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Batteries that “drink” seawater could power long-range underwater vehicles

http://news.mit.edu/2017/batteries-drink-seawater-long-range-autonomous-underwater-vehicles-0615

The long range of airborne drones helps them perform critical tasks in the skies. Now MIT spinout Open Water Power (OWP) aims to greatly improve the range of unpiloted underwater vehicles (UUVs), helping them better perform in a range of applications under the sea.
Recently acquired by major tech firm L3 Technologies, OWP has developed a novel aluminum-water power system that’s safer and more durable, and that gives UUVs a tenfold increase in range over traditional lithium-ion batteries used for the same applications.
The power systems could find a wide range of uses, including helping UUVs dive deeper, for longer periods of time, into the ocean’s abyss to explore ship wreckages, map the ocean floor, and conduct research. They could also be used for long-range oil prospecting out at sea and various military applications.
With the acquisition, OWP now aims to ramp up development of its power systems, not just for UUVs, but also for various ocean-floor monitoring systems, sonar buoy systems, and other marine-research devices.
OWP is currently working with the U.S. Navy to replace batteries in acoustic sensors designed to detect enemy submarines. This summer, the startup will launch a pilot with Riptide Autonomous Solutions, which will use the UUVs for underwater surveys. Currently, Riptide’s UUVs travel roughly 100 nautical miles in one go, but the company hopes OWP can increase that distance to 1,000 nautical miles.

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Maybe the future needs us after all

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-15/the-robot-takeover-is-greatly-exaggerated

That closer look was taken by Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. In a long essay, they examine the Acemoglu and Restrepo paper in detail. They note that the two economists find that capital investment, and use of computers specifically, tend to increase jobs. As Acemoglu and Restrepo themselves wrote:

[Our results] suggest that other types of capital equipment and even computers tend to increase the demand for labor. This result underscores the possibility — though certainly does not prove — that industrial robots might have a very different impact on employment and wages than other types of recent technologies.

“Robots,” you see, are actually a very narrowly defined type of automation. Most automated- production technologies, from self-checkout kiosks to machine-learning algorithms to automated phone-answering machines, might be called “robots” in common parlance, but the definition of robot used by Acemoglu and Restrepo is limited to fully autonomous multipurpose machines with no human operators. If these machines are one of only a few kinds of automation that are causing job losses, and other forms of automation are complementing human beings and creating new jobs, the labor market is probably in good shape.

Mishel and Bivens also give some other reasons to be skeptical of Acemoglu and Restrepo’s findings. They note that workers haven’t been changing occupations as much as they did in past decades — if people were losing their jobs to automation at a faster rate, we’d expect them to have to retrain more frequently.

Mishel and Bivens note that productivity growth and corporate investment in information technology has fallen, which also doesn’t fit with a story of accelerating automation. And they show that according to Acemoglu and Restrepo’s own estimation, the negative impact of Chinese competition on U.S. jobs was more than three times larger than the effect of robots.

This is quite a convincing rebuttal. It seems clear that the economics press has overplayed the Acemoglu and Restrepo paper. In part, this is probably because of a general anxiety about new technology and automation, which happens in the wake of any big technological revolution. And the fact that the paper had the word “robots” in the title, which just happens to be a trendy buzzword, likely didn’t help.

As I said, this doesn’t mean automation will never be a concern. But as of today, technology remains good for human employment. Which means automation is far, far down on the list of problems to be confronted.

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China takes lead in quantum security…

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-shatters-ldquo-spooky-action-at-a-distance-rdquo-record-preps-for-quantum-internet/

In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite has tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China—each separated by more than 1,000 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory, and firmly establishes China as the frontrunner in a burgeoning “quantum space race” to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network—that is, a potentially unhackable “quantum internet” that would be of immense geopolitical importance. The findings were published Thursday in Science.
“China has taken the leadership in quantum communication,” says Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva who was not involved in the study. “This demonstrates that global quantum communication is possible and will be achieved in the near future.”
The concept of quantum communications is considered the gold standard for security, in part because any compromising surveillance leaves its imprint on the transmission. Conventional encrypted messages require secret keys to decrypt, but those keys are vulnerable to eavesdropping as they are sent out into the ether. In quantum communications, however, these keys can be encoded in various quantum states of entangled photons—such as their polarization—and these states will be unavoidably altered if a message is intercepted by eavesdroppers. Ground-based quantum communications typically send entangled photon pairs through fiber-optic cables, or through the open air. But collisions with ordinary atoms along the way disrupt the photons’ delicate quantum states, limiting transmission distances to a few hundred kilometers. Sophisticated devices called “quantum repeaters”—equipped with “quantum memory” modules—could in principle be daisy-chained together to receive, store and retransmit the quantum keys across longer distances, but this task is so complex and difficult that such systems remain largely theoretical.

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It is time for the FOMC to come clean on what it really wants to do with inflation.

http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2017/06/musings-on-junes-fomc-meeting.html

Yep, either the Fed is the most unlucky institution in the world or the Fed has a problem. I think the latter. The Fed appears to have begun having a problem with 2 percent inflation around the time of the Great Recession. This can be seen in the FOMC’s summary of economic projections (SEPs) figure below. It shows for each FOMC meeting where SEPs were provided to the public the central tendency forecast of the core PCE inflation rate over the next year. The horizon for these forecasts depend on the time of the year they were released and range from one year to almost two years out. The forecast horizons are long enough, in other words, for the FOMC to have meaningful influence on the inflation rate.

To be clear, the Fed has only been explicitly targeting inflation at 2 percent since 2012, but many studies have shown it to be implicitly doing so since the 1990s. So this truly has been an eight-year plus problem for the Fed and one that makes Janet Yellen’s remarks all the more disappointing to hear. One would think after almost a decade of undershooting 2 percent inflation there might be an acknowledgement from the FOMC like the one that came from Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari (my bold):

[O]ver the past five years, 100 percent of the medium-term inflation forecasts (midpoints) in the FOMC’s Summary of Economic Projections have been too high: We keep predicting that inflation is around the corner. How can one explain the FOMC repeatedly making these one-sided errors? One-sided errors are indeed rational if the consequences are asymmetric. For example, if you are driving down the highway alongside a cliff, you will err by steering away from the cliff, because even one error in the other direction will cause you to fly over the cliff. In a monetary policy context, I believe the FOMC is doing the same thing: Based on our actions rather than our words, we are treating 2 percent as a ceiling rather than a target. I am not necessarily opposed to having an inflation ceiling… I am opposed to stating we have a target but then behaving as though it were a ceiling.

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digital to biological printer… let that sink in …

https://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nbt.3859.pdf

We present a scalable bio-manufacturing unit, called a digital-to- biological converter (DBC), that receives digitally transmitted DNA sequence information and converts it into biopolymers, such as DNA, RNA and proteins, as well as complex entities such as viral parti- cles, without any human intervention

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Globalism, war, and could it happen again?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2017/06/1914-effect

Industrialisation meant that new sources of power emerged to challenge the old aristocratic elites—industrialists and factory workers. Workers were able to use their muscle to demand more rights and, increasingly, the vote. Elites turned to nationalism as a way of distracting voters from economic issues and shoring up their support. This nationalism led to clashes with the other great powers where their interests diverged; between Britain and Russia in Asia; Russia and Austria in the Balkans; Germany and France in north Africa.

So let us move to the current era of globalisation, during which the export share of global GDP has more than doubled since the 1960s. New economic powers have emerged to challenge American dominance; first, Japan, and now China and potentially India. Imperial overstretch threatens America as it did Edwardian Britain. The ability and, more recently, willingness of America to act as global policeman has been eroded. Indeed, unlike Britain in 1914, America is a net debtor not a creditor. Can it hold China’s ambitions in check in the Pacific, counterbalance Iran and the terrorists of Islamic State in the middle east and deal with a nationalist Russian regime? It seems clear that other powers think it can’t. They are pushing to see whether America will react.

Within the economy two big changes have occurred. Manufacturing capacity has moved from the developed world to Asia. Technology has rewarded skilled workers and widened pay gaps. Voters have rebelled by turning to parties that reject globalisation. This didn’t happen in France but generally it has made life more difficult for centre-left parties and turned centre-right parties more nativist. America’s Republicans used to be enthusiasts for free trade. Now they have elected Donald Trump.

Just as in the first era, globalisation has disrupted international and domestic power structures. Thankfully this does not mean that another world war is inevitable. But it is easy to imagine regional conflicts: Iran against Saudi Arabia, or an American attack on North Korea that provokes a Chinese reaction.

The real danger is that this a zero-sum game. Governments will appear to grab a larger share of global trade for their own countries. In doing so, they will cause trade to shrink. That might make voters even angrier. From the early 1980s to 2008, most companies could count on a business-friendly political environment in the developed world. But it looks as if that era has ended with the financial crisis. Globalisation has caused another counter-reaction.

The best hope is that technology can deliver the economic growth and rising prosperity voters want. If that happens, these threats will not disappear but they will be much reduced. But for all the hype about new technology, productivity has been sluggish. The omens are not great.

 

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Having won California, self-esteem went on to conquer the world.

https://literaryreview.co.uk/knowing-me-knowing-me

Having won California, self-esteem went on to conquer the world. And so here we are, living with the first generation to have been raised entirely on the intoxicating mantra of its own excellence. Storr argues provocatively that an obsession with promoting self-esteem has led to an increase in narcissism, and he has some interesting research data to back up this claim.

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AI is even more interesting…

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608108/forget-alphago-deepminds-has-a-more-interesting-step-towards-general-ai/

The researchers at DeepMind, which created the champion Go-playing robot AlphaGo, are working on an approach that could prove significant in the quest to make machines as intelligent as we are.

In two papers published this week and reported by New Scientist, researchers at the Alphabet subsidiary describe efforts to teach computers about relational reasoning, a cognitive capability that is foundational to human intelligence.

Simply put, relational reasoning is the ability to consider relationships between different mental representations, such as objects, words, or ideas. This kind of reasoning is both crucial to human cognitive development and vital to solving just about any problem.

Most existing machine-learning systems don’t try to understand the relationship between concepts. A vision system can identify a dog or a cat in a picture, for example, but it doesn’t know that the dog is chasing the cat.

The two systems developed at DeepMind solve that by modifying existing machine-learning methods to make them capable of learning about physical relationships between static objects, as well as the behavior of moving objects over time.

They demonstrate the first capability using CLEVR, a data set of simple objects. After training, they can ask the system whether one object is in front of another, or which object is closest. Their results are dramatically better than anything achieved before, even exceeding human performance in some cases.

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Video games are bigger than you think…

 

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/3-surprising-facts-about-the-gaming-industry-and-why-you-should-start-paying-attention

More people watch online video game play than major cable networks and subscription entertainment services.

At 665 million strong, these consumers are cutting the cord on traditional cable packages and subscriptions in favour of DIY platforms like YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch.

SuperData, a gaming and technology research firm, estimates that ads and direct consumer spending on game video content will reach $4.6 billion in 2017.

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Hydrogen from paint? Material science has much more to give.

https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/new-paint-product-can-harvest-hydrogen-energy-from-the-air

Researchers have developed a paint-like product that can turn air into hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen is an extremely clean fuel source, emitting only water when it’s burned. However, the fossil fuels needed to create it negate its environmental benefits, and alternative production methods using liquid water aren’t cost-effective. The newly developed material addresses both problems, drawing water molecules from humid air and using solar energy captured by the paint to split them into their hydrogen and oxygen components. We spoke with Torben Daeneke, lead author of the study introducing the technology, to learn more.