive damage, around the world, and the fallout would cause catastrophic changes to the atmosphere and oceans which cause the extinction of many plankton and plants. Larger animals would quickly starve.

Further, these changes lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.  The Earth did, indeed, recover from this sudden perturbation, but that process took millennia.

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1. Michael J. Henehan, Andy Ridgwell, Ellen Thomas, Shuang Zhang, Laia Alegret, Daniela N. Schmidt, James W. B. Rae, James D. Witts, Neil H. Landman, Sarah E. Greene, Brian T. Huber, James R. Super, Noah J. Planavsky, and Pincelli M. Hull, Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:201905989, 2019. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/10/15/1905989116.abstract
2. Lucas Joel, The Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Acidified the Ocean in a Flash, in New York Times. 2019: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/science/chicxulub-asteroid-ocean-acid.html

 

 

Book Review: “The Princess Beard” by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

The Princess Beard by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

Dawson and Hearne give us another Pell of a book, following Kill the Farm Boy and No Country for Old Gnomes.  These stories are dedicated to the proposition that fairy tales need to be shaken up; and a ridiculous amount of wordplay stirred in.  The authors have fun, and it’s fun to read.

This episode follows the adventures of a couple of plucky young women from earlier tales, among others.  What is it like to wake up from a cursed sleep, with two-foot-long fingernails, hair like jungle vines, and a beard?  What will happen to the liberated dryads, nice young women who will grow up to be carnivorous trees?  How will a Clydesdale-centaur deal with his shame at his unmanly magical talent for making fine pastries and tea?  How can a short, pudgy, freckly elf find his own life, rejected by snooty, svelte, blonde elfish society?

As it happens, they all run off to be pirates, naturally.  Or should I say, “pirrrates, naturrrrally”.

Of course, this gang of misfits are good pirates, and they become eco-warrior pirates, tackling a nasty, nature fouling corporation.  Arrr, mateys!  Don’t mess with this gang!

But, you say, this is such a hackneyed chestnut of a plot, actually a whole stew of stereotypes. Of course it is, that’s part of the point. (See the authors’ comments to the first book.)

Fear not.

It’s all great fun, silly puns, sentimental goop and all.

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1. Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne, The Princess Beard, New York, Del Rey, 2019.

 

Sunday Book Reviews

Book Review: “Hollywood’s Eve” by Lili Anolik

Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik

I love this book!  I admire this book!  I would love to be able to write like this!

The topic is biographical, though there is a large dose of autobiography.  Anolik loves her subject, in many complicated ways, and she takes time to tell us all about it.

Do I need to know all this?  Of course not.  But I loved reading it, anyway.  That’s what I call great writing.

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Eve Babitz is a near contemporary to my life, though I never heard of her.  In one sense, this is surprising, considering her spectacular life.  On the other hand, 99% of us were not rock stars or groupies, we were stuck out in the arena, never close to getting backstage, never pretty or clever enough to pick up someone pretty and clever. (Not that we would have known what to do if we did get into such a scene.)

And, of course, Eve’s an LA girl, through and through.  Out here in the corn fields, the LA scene isn’t quite as compelling as it was at Hollywood High.

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Eve’s life is an unbelievable, chaotic, irresponsible, irrepressible saga.  Anolik tells of her Forest Gump-like life, sleeping with everyone you’ve heard of, right there out in the open. “Squalid overboogie.” (p. 67)   She was and is “an existential outlaw plus demon plus and artist” (p. 260)

So why does Eve appeal, even to drab nobodies out in flyover country?

The book of Eve is one long tale of sex and drugs and, well, that’s about it.  (It’s a wonder she has lived as long as she has.)  But, Anolik argues that this wasn’t mere hedonism. She says that the sex is what made Eve tick.

“Aha, so it’s not sex and art for Eve, it’s sex is art. And sex, as much as writing, is her métier….Sex is undeniably the source of her energy. It’s what propelled her through her ambiguous and complicated life.” (p. 243)

Her life was and is a mess.  Over and over, through and through, we have to wonder, “what was she thinking?”  Why would she do this stuff?  What was she even trying to do?

Analik makes the case that, if Eve was trying to do anything other than just be Eve, she was trying to be an artist.

Anolik discusses Eve’s art, especially her writing.  All novels are autobiographical one way or another. Eve’s are nothing but autobiography with the names changed.  This makes the job of a biographer merge into a literary critic.

Anolik suggests one reason why Eve Babitz is having a bit of a moment this late in her life:  she speaks to the eternal challenge for artists, especially female artists.

“An artist must be willful, selfish, ruthless, calculating, egotistic. In short not nice,”   Which is usually seen as not feminine or female. “What happens so often with women artists is that, at some point, they need to sacrifice—or believe they need to sacrifice—the artist for the woman….But that didn’t happen to Eve.” (p. 253)

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Eve was never especially successful as an artist, though, or at anything but being Eve. She never married, never had a job, was always fearlessly diving in.

In short, she never grew up.  More to the point, “Eve didn’t fail to mature, she refused.” (p. 263 ) “Adulthood was a condition she simply wouldn’t submit to, and that was that.” (p. 264)

No wonder I like her!

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Fittingly, Anolik adopts a Babitzian style; wandering, non-linear, confessional.  Tons of quotes and facts, with not one footnote.  (What would Eve do?  Certainly not footnotes!)

We learn as much about other people as we do about Eve, and we learn a lot about the author.  It’s not conventional biography, for sure.  What the heck is it?

 “Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is: a biography in the non-traditional sense; a case history as well as a cultural; a critical appreciation; a sociological study; a psychological commentary; a noir-style mystery; a memoir in disguise; and a philosophical investigation as contrary, speculative, and unresolved as its subject.” ( p. ix)

Well, OK, maybe.  (I’m baffled byt the ‘noir’ part, and it ain’t terribly *-ical in any systematic sense.)

But above all else this book is “a love story” .  Anolik’s book is “infatuated—hopelessly, helplessly, heedlessly” with her subject (p. x).

It shows, and that’s what makes it so good!

Honestly, I don’t identify with the privileged and feckless Babitz (talk about wasted opportunities!), but I’m a big sucker for hopeless, helpless, heedless infatuation.

I’d say this book was a guilty pleasure, except I feel not even the tiniest shred of guilt.

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1. Lili Anolik, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and he Secret History of L.A., New York, Scribner, 2019.

 

Sunday book Reviews

Plastic is Forever. How long is forever?

I was taught that plastic is not biodegradable (which is certainly true), and, accordingly, we should assume that it will remain in the environment for a long time, effectively “forever”.  It is also clear that plastic materials can last decades in the wild, and can have devastating effects on wildlife.

Researchers from MIT and WHOI report this fall that there is more to this picture. In controlled experiments, they show that the ubiquitous polystyrene decomposes into (tiny amounts of) Carbon and CO2 when exposed to sunlight.  Polystyrene is pretty much indigestible by microbes (hence, “not biodegradable”), but is quite sensitive to UV light.

This finding is interesting because it explains the anomalous finding that there isn’t anywhere near as much plastic waste in the oceans as would be expected if they last thousands of years [1].  A lot of plastic probably degrades in the sun, turning into traces of carbon, and effectively disappearing.  Understanding this process in more detail will help refine estimates of the Earth’s Carbon budget.

Does this mean we are all clear to dump plastic?  Not really.

For one thing, this lab study doesn’t consider many details of what may happen in the wild, not least how much sunlight really hits the waste, and how gooky the plastic may be, and so on.  There are many unknowns, that could speed up or slow down decomposition.

“Multiple variables are not considered in these lifetime calculations that could shift our estimates to be shorter or longer. For example, it is unknown how the light absorption properties of PS change with increasing time in the environment (e.g., yellowing or fouling by organics and biofilms) or how the residence time of PS in sunlit environments varies” ([2], p. D)

Equally important, additives in the plastic have significant effects on the degradation.  It will be important to understand this photochemistry, not least because some additives may make the polystyrene much more or less degradable.  There may be additives that should be avoided, and others that have shorter lifetimes.

Finally, there are many plastics in wide use (with many additives), so similar studies are needed to understand the overall picture.  Again, some formulations may be much more degradable than others.  And some plastics emit greenhouse gasses in these conditions, so they may not be as benign as polystyrene when they solar degrade.

In the best case, we may discover some plastics that are relatively “solar degradable”, and therefore better for the overall environment.  For that matter, we may discover ways to promote this process, to get rid of unwanted plastic.  (How about microbes that eat sugary traces of soda and emit UV light to melt the empty bottle?)

It also occurs to me that this finding suggests that burying polystyrene might be a bad idea, because it might help preserve it.  Burial is a rich environment for microbes, but poor in UV and sunlight.  Perhaps polystyrene discards can be treated by exposure to sunlight, and should not be sent to landfills, where they really will last forever.

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1. William J. Broad, In the Sea, Not All Plastic Lasts Forever, in New York Times. 2019: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/science/plastics-ocean-degrade.html
2. Collin P. Ward, Cassia J. Armstrong, Anna N. Walsh, Julia H. Jackson, and Christopher M. Reddy, Sunlight Converts Polystyrene to Carbon Dioxide and Dissolved Organic Carbon. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 2019/10/10 2019. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.9b00532

 

Python Data Analysis Oopsie

Back in the day, we used to talk about the need for provenance for digitally enabled science [4, 5]. Much of the initial attention focused on data provenance, what data was used and how it was manipulated to get the reported conclusions.

Data is important, but provenance must also include everything you might need to reproduce the results [3].  And this potentially could include anything and everything.

This fall, researchers from Hawaii report an example of just how crucial this challenge has become. They found that a widely used Python library produces different results depending on the platform it runs on [1].  Uh, oh!

Let’s be clear here.  The computational code is identical on each platform and basically correct. No errors are reported, you get an answer that is 99% the same.  But on some versions of Windows, Macosx and Linux, you get different answers.  In fact, two different versions of Macosx give different answers.  Ouch!

Even more interesting, the problem is said to be due to a utility that searches for files by name, which apparently returns the files in slightly different order on different platforms [2].  For many purposes that probably doesn’t matter, but in this case, the chemistry computation gives different answers depending on the order of the data.  Sigh.

(Technical note:  yes, boys and girls, sort order is not a fixed, universal concept.  On most systems, it is a “localization” setting, because it depends on the language and character encodings used, which vary in different cultures.)

Chemists must now review published studies to check which ones might be affected by these issues.   Good luck with that.

“This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned.” ([1], p. 8452)

Knowing the algorithm used doesn’t answer the question, nor does the fact that Python was used, or even that it was an apple or windows or linux machine.  You have to know the exact version of the operating system used.  More precisely, the version of the operating system actually used when the computation ran, five years ago.

And, by the way, the offending subroutine could have been used by many other libraries, and might or might not produce problematic results.  So, in principle, you need to know if any of the software used a buggy version of the glob utility.  Again, in the configuration that ran whenever it ran, long in the past.

This, my friends, is what you need automated provenance capture for!

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1. Jayanti Bhandari Neupane, Ram P. Neupane, Yuheng Luo, Wesley Y. Yoshida, Rui Sun, and Philip G. Williams, Characterization of Leptazolines A–D, Polar Oxazolines from the Cyanobacterium Leptolyngbya sp., Reveals a Glitch with the “Willoughby–Hoye” Scripts for Calculating NMR Chemical Shifts. Organic Letters, 21 (20):8449-8453, 2019/10/18 2019. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216
2. Sean Gallagher, esearchers find bug in Python script may have affected hundreds of studies, in ArsTechnical. 2019. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/chemists-discover-cross-platform-python-scripts-not-so-cross-platform/
3. Carole Goble, What is Reproducibility? The R* Brouhaha, in First International Workshop on Reproducible Open Science. 2016: Hannover, Germany. http://repscience2016.research-infrastructures.eu/img/CaroleGoble-ReproScience2016v2.pdf
4. Carole Anne Goble and D. De Roure, myExperiment: social networking for workflow-using e-scientists, in Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Workflows in support of large-scale science. 2007, ACM: Monterey, California, USA. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1273360.1273361
5. James D. Myers, Alan R. Chappell, Matthew Elder, Al Geist, and Jens Schwidder, Re-Integrating The Research Record. Computing in Science and Engineering, 5 (3):44-50, May/June 2003. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1196306/

Tulipphilia: Faith-based Nakamotoan Economics

Layer1, a company notable for its astonishingly opaque website, is reportedly “plans to bring wind-powered bitcoin mining rigs to West Texas early next year.” [1]  (Brady Dale notes that Peter Thiel has invested in this project, which I assume he imagines is an endorsement.)

As far as I can tell, Layer1 are building wind farms to power their Bitcoin mining machines, thus “driving its business plan straight into the “bitcoin wastes too much energy” argument”, and argument which you have heard from me and others.

Dale’s headline terms this “renewable Bitcoin MIning”, though it is actually “wasting renewable energy” instead of just “wasting energy”.

To me, this business plan actually makes the Bitcoin is Evil argument all the stronger:  building windfarms that do not displace existing Carbon emissions is, well, not helpful. Less evil than recommissioning retired coal fired plants, but a waste of perfectly good turbines.

Layer1 CEO Alexander Liegl is sure this is a good idea because, and I quote, “Bitcoin is the only thing we believe in….” (Alexander Liegl quoted in  [1])

Wow!

The essence of Nakamotoaism! Pure, unadulterated.

In the article, Liegl gives another very revealing comment, noting that “Bitcoin mining is pretty compelling to people out there [in Texas] because it’s pretty analogous to how oil and gas works.” (Liegl, quoted in  [1])

Again, wow!

And he has a valid point.

The term Bitcoin “mining” is not just a metaphor, or rather, it is an extremely literal metaphor.  Bitcoin mining is an extractive industry, akin got mining and farming. Fundamentally, cryptomining consumes vast quantities of electricity and computation to “extract” a raw material (Bitcoin).  Bitcoin may or may not be used for economically productive activities, but the tokens themselves are useless. Just like petroleum or iron ore.

Texans (and Peter Thiel) may think extractive industries are the bee’s knees, but a lot of us know that they are unsustainable and not good for the planet, at least not for the parts of the planet that humans inhabit.

I guess the good news is that when the Bitcoin mining goes out of business, the windfarms probably will still be useful.

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1. Brady Dale (2019) Peter Thiel Backs $200 Million Valuation for Renewable Bitcoin Mining in the US. Coindesk, https://www.coindesk.com/peter-thiel-backs-200-million-valuation-for-renewable-bitcoin-mining-in-the-us

 

Cryptocurrency Thursday

Tiny Bio Bots From Illiniois

Holy, Moly!  How did they do this?

Researchers down the street at the University of Illinois report on an astonishing “biohybrid” robot [1].

To be clear, there have been plenty of biobots built with muscle tissue, including here at Illinois.

This one is a bit more than that:  they used both muscle tissue and nerve tissue, to create a little bot that moves by muscles under the direction of the nerves.   Whoa!

“This biohybrid swimmer exemplifies a multicellular engineered living system that is developed via a synthesis of top-down engineering and bottom-up self-organization and development.” ([1], p. 19846)

(There isn’t a word in that sentence that I don’t like!)

Fig. 1. Conceptual framework. The embodiment of the envisioned motile bot consists of an engineered scaffold, ECM, muscle tissue, and optogenetic motor neurons, operating in a fluid environment and responding to external light stimuli. Engineered muscle tissue is formed through self-organization of muscle cells and ECM, guided by the shape of the scaffold. Functional neuromuscular units develop in situ whereby motor neurons extend neurites and innervate the muscle tissue. Appropriate design choices can result in a biohybrid machine capable of locomotion actuated by neuromuscular units. (From [1])

This study uses now established techniques for culturing tissues in a 3D scaffolding. In this case, muscle tissue and motor neurons are cultured together and self-organize into muscle tissue, and motor neurons “extend neurites selectively toward the muscle and innervate it, developing functional neuromuscular units.” ([1] , p. 19841)  Whoa!

The research developed computational methods to design an effective swimmer, with a flat head and a flexible tail for swimming.  This involved a lot of cool biomechanical theory and some serious computational modelling. Even cooler, the neurons are responsive to light, so the little swimmer is activated and controlled by light.

They created a real bot, which demonstrated “actual untethered locomotion”—it works!

Well done, all!

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1. Onur Aydin, Xiaotian Zhang, Sittinon Nuethong, Gelson J. Pagan-Diaz, Rashid Bashir, Mattia Gazzola, and M. Taher A. Saif, Neuromuscular actuation of biohybrid motile bots. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (40):19841, 2019. http://www.pnas.org/content/116/40/19841.abstract
2. Lois Yoksoulian, Researchers build microscopic biohybrid robots propelled by muscles, nerves, in University of Illinois Research News. 2019. https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/802738

 

Robot Wednesday