The roots of the present Greek crisis lie in the political transformation of the country during the 1980s. (Disclaimer: Although this post is about Greek fiscal behaviour, I am not taking Germany’s side. Lenders to the profligate are just as culpable as the borrowers.) … Continue reading →
Limpet teeth might be the strongest natural material known, with biological structures so strong (3.0 to 6.5 GPa tensile strength) they could be copied to make future cars, boats, and planes, a new study by researchers from the University of Portsmouth has found. The research was published (open access) Wednesday Feb. 18 in the Royal Society journal Interface. “Until now, we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material [at ~4.5 GPa] because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bullet-proof vests to computer electronics,” noted Professor Asa Barber from the university’s School of Engineering. The limpet teeth strength is also comparable to that of the strongest man-made fibers, such as high-performance Toray T1000G carbon fibers, which also have a tensile strength of 6.5 GPa, the paper noted. Munching rock Barber found that the teeth contain a hard mineral known as goethite, which forms in the limpet as it grows. “Limpets need high-strength teeth to rasp over rock surfaces and remove algae for feeding. We discovered that the fibers of goethite are just the right size to make up a resilient composite structure. This discovery means that the fibrous structures found in limpet teeth could be mimicked and used in high-performance engineering applications such as Formula 1 racing cars, the hulls of boats, and aircraft structures.”
Figuring out which companies are likely to succeed is one of the toughest problems in business. But even very dry data from business registrations can tell you a great deal, according to a new NBER working paper from researchers at MIT. Even though the authors have come up with a robust way to predict growth, one of the biggest factors is still timing.
In a dataset from Massachusetts, 77% of growth outcomes (an IPO or acquisition within 6 years of being founded) came from companies in the top 5% of the quality measure the authors created, based on everything from how a company is named to how quickly it files for patents. Nearly 50% of successful outcomes were in the top 1%. A similar dataset from in California produced remarkably similar results for the researchers (paywall).
But their model doesn’t account for everything. The highest potential entrepreneurs in a dataset that ran from 1988 to 2014 were from the class of 2000. But entrepreneurs in 1995 had a far, far greater chance of success.
Timing matters, a lot. The earlier entrepreneurs got more time in a growth market, and were more likely to be successful. Their years of success attracted more people and made the early stages easier, but high potential means very little in a tough market. There was a huge spike in the number of firms that exited successfully around 1995—they got the full benefit of the boom, and suffered fewer of the consequences of the tech-bubble bust:
The height of entrepreneurial quality was actually at the very end of the bubble. But they had a substantially harder time making it, and that difficulty persisted for years after the bubble burst. RECPI is the average quality of firms multiplied by the number of startups created in a given year in a particular area, the state of Massachusetts in this case:
So what sort of data predicts success? It’s a few, surprisingly simple, things. Registering as a corporation rather than an LLC or partnership means a company is five times more likely to be successful. Registering in Delaware (a particularly business-friendly jurisdiction) is associated with a 40 times greater chance. Filing for a patent within a year of starting means a 60 times greater likelihood of growth.
Names matter: successful firms tend to have short ones (3 words or less). An company named after a founder has only a 5% chance of success, compared to one that isn’t. And an early mention in the Boston Globe business section was associated with a 30 times greater likelihood of success.
The difference between a firm that satisfies many of the quality metrics and one that doesn’t is pretty startling. The odds of a Delaware corporation with a patent and trademark succeeding compared to a Massachusetts LLC without intellectual property is 3097:1. The authors go even deeper:
More dramatically, at the (near) extreme, comparing the growth probability of a Delaware corporation with a patent, trademark, media mention and non-eponymous short name with an eponymous partnership or LLC with a long name but no intellectual property or media mentions, the odds-ratio is 295,115 to one!
It’s not causal—just registering in Delaware won’t make a company successful. But it’s an excellent signal of the ambition and potential of a company at a very early stage.
This data isn’t likely to give investors an advantage, but for governments trying to grow jobs and encourage entrepreneurs, it’s a way to focus on quality over quantity.
The Great Financial Crisis lingers. The fact that the world economy continues to grow does not change that fact. There are different lenses from which one can view the crisis and seek to understand its implications.
We are drawn to a lens that was central to the political economic discourse from the middle of the 19th century through the Great Depression. It was the idea that capitalism was so terribly successful that it generated a surplus in excess of what it could profitably invest.
Charles Conant, a journalist-cum-presidential adviser in the late-1800s, and early 1900s recognized a limited range of possibilities. Anticipating Mad Men by half a century, Conant understood that increased consumption could absorb the surplus. There was a certain plasticity to consumer desires. Still wedded to the character-building concept of scarcity, Conant saw limitations to this course.
Conant realized the surplus could be redistributed. He accepted some movement in this direction but thought that too much would undermine the work ethic. Conant knew war could destroy the surplus, but he was not war-monger. He rejected this option on humanistic ground.
The alternative he advocated was to export it. However, he also recognized that the other industrialized nations faced similar "capital congestion". The US surplus could not go there, but rather it would directed toward the emerging markets of the era. Conant wanted the surplus capital to build infrastructure, including railroads. This would absorb the surplus savings and help integrate those regions via trade in goods and services.
The Great War destroyed tens of millions of people and the capital stock of Europe and Japan. The idea of surplus capital, a central thesis, moved to the margins of the economic and policy making circles. However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Europe and Japan were rebuilt, and the excesses began growing again. The cultural critique of the 1960s and the stagflation of the 1970s saw some interest return to the surplus capital lenses.
Reagan and Thatcher can be viewed through the lenses as turning Conant on his head.Exporting the surplus only aggravated the general congestion in the world. Instead, the Anglo-American economies would absorb the world's surplus capital. This meant importing the world's products and capital. This meant current account deficits and capital account surpluses. This required the liberalization of the capital markets and financial innovation.
The Great Financial Crisis marked the end of that strategy of dealing with the surplus. There were political limits on how large of a trade deficit the US could run without triggering a protectionist backlash. Keeping the surplus out of production and into financial assets worked for the better part of two decades. The press for deregulation succeeded in weakening the oversight and the allowed the gaming of the system, while the financial engineering created complex, opaque and illiquid financial products, with incredible leverage and risk beyond comprehension. The Great Moderation not only reduced the magnitude and amplitude of the business cycle but also served to fan the belief that asset prices could only rise.
This side of the crisis, there is still too much capital. Much of the capital that was destroyed was recovered and/or redistributed. Modern representative governments (and many of those that may not be so modern or representative) are loath to follow Andrew Mellon's advice to Herbert Hoover: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.”
Seeing this through the liberal lenses or its close cousin neo-, some economists talk about secular stagnation and insufficient aggregate demand. The political program they advocate is boosting aggregate demand through the government-sponsored infrastructure, which is indeed needed in most of the high income countries, let alone the rapidly urbanizing moderate and low income countries.
However, it does not break the cycle. It will not solve the challenge of surplus capital. What good, for example, is another tunnel into Manhattan if the toll costs most than an hour's work at the average pay? Among the periphery in Europe, Portugal has among the most modern infrastructure, yet it has not boosted the country's competitiveness. China has spent billions on infrastructure, but the economy is maturing, and growth is clearing slowing.
The liberals are reformers. They think there is a problem with capitalism and it can be fixed by this program or that. They do not appreciate that the main challenge comes not from capitalism’s weakness but its strength. It produces wealth in such abundance that we are choking on it.
The end of the Reagan-Thatcher solution leaves us with out a new strategy to deal with the surplus capital. It has given the body politic a fever. A fever is both a symptom of the illness and an attempt by the body to cure itself. That is what negative nominal interest rates are—a symptom of the surplus capital and a cure—namely the destruction of capital.
In order for society to continue, the social classes needed to reproduce themselves. Wages need not just to sustain an employee, but be sufficient to have a family. Capital needs to reproduce as well. This is the return on capital—interest rates and profits. Productivity gains are divided between wages and profits.
The lion’s share has gone to profits as wages have become decoupled from marginal gains in productivity. This forced women into the work force in droves. This still was not sufficient. Increasingly young people were forced into the labor market. This still was insufficient. Rather than win concessions from capital, the state interceded. The fastest growing part of household income comes from transfer payments. Nearly 20% of American households get government assistance for buying food. The rise in the minimum wage in over 20 states and cities this year is another concession from the state (which turns out to be among the largest employers, through contracted work, of minimum wage workers).
This still was not sufficient. Households took on debt to square the circle. The Great Financial Crisis ended that. The consumption in the US (4.3% increase at an annualized pace in Q4) is being done without much of an increase in revolving debt (credit cards). Now we have the first generation of Americans that most likely will not live as well as their parents. This is the way that the inability to reproduce itself is reflected among workers.
Capital is also finding it difficult to reproduce. Facing dismal returns, which Conant understood would be a consequence of capital congestion, capital has sought to increase further its share of productivity. This is one of the under-appreciated reasons why wages, even where the labor market is tight or tightening, like Germany, Japan, the US and the UK, are not seeing wage gains.
There is a political backlash against the concentration of wealth that has resulted. The political repulsion has many expressions and crosses the political spectrum. Capital is subject to the same laws of supply and demand that they insist for the production and employees. The negative interest rates are a prima facie case of too much capital.
The most famous equation last year was Picketty’s r>g. That meant when the return to capital was faster than growth, which historical tendencies showed, it led to a concentration of wealth. The negative nominal interest rates means that r<g. Negative interest rates turns capitalism on upside down.
The crisis will linger until we find an answer to Conant’s question. What to do with the surplus capital that our political economy cannot help but generate. Picketty treated capital as synonymous with wealth. If we widen the definition and return it to its original meaning, it represents a social relationship. Ultimately to resolve the surplus capital problem, social relationships have to change by definition.
Other articles looking at the world through this lens:
Best College Reviews has published a ranking of the 20 Best College Farms in America. Best College Reviews is an editorially independent college review website focusing on college rankings, reviews of college features, and thought leadership on helping students find their place in the higher education landscape. I am excited to see a Missouri school on the list that is right in my back yard.
From small student-run organic farms, to large agribusiness training centers and entrepreneurial programs, farming plays a central role in many American higher ed institutions. Best College Reviews realizes that a university farm can mean a number of things, so as they reviewed 50 universities from across the country, they kept the following criteria in mind: Farm Size, Integration with the Main Campus, Sustainability, Are courses taught at the farm?, Do students use the farm?, and Integration with the Community.
Here are the top 5 on their list:
1. Warren Wilson College – Asheville, North Carolina
2. College of the Ozarks – Point Lookout, Missouri
3. Deep Spring College – Big Pine, California
4. Hampshire College – Amherst, Massachusetts
5. Butte College – Oroville, California
“The magnetic graphene acquires new electronic properties so that new quantum phenomena can arise. These properties can lead to new electronic devices that are more robust and multi-functional.”
The finding has the potential to increase graphene’s use in computers, as in computer chips that use electronic spin to store data.
The magnetic insulator Shi and his team used was yttrium iron garnet grown by laser molecular beam epitaxy in his lab. The researchers placed a single-layer graphene sheet on an atomically smooth layer of yttrium iron garnet. They found that yttrium iron garnet magnetized the graphene sheet. In other words, graphene simply borrows the magnetic properties from yttrium iron garnet.
(a) Magnetic hysteresis loops in perpendicular and in-plane magnetic fields. Inset is the AFM topographic image of YIG thin film surface. (b) Optical image (without top gate) and (d) schematic drawing (with top gate) of the devices after transferred to YIG/GGG substrate (false color). (c) Room temperature Raman spectra of graphene/YIG (purple), graphene/SiO2 (red), and YIG/GGG substrate only (blue).
Though humans generally have a tendency to look at a region just below the eyes and above the nose toward the midline when first identifying another person, a small subset of people tend to look further down –– at the tip of the nose, for instance, or at the mouth…
The reason we look where we look, said the researchers, is evolutionary. With survival at stake and only a limited amount of time to assess who an individual might be, humans have developed the ability to make snap judgments by glancing at a place on the face that allows the observer’s eye to gather a massive amount of information, from the finer features around the eyes to the larger features of the mouth. In 200 milliseconds, we can tell whether another human being is friend, foe, or potential mate. ”
The full read is pretty amazing. One of the things we realized when designing for communications is that 1) people don’t really like how they look on video and 2) getting meaning from nonverbal/facial cues a lot of times means getting the essence of the sender’s mood and emotions.
In other words, visual cues are extremely important in communication, but humans have evolved to make snap judgments based off visual cues really well.
It’s why we’ve designed videos on Pop to be pretty lo-fi: you don’t need super high fidelity for messaging and you get to keep your data plan happy.
The Crazyflie 2.0 is an open project, with source code and hardware design available and documented. The platform is designed with development in mind, implementing features to make development easier and faster, such as logging and real-time parameter setting and wireless firmware update. The complete development environment for most of the projects is available in the virtual machine, so you don’t need to install any toolchains to get into the development. But the virtual machine can just as well be used for flying. Aside from the firmware and software projects, there is also a number of community supported APIs written in Java, Ruby, C/C++, C# and Javascript.
Ryan and crew built Tessel because they thought building a personalized, web-connected speaker system should be easier than it was. So many public web services now offer tools called APIs, or application programming interfaces, that make it easier for anyone to build other software and services. APIs make it easier to, say, build an application that combines data from both Facebook and Spotify — and many other applications. Even non-developers can get in on the action through services like IFTTT — short for “If This, Then That” — which makes it easy to connect different services without writing code.
The Ai.Frame on Pozible caught my eye because of all the cool moves the robots do–although turning around becomes a surprisingly difficult option for a walking robot. In addition to the 16-servo humanoid, they also have a cool bird that sort of resembles an AT-ST Imperial Walker that uses 9 servos.
The concept of a “JavaScript for Things” is amazing for home hardware hackers, since it considerably simplifies the process of making devices behave the way you want them to. Williams uses the blinking light example to compare the amount and complexity of code required for both an Espruino-based board and an Arduino one. the JavaScript method is not only familiar to people who’ve done some web development, but it’s much easier to modify and extend, whereas Arduino often requires a lot of rework to accomplish even similar things.
RF Explorer, a low-cost spectrum analyzer. The Wi-Fi version is less than $120. “RF Explorer is a remarkable device — and it would belittle its true value to even qualify that statement by saying for the money,” mentions Leytus. “Performance and sensitivity are on par with instruments that cost many times more.”
LOGi features a Spartan 6 FPGA with 9152 logic cells, 16 DSP Slices, 576KB of RAM, and 96 I/O Pins. There’s also 256 MB of SDRAM and a SATA connector.
The LOGi’s hardware is comparable to the Papilio Pro, so potential projects may include generating NTSC video, adding a VGA out, and a few retrocomputer emulations via OpenCores.
Blink(1), a tiny device you plug into your USB slot, is a red-green-blue LED that you can program to discreetly alert you to virtually anything.
Set the gizmo to watch for that email you’ve been waiting for, and save yourself the frustration of constantly refreshing your Gmail window. Once you see that blinking purple light (or whichever color pattern your prefer), you’ll be able to rest easy.
Hook blink(1) up to Skype so you can know when your friends are available, without windows popping up every time someone signs on. Use it as a physical “busy” indicator in your office so colleagues will know when you’re in a meeting, or simply set it to flash to the beat of your music. Groovy.
On board the Duo is an ATMega32u4, the same chip used in the Arduino Leonardo, allowing for easy integration with your standard Arduino projects. The top of the board is where the real money is. There’s a Spartan 6 FPGA with 9k logic cells, enough to run emulate some of the classic computers of yore, including the famous SID chip, Yamaha YM2149, and the Atari POKEY (!). With host and device USB, 512k or 2M of SRAM, and an ADC on the FPGA inputs, this board should be able to handle just about everything you would want to throw at it. There’s even a breakout for HDMI on the bottom.
There are a few interesting software features of the Duo, including a full debugger for the ATMega chip, thanks to an emulated Atmel JTAG ICE MKII. Yes, an Arduino-compatible board finally has a real debugger.
“An Arduino compatible for minimalists.” We have designed a world standard prototyping tool that is essential for modern electronic work called Arduino, at the world’s smallest size. Arduino contains a microcomputer, and is used for prototypes and development by engineers, designers and media artists, but conventional products were too big to integrate into their work efficiently. We provide enough “margin” resulting from the world’s smallest size by eliminating all unnecessary space for users who pursue minimal work and product development. The material for users to smoothly develop has been realized without any compromise in usability when writing via the world’s smallest original micro USB connecter.
The Choosatron: Interactive Fiction Arcade Machine is a bit of a hybrid of these worlds. Like the CYOA books, each section ends in a question with a few choices. Unlike the books, you don’t have to go thumbing through pages to find the rest of the story. As part of the Kickstarter, a number of authors are creating new and original stories, and everything is open so it would be possible to create your own stories and download them to the Choosatron.
The rail line seeks to facilitate travel across Europe and Asia, Beijing’s municipal government said Jan. 21 in a post on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. The journey from Beijing to Moscow would take “two days” on a route passing through Kazakhstan, the post said.
A humble roundworm is leading the race in artificial intelligence, showing that it may be possible one day to upload our brains to a computer.
Called the Open Worm Project, the research brings together scientists and programmers from around the world with the aim of recreating the behavior of the common roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans) in a machine.
The open source project recently had its first major breakthrough when its software — modeled on the neurons of the worm’s nervous system — independently controlled a Lego robot.
[Cooperman] had been poking around the ‘net checking out DIY CNC machines for a while. He wanted to build one. During his search, he noticed that there was a common thread amongst homemade machines; they were usually made from parts that were on hand or easily obtainable. He had some parts kicking around and decided to hop on the band wagon and build a CNC Router. What sets [Cooperman]’s project apart from the rest is that he apparently had some really nice components available in his parts bin. The machine is nicknamed ‘Tweakie‘ because it will never really be finished, there’s always something to tweak to make it better.
The foundation for Tweakie is a welded frame made from 25mm steel square tubing. A keen observer may point out that welding a frame may cause some distortion and warping. [Cooperman] thought of that too so he attached aluminum spacers to the steel frame and lapped them flat. After that, fully supported THK linear bearings were attached to the now-straight spacer surface. Both the X and Y axes have ball-screws to minimize backlash and are powered by NEMA23 stepper motors. The Z axis uses 16mm un-supported rods with pillow block linear bearings. Unlike the X and Y, the Z axis uses a trapezoidal lead screw and bronze nut. [Cooperman] plans on replacing this with a ball-screw in the future but didn’t have one on hand at the time of assembly.
Mach3 is the software being used to control the CNC Router. It communicates via parallel port with a 3-axis StepMaster motor driver board that can handle providing 24vdc to the stepper motors. All of the electronics are mounted neatly in an electrical cabinet mounted on the back of the machine. Overall, this is a super sturdy and accurate machine build. [Cooperman] has successfully cut wood, plastic and even aluminum!
by James Dyke, Lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation at University of Southampton
It’s confirmed: 2014 produced the highest global temperatures since records began in the 1880s. As if that’s not cause enough for concern, this year threatens to see the return of El Niño, which like some enraged climate-driven Godzilla, could emerge from the depths of the South Pacific and lay waste to entire regions.
While the effects can be felt around the world, it is nations bordering the Pacific that are most affected by this natural phenomenon which puts parts of the Earth’s climate into reverse. Rain that would have fallen in northern Australia and Southeast Asia falls instead on the west coast of the Americas. Messing with the hydrological cycle can cause both major droughts and floods on different continents. El Niño can at the same cause crops to fail because of lack of rainfall while on the other side of the world wash away entire communities.
El Niño and La Niña are the two opposing phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which is the name given to the phenomenon of regular and sometimes large annual variations in sea surface temperatures, air pressure and rainfall. El Niño is characterised by significant warming of portions of the Pacific while La Niña sees lower temperatures in these waters.
During an El Niño event, sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial regions of the Pacific increase significantly. This weakens the trade winds that blow westwards across the South Pacific. One result of this is that the warm waters that were previously concentrated into an area of the south west Pacific towards Australasia spread out eastwards across the whole ocean. This delivers a pulse of heat from the seas to the atmosphere.
It is no coincidence that previous temperature records have been broken during El Niño years. One of the most significant El Niño events in the 20th century happened over 1997-98 and 1998 was, until last week, the hottest year ever. It hasn’t escaped people’s attention that 2014 snatched the title even without a helping hand from an El Niño.
This year we may well find out what El Niño-assisted temperatures might be like as a number of meteorological agencies are giving about a 60% chance for El Niño over the northern hemisphere winter in 2015, perhaps persisting until spring. This estimate is based on something called the Oceanic Niño Index which is a measurement of temperature anomalies in three regions of the equatorial Pacific. If this is greater than 0.5°C for three consecutive months then alarm bells start ringing.
That temperature change may not sound much, but a lot of energy is required to increase the temperature of billions of litres of water by even half a degree. Water stores an immense amount of heat compared with air such that it takes 1,000 times more energy to heat a cubic metre of water by 1°C as it does the same volume of air. Next time you boil the kettle, watch the electricity meter whizz round for a sense of this energy cost.
The bottom of the oceans are cold, approximately 4°C three kilometres down. That represents a massive heat sink in which to hide extra energy from the surface. Since the 1970s, more than 90% of the additional heat due to higher greenhouse gas levels has been absorbed into the oceans. Some have argued that avoiding certain changes in ocean heat content is a more useful safeguard against dangerous climate change than the currently employed 2°C threshold of surface warming.
Given their importance to climate dynamics, understanding what is going on in the oceans is vital if we are to produce useful scenarios for future climate change. Research published in the journal Science last year proposed the hypothesis that more heat is being drawn down into the ocean depths rather than warming the Earth’s surface, perhaps explaining the global warming “hiatus” observed since 1998. The record breaking 1997-98 El Niño may even have been an important driver of this large scale change in ocean currents.
Does that mean there are reasons for optimism? Could a form of negative feedback be operating whereby higher surface temperatures lead to more heat being transferred from the surface to the ocean depths? Would this produce a braking effect on temperature increases? I think it’s fair to say this would have to be pure speculation. Climate-ocean dynamics are too complex to be able to discern such a process right now.
What is certain is that there are large changes occurring in the amount of energy in the Earth’s oceans. One way or another this will have an effect on atmospheric processes and us surface dwellers.
Muir Glacier 1941 and 2004: now you see it, now you don’t.
NSIDC, CC BY-SA
The El Niño Southern Oscillation brings climate change into focus because it can produce such large and sudden changes in the weather. Current assessments are that an El Niño this year would likely be quite weak and nothing like the titan of 1997-98. The beast may continue to slumber. But unless there have been dramatic and long lasting changes to the El Niño Southern Oscillation, it will inevitably rise up and issue a roar that will be heard around the world.
For now, satellites peer down and monitor surface temperatures while arrays of buoys sample a range of parameters under the water. Fingers crossed they don’t detect a monstrous shape forming any time soon.
James Dyke does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
Open source has helped shape the team at PushAgency.io into the programmers and developers we are today. We’ve used it throughout our educations and careers, and now incorporate it into the products and services we deliver.
The ascent to power of Narendra Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), means that Hinduism has now become an integral part of politics and identity in India.
The suddenness of this development has startled many in the West who had viewed Hinduism, from a distance, as essentially amorphous, complex, largely confined to within India, above all exotic, and therefore far removed from the swords and the ploughshares of today’s world.
That contemporary Hinduism might prove to be a manifestation of popular sociocultural trends in a country of over a billion people has prompted serious reflection on a number of questions: What will Hinduism in the future look like? How will the new Hinduism impact politics, business and culture in 21st century India? These are questions that are now relevant not only to academicians but also to foreign policy strategists, the media and business people across the world.
Although there is nothing equivalent to an Encyclical that has been issued by any reputed Hindu thinkers or religious leaders, there are nevertheless the outlines of a 21st century Hinduism that can be discerned through what appears in the India media, films, books and magazines, and from the writings and speeches of influential Hindu intellectuals and political leaders.
Analysed through the lens of contemporary modernism as applied to the popular Indian culture of today, these outlines form something like an emerging ten commandments or ten guidelines of future Hinduism:
21st century Hinduism will be increasingly monolithic, i.e. a single broad thread of Hinduism will dominate across the different regions and communities of India rather than the multiplicity of practices in the past. In this post-colonial process, many of the subsects and parallel strands of Hinduism, such as Tantra, will be substantively discarded.
Hinduism in the future will increasingly seek to become a component of national and political identity, similar to the association that Christianity and Islam have established in other parts of the world. Thus, Hinduism will identify itself with a particular geographic entity—the South Asian subcontinent—and incorporate the notions of “us” and the “other.”
The understanding of Hindu scriptures will move rapidly to a symbolic interpretation rather than a literal one. To give just one example, Draupadi’s five husbands will be viewed as the five aspects of the perfect man rather than proof of historical polyandry. 21st century Hinduism will be receptive enough of modern science and technology to acknowledge that myths are overwhelmingly just inventions by creative minds, stories useful as guidelines for life but not at all indicators of past fact.
In this process, the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses will assume only symbolic significance in worship, a development already much evident in contemporary India.
Of the pantheon, Ram and Sita will take front stage as the ideal for men and women respectively. Krishna will continue to be the overarching source of inspiration for Hindus through the Bhagavad Gita, but will recede somewhat as the role model for the average Hindu, reflecting the pronounced puritanism that can be observed in urban India today.
Ganesha will continue to rise in prominence as the symbol of the globally successful, outward looking, materialistic and self confident 21st century Hindu, as against the conventional image of the Hindu in the past as provincially oriented, inward looking, spiritually inclined and humble.
Hinduism in the future will seek to become the major basis for the conduct of daily life by Hindus. The gap between religion as practiced in private and life as led in public will diminish. The role of religion will be seen as one that provides guidelines rather than requiring conformity to practices. But 21st century Hinduism will explicitly assert that morality cannot be legislated, and instead requires cultural awareness.
Exactly following this approach, the Hindu woman will need to continue to take primary responsibility for family and relationships, customs and culture, and public morality in general. To this extent, the Manusmriti will continue to be seen as broadly the source of guidance, but not in any sense binding or prescriptive.
The relationship of Hinduism to other religious minorities will be based on a majoritarian foundation, just as Christianity forms the framework in the United States. Thus, Wendy Doniger and other similar writers and artists can expect increasingly aggressive opposition to their views.
Sanskrit will be universally taught to all Hindus and become the language for worship by all sections of society. 21st century Hinduism will recognise that the exclusivist view of Sanskrit as the property of Brahmins has badly damaged Hindu society over the millennia. With the blurring of its association to Brahmins and upper castes, Sanskrit will become the crucial and critical key to the blurring of caste boundaries and the eventual elimination of caste.
Much of this will be immediately denounced as extremist Hindutva. But in this process, it should also be recognised that these “ten commandments” are not entirely without merit. The perspective that morality cannot be entirely legislated, but needs cultural renewal, probably makes instinctive sense to Indians, many of whom have been repulsed by recent public discussions of the lurid details of the high profile sexual harassment cases, for example. Similarly, the idea that Sanskrit might hold the key to mitigating the worst excesses of caste has the potential to radically transform the discourse on that historical evil.
These ten commandments, so-called, might be viewed as robbing Hinduism of precisely its tolerant core, its universal appeal and its manifold sources of beauty, and substituting in its place a dry, colourless list of prescriptions. But they also might indicate that the 21st century Hindu has decided that it is finally time to shake off the past and embrace the future. To the modern Hindu, only some of the innumerable trappings of traditional Hinduism may be relevant or necessary.
If, in the process of this refashioning, some controversies arise, those are only to be expected, would be his response. The new politics, the new culture, the new aggressiveness, may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But in the perspective of the emergent 21st century Hinduism and to its followers, the pluses far outweigh the minuses.
We’re celebrating the release of Chris Hackett & PopSci’s new book, The Big Book of Maker Skills. Today’s excerpt is about taps and threads. – Becky Stern
Hackett Says:
Use an Old-School Tool for a Manufactured Effect
I did not grow up around tools and making. Other than an unhealthy obsession with knives, my curiosity about how things worked involved carefully taking things apart, attempting to put them back together, eventually losing interest, and then getting in trouble for ruining a perfectly good clock radio. I knew which end of a hammer to hold, and I knew what drills did, but that was as far as things went.
On the rare occasion I was called upon to assemble some furniture or fix something, I would quietly panic. Coupled with decent strength and a willingness to blaze through, I left a trail of destruction in my wake. Split wood, stripped screws—the only thing stronger than my incompetence were threaded fasteners. There was a right way and a wrong way, as with anything, but this one had a catchphrase: “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.” I could be crap at everything else, but nuts and bolts were idiotproof.
In fact, nuts and bolts are a shorthand for the best parts of our civilization. Exact, interchangeable, consistently produced—even the crap ones were better than what came before them, and they work even when guided by an idiot.
Time passed. I got interested, then obsessed, with how stuff works and making. I got less bad, then okay, then pretty good, but things clicked when I realized that, of all the references to taps that I encountered, none of them was about beer.
Drill the right hole, run a tap, and every bolt ever made in that size will fit. A couple of minutes’ work and your creation is seamlessly, tightly joined to the best our civilization has to offer.
Makers, get ready: This is your ultimate, must-have, tip-packed guide for taking your DIY projects to the next level—from basic wood- and metalworking skills to 3D printing and laser-cutting wizardry, plus the entrepreneurial and crowd-sourcing tactics needed to transform your back-of-the-envelope idea into a gleaming finished product.
In The Big Book of Maker Skills: 334 Tools and Techniques for Building Great Tech Projects, readers learn classic, tried-and-true techniques from the shop class of yore—how to use a metal lathe, or pick the perfect drill bit or saw—and get introduced to a whole new world of modern manufacturing technologies, like using CAD software, printing circuits, and more. Step-by-step illustrations, helpful diagrams, and exceptional photography make this book an easy-to-follow and easy-on-the-eyes guide to getting your project done.
The International Monetary Fund downgraded its projections for global growth (pdf) this month, as well as a for number of countries, individually. One of those countries is China, which is projected to see slowed growth this year and the next. The economy left almost untouched? India, which means it’s on track to surpass China as the fastest-growing large economy, the Wall Street Journal notes.
China is expected to grow 6.8% this year and 6.3% in 2016. That’s a decrease from October, when the IMF projected China’s growth for 2015 at 7.1% (pdf, pg. 55). It projected a 6.4% growth for India this year, and the latest report predicts a minor slowdown, to 6.3%.
According to the January IMF report, there are a few reasons this is happening—China saw a decrease in investment growth toward the end of last year, and that slowdown will affect the surrounding Asian countries, but not India. The IMF report credits New Delhi’s stability in part to the recent economic reforms that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has implemented, as well as a boost in trade because of lower oil costs.
IMF projections, while an important indicator of where the global economy is going, also have a tendency to be overly optimistic when it comes to forecasting growth (pdf, pg. 195). And a slowing China doesn’t necessary spell trouble for the rest of the world, as Quartz noted back in 2013—it might actually give other economies a chance to meet some of the global demand that China normally eats up.
Japan is home to the world’s largest indoor farm and the statistics for which are a little bit mind blowing; 25,000 square feet producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day (100 times more per square foot than traditional methods) with 40% less power, 80% less food waste and 99% less water usage than outdoor fields.
The benefits of farming indoors with such a controllable climate are fairly obvious. Crops won’t be affected by unexpected weather events, crop disease or bad droughts.
Working in Miyagi Prefecture in eastern Japan, which was badly hit by powerful earthquake and tsunamis in 2011, Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.
Being half the size of a football pitch the farm comprises of 17,500 LED lights on “18 cultivation racks reaching 15 levels high,” GE says.
“I knew how to grow good vegetables biologically and I wanted to integrate that knowledge with hardware to make things happen,” Shimamura says. “What we need to do is not just setting (sic) up more days and nights. We want to achieve the best combination of photosynthesis during the day and breathing at night by controlling the lighting and the environment.”
The lights give them the ability to control temperature, humidity and irrigation, allowing it to cut its water usage to 1 percent of that needed by outdoor fields, while also growing lettuces two-and-a-half times faster, the experts claim.
The GE Japan team believes that indoor farms like the one in the Miyagi Prefecture could be a key to solving food shortages in the world. Mirai and GE are already working on “plant factories” in Hong Kong and the Far East of Russia. Says Shimamura: “Finally, we are about to start the real agricultural industrialization.”
GE isn’t the only electrical firm trialling the new method. Philips has partnered with Green Sense Farms, an Indiana-based vertical farm which produces herbs, leafy greens and lettuces using LED lights.
HALIFAX, Canada—In 2007, Sandy MacMullin was sitting across from his boss, a deputy minister in Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast. They had struck a windfall—enough natural gas royalties to pay $500 to every man, woman and child in the province, with cash to spare.
But MacMullin and all else in the room also knew what few outside it wanted to face: Such bonanzas were about to end. After a string of failures, the oil industry had declared the province dry. In just five years, gas production would begin to plunge, and soon after that there would be almost no royalties at all. Already deep in debt after the decline of the province’s lifeblood cod, lobster and timber businesses, Nova Scotia would be in trouble.
Royalties from the Sable Offshore Energy Project in 1997 (gray) and 2006 (green).(Nova Scotia government/Sandy MacMullin)
“I want a plan,” MacMullin’s boss said.
What followed was an extraordinary journey in which MacMullin, a burly native of the province with a broad grin and blow-dried hair, sought to prove the experts wrong. Nova Scotia’s salvation, he was convinced, lay in the same place it had been—its offshore oilfields. Although the old wells were declared to have dried up, there still had to be reserves in places people had overlooked.
Today, BP and Shell are embarked on a combined $2 billion in spending to explore Nova Scotia’s waters anew. What lured them back were the fruits of an extraordinary geological treasure hunt, led by MacMullin, which yielded estimates of 8 billion barrels of oil offshore—four times the volume produced in all previous drilling in the province as a whole.
Nobody will know if MacMullin’s labors have paid off until later this year, when the first well is spudded. And now, with oil prices plunging and companies scaling back their exploration, it could all be at risk—although both companies say they are carrying on regardless for now. But if there is oil and it is economic to extract, it could stop Nova Scotia’s decline and transform this quiet, mannerly and relatively isolated province of 940,000 people into the scene of a roiling new oil boom.
To begin with, however, all MacMullin had to go on was a hunch. To back it up, he would have to persuade his bosses to spend $15 million from spartan provincial funds on specialists with an extremely arcane skill: paleogeology, the painstaking reconstruction of the long-ago world.
“We could have sat and waited for the demise, but no one wanted that,” MacMullin said over breakfast in this tawdry port. “We had to do something.”
Two hundred million years ago, a gigantic supercontinent, Pangaea, comprised all the land on Earth. Nova Scotia and Morocco, today separated by about 3,100 miles (5,000 km) of the Atlantic Ocean, were conjoined. And since oil had been found in the deep waters offshore from Morocco, MacMullin had heard from experts, it stood to reason, geologically speaking, that it must be present in Nova Scotia, too. The two were “analogs” of one another. By starting at the very birth of the conditions for the creation of hydrocarbons, they might locate Nova Scotia’s petroleum trove.
Sandy MacMullin with Nova Scotia’s offshore exploration atlas, the result of his quest.(Chronicle Herald/Tim Krochak)
Sandy MacMullin is 55 years old, solid like the amateur hockey player he was for years, and a fitness fanatic, bicycling for 25 minutes every day to his office near the marina even in Halifax’s freezing winters. In college, he studied agricultural engineering, but he landed a trainee government job in oil reservoir analysis, and liked the work. Three decades later, he heads up Nova Scotia’s Petroleum Resources Branch, which makes him the government’s leading oilman.
In order to reverse the deeply held pessimism about Nova Scotia’s oil prospects, MacMullin had to demonstrate the potential for significant new discoveries. Given the dramatic industry exodus, it meant starting from scratch, and MacMullin did what politicians and bureaucrats typically recommend in a crisis—he commissioned a study.
Most of the wells up to now off Nova Scotia’s coast have been in shallow water.(Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board)
He contracted it to a group of retired BP scientists at a UK firm called RPS. Leading them was a Cypriot-born geologist named Hamish Wilson. Examining Nova Scotian history, Wilson noticed that the early drillers had worked almost entirely in extremely shallow water—400-500 feet (120-150m) deep. He also observed that, in their post-1986 run of bad luck, they had been relying almost wholly on 1970s seismic methods—tools that are rudimentary by today’s standards.
It was possible, RPS said, that something had been missed. Wilson’s proposal included going deeper—hunting for an entirely new oil province in 6,500 feet of water, reaching for much older geology, and using much more advanced exploration tools. Wilson’s model would reconstruct Nova Scotia through eight geological eras going back to the early Jurassic age, just as Pangaea was breaking up. Given how oil cooked up over time, that was where, if substantial undiscovered reserves existed, they would be found.
Such “analog exploration” is a current geologic rage among international oil companies. Along much of the north-south strip of geology underlying the Atlantic Ocean, oil explorers are noting where petroleum has already been found, and then, in a nod to Pangaea, looking for its analog in a place to which it was once fused, often thousands of miles away on another continent.
Pangaea is only the latest of numerous supercontinents in the earth’s history. At approximately 300-million- to 500-million-year intervals, for at least 3 billion years and perhaps longer, plate tectonics have created and broken up these land masses. Where they have left the conditions for the creation of hydrocarbons has been a matter of accident—a rare and specific sequence of geologic events.
“Analogs are a great tool of exploration. You get to know something. You can touch and feel.”
Numerous of those sequences happened in what is called the Atlantic Margin, a string of basins that links Europe, Africa and North and South America, following a path from Tierra del Fuego and the Cape of Good Hope in the South Atlantic to the northern waters off of Newfoundland, Greenland and the United Kingdom. Theoretically, you can drill anywhere on either side of these once-united continents and find oil or gas.
When American oil lobbyists advocate drilling offshore from Virginia, they are hoping to tap the geology of the Atlantic Margin. A rush of interest to drill offshore from Namibia (paywall) is the same play. In 2007, Tullow Oil made a discovery offshore from Ghana. From there, the UK-based company went straight across the Atlantic to French Guiana and, in 2011, found an oilfield called Zaedyus. After 20 billion barrels of oil were discovered in offshore Brazil, frenzied oil companies explored the opposing geology in deepwater Angola where, in 2012, they found petroleum in a play called Kwanza.
The analog logic is also behind far-flung oil company interest in offshore Portugal, Gabon, Newfoundland, Suriname and more. All of it goes back to the breakup of Pangaea. “Analogs are a great tool of exploration. You get to know something. You can touch and feel,” said Geir Richardsen, vice president of exploration for Norway’s Statoil.
Getting the go-ahead
Even if the project validated MacMullin’s hunch, Wilson advised him to be prepared for serious resistance. Oil companies that had already spent time and money prospecting off Nova Scotia might be offended by the suggestion that they had simply overlooked something. Still, what Wilson had in mind would not be unprecedented, he said, and it was the right approach to attract a supermajor. Companies routinely revisited their rivals’ failed fields, figured out what went wrong, and emerged with big discoveries, often using meticulous paleogeological reconstructions of the sort Wilson had in mind.
When done well, such models could convey a remarkably broad story, linking together the earliest geological tale of sprawling, often disconnected regions. If you were a mid-level manager at a supermajor and wished to sell your boss on a new play, an analog was a good way to do it—a sensible story that could carry outsized authority, giving the impression that the risk of a dry hole had been at least partly eliminated. So quite apart from the secrets that analog exploration could unlock, Wilson’s suggestion also shrewdly captured industry psychology.
“Either we spend the money, or we give up.”
But Wilson’s fee was high. For a big oil company, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, a $15 million analysis would be trifling, but not for a place like Nova Scotia, which was $15 billion in debt from years of overspending. It had no slush fund for eccentric, high-risk projects. Ministers wanted to know what RPS could possibly learn “that the big oil companies couldn’t figure out.”
“Either we spend the money, or we give up,” MacMullin replied.
The request went all the way up to the premier, Nova Scotia’s top political leader. MacMullin got the money.
“Now we were onto something,” MacMullin said. “There was no guarantee it would turn us around. But it was our best chance.”
Gordon Stevens, the owner of the Uncommon Grounds cafe.(Gordon Stevens)
Gordon Stevens owns a patio cafe in Halifax called Uncommon Grounds, in a manicured downtown park that is tended like the Victorian-era garden it once was. Stevens grew up in Cape Breton, the northern island of Nova Scotia. In 1914, his great-grandfather, Gordon P. Stevens, opened a general store on the island, in the fortress town of Louisbourg, selling supplies to cod fishermen and families associated with the shipping industry.
But three generations later, cod fishing collapsed. When Gordon’s father, Doug, retired in 1998, he closed the store. Work had generally left the town. Today cod and haddock are still caught at sea, but they are immediately gutted and frozen for shipment to China, where they’re processed further, then shipped back again to Massachusetts and New Hampshire fish sticks factories. That part particularly galls Stevens—how it could be cheaper to ship cod to China and back to the US, just to turn it into cheap fish sticks, than to process it here in Nova Scotia.
That loss of the fish sticks business reflects a general hollowing-out of work. From 1990 to 2010, Nova Scotia had the lowest growth of any province in Canada, at 1%, and the lowest GDP per capita at $37,349. As the fish population collapsed in the early 1990s, so did employment on boats, plunging by 49% by 2012, according to official records. Lumber exports fell by 58% and the demise of newspapers resulted in a closure of sawmills. In Cape Breton, a third of the population aged 30 to 39 cleared out. In one county—Guysborough—more than half of the working-age population moved away. Stevens himself went and found work in the Cayman Islands.
The oil industry mirrors the general decline. By the time MacMullin’s boss told him “I want a plan” in 2007, Nova Scotia’s drilling days were thought to be over. Oil companies had been exploring since 1959, and until 1986, almost one in four wells they drilled found commercial gas—an enviable record for the period. But since then, only one of 36 wells has struck commercial hydrocarbons. And the volumes have been relatively paltry—roughly 2 billion barrels of recoverable reserves in all the finds. (In the United Arab Emirates, that’s the lifetime average of one single well.) The spate of dry holes, along with the high cost of working on the often harsh frontier, led most of the explorers to relinquish their remaining rights to drill and pack up for prospects elsewhere.
The province’s predicament was summed up neatly last February in a 258-page government-commissioned report titled Now or Never: An Urgent Call to Action for Nova Scotians. Its principal author, Ray Ivany, president of Acadia University, about 60 miles northwest of Halifax, said he did not mean to “raise panic bells,” but that he had to be blunt. “We are teetering on the brink,” the report said. “There is a crisis, and it does threaten the basic economic and demographic viability of our province, most dramatically in our rural regions.” The population was aging—the number of Nova Scotians over 65 grew 26% from 2002 to 2012, to reach 17% of the population, the highest proportion in Canada, while those under 15 were just 14.5%.
Indeed, in March of last year, the town of Springhill voted itself out of existence, citing its declining population and economy. About 10 other rural towns, officials say, are also on the verge of failure and dissolution.
In the beginning: The Bahamas, 203 million years BC
200 million years ago, Nova Scotians could see Morocco from their house.(copyrightexpired.com)
The British consultants became MacMullin’s partners in saving Nova Scotia. Wilson, whose father and both siblings were also geologists, was joined by three other BP veterans. Together, they set out to reconstruct the world starting a little over 200 million years ago. “We needed to put the continents back together,” Wilson said.
The time they were looking at was one when the united Nova Scotia and Morocco were situated near the present-day Caribbean. If a dinosaur were inclined to roam 300 or 400 miles, it could have walked from Halifax to Rabat. Balmy and leafy, Pangaea was in the throes of breaking up.
If a dinosaur were to roam 300 or 400 miles, it could have walked from Halifax to Rabat.
As the inexorable currents of molten rock inside the earth slowly drove the continents apart, there was first cracking, followed by an explosion. Magma ejected violently. Rifts opened in Pangaea corresponding roughly to the coastlines of present-day Canada and North Africa. Seawater flooded in. A coral reef the size and appearance of the Great Barrier Reef began to form—an ancestor of today’s Bahamas.
Over tens of millions of years, that water would broaden into the central Atlantic Ocean. But to begin with, it was shallow. It would evaporate in the tropical heat, then build up again before vanishing anew, resulting in a thickening salt plain. When the water was there, it supported the presence of billions of marine animals, both tiny and larger. In the dry periods, the animals died and became buried in mud and sand landslides. Gradually they merged into a gigantic mass of gunk—salt, dead organisms and sediment, all of it piling up in a gently subsiding basin.
For these organisms to transmogrify into an oilfield would require a fortunate sequence of events.
First, the muck of organisms, sand and mud had to harden into rock. Then it had to ferment, or “cook”, for tens of millions of years. This cooking would have happened in what’s called “source rock,” which is dense, like shale or sandstone. Source rock is the fundamental component of an oilfield, the kitchen for the creation of oil and gas.
But getting oil straight from source rock is difficult. The rock is too dense to allow for the easy extraction of embedded liquid molecules. Onshore and in shallow waters, oil companies use hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” techniques to blast cracks into source rock and release the oil, but fracking at the ocean depths where MacMullin and Wilson wanted to look is exceptionally difficult and expensive, and companies are only just starting to take it on.
So for the oil to be easily accessible, the next step it must take after “cooking” in the source rock is to naturally seep out and be captured within a larger, outside container—a reservoir. An oil reservoir is not like a gigantic tank or swimming pool: It’s just another mass of rock. But it has larger pores. Those pores are linked—they run more or less in a sequence that allows the oil or natural gas to be freely pumped from the ground.
Finally, the reservoir has to be self-contained: sealed off by something else, such as another kind of rock, or a cap of salt. If not, the hydrocarbons will leak away and be lost to the subterranean world.
Take a stinking marsh, dry it, cover it, cook it, wait 15 million years.(Reuters/Sean Gardner)
So Wilson had to show that this chain had unfolded perfectly in Nova Scotia. None of the steps could be missed. For starters, his team had to discover how long the initial process had gone on—how long that narrow stretch of water between the future opposing continents was shallow. Then, what did the waters look like—were they clear and blue, like a Bahaman cove, or green, saline and malodorous like a Florida marsh? To create a soup of hydrocarbons, the conditions had to be anoxic and relatively stagnant—the water had to be a lagoon with restricted oxygen and circulation. The more stagnant the better.
And it had to have persisted that way for 10 or 15 million years. If the waters had been deep, open and agitated—or if they had been shallow and cut off, but for only a few million years—there was no reason to look any further for oil. The muck would not have fermented into hydrocarbons, and MacMullin would have to conceive another plan to save his province.
The Halifax effect
Trevor Adams, who runs a local magazine in Halifax, reckons that no one outside Nova Scotia’s oil game itself has given a thought to the possibility of oil. Nova Scotians, he says, have by and large lost hope in such luck.
Adams himself grew up in a village called Westport. The men there would fish for scallops and lobster for three months, which earned enough to live for the rest of the year. But now there is a glut of such seafood and little work. He said the town—once 500 residents—has dwindled to just 150. Few of working age can think of any reason to stay.
Downtown Halifax has a shopworn feel.(Andy Fillmore)
John Demont, a business columnist at the local Chronicle Herald, tells a similar story about his hometown of Sydney, where his and his friends’ fathers and grandfathers mined coal and made steel for the gigantic Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation. Now Dominion is closed, and local men board a weekly plane at the nearby airport for the flight to Alberta to work the oil sands fields. When the plane lands, they take the places of men disembarking from the same fields. Such men held little store in tales of Nova Scotian booms. “We’re always hitching our wagon to someone. ‘We’re all going to be rich!’” Demont said, not smiling.
Haligonians say experience has led them to be predisposed to be reserved, not to flaunt themselves, and above all else not try to achieve too much. One hears much mistrust of hifalutin’ business successes who become full of themselves, something the author of the government report, Ray Ivany, called a tendency to more harbor “suspicion about [entrepreneurs’] motives than … to celebrate their success.”
It stems partly from a huge chip that Halifax has on its shoulder. In its centuries of history, it has been on the edge of numerous events—all the major wars, local and global, since the US Revolutionary War. With little prompting, Haligonians recall their outsized disasters—among them a two-day brawl by 12,000 sailors in 1945, who celebrated Germany’s surrender by attacking some 850 shops, many of which had gouged them mercilessly during the wartime business boom. And the 1917 explosion of a French cargo ship loaded with munitions that killed some 2,000 people and burned large parts of the city, in what before Hiroshima was called the largest man-made explosion in history.
“Would it be great if it worked out? Yes. Do I think it will happen? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”
This is a city not only with a chip, but a black mood. Visit Bookmark on Spring Garden Street and, on the local authors’ shelf, consider the titles: Death on the Ice, The Town that Died,The Gale of 1929, and, of course, Shattered City. Haligonians simply retain faith in few. It hasn’t helped that they’ve been fibbed to—a lot—in the view of many people here. According to Gordon Stevens, Nova Scotia is a magnet for fly-by-night operators, big talkers who “say they are going to change the world” but don’t. He thought about that a few weeks before, listening to a group of Chinese describe plans for 800 cabins on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore, in Guysborough County, along with a theme park and a movie studio. “Would it be great if it worked out? Yes. Do I think it will happen? Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” Stevens said.
Stevens himself is a bit of an outlier. After spending some years in the Caymans, he returned to Nova Scotia in 2002 and opened Uncommon Grounds, his cafe, and later a few other businesses. They cater to what he said was the only way Nova Scotia would survive—by not trying to undercut anyone but concentrating on value, quality and brand.
One thing that Stevens is definitely not thinking about is an oil rush. Apart from MacMullin and his guys, no one seems to be. “I’m as optimistic as it’s safe to be,” Stevens said. “But I’m not about to open a new store in hopes they strike oil.”
A map of the earth’s tectonic plates.(US Geological Survey)
To find the evidence that the break-up of Pangaea had led to the happy sequence of events he was looking for—a shallow, anoxic lagoon full of biomatter that hardened over millions of years into source rock, cooked into hydrocarbons, then seeped out into a reservoir and was trapped—Wilson would need to assemble a broad team of experts: seismologists, geochemists, hydrocarbon geologists, volcanic specialists. But for starters, he required just one expertise: plate tectonics.
Paleogeologists, as such scientists are known (one admirer at Halifax’s Dalhousie University called them by another common term–“paleomagicians”), decipher the past by plotting the shifts of the world’s nine major tectonic plates, then depicting the results on maps. Paleogeology is not a hard science in the sense of chemistry or biology—the passage of time and the dependence purely on the geological record mean the data require a lot of interpretation and leaps of judgment. Disputes are legion over what rock was precisely where and when, what substances or minerals collected within the Earth, and how you ultimately could extract them. So even if Wilson’s team discerned evidence of a substantial hydrocarbon system—source and reservoir rock, along with an estimate of the reserves contained within—their view would be subject to challenge.
Wilson’s paleogeologists were led by a Frenchman named Jean-Claude Sibuet, a specialist on Iberia and North Africa. He would now combine his data on their geology with research into Nova Scotia.
Sibuet produced the first known 3D portraits of the Nova Scotian offshore from the Pangaean breakup forward.
One of his main tools was the seismic record: the detailed subterranean maps that oil companies had created over the years by bouncing sound to the sea floor from ships on the surface of the water. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, the industry standard was maps that showed a two-dimensional picture of the geological depths. These were the kinds of maps on which the oil majors had hitherto been relying in Nova Scotia. They had resulted in a terrific record of discoveries around the world. But there also was a high failure rate since such maps did not reveal complex plays—the multi-layered geology that could lie beneath the surface.
Sibuet, instead, took advantage of three-dimensional seismic portraits, pioneered by ExxonMobil, that reveal hidden twists of geology channels. Sibuet’s slides married existing two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps and other data to produce the first known 3D portraits of the Nova Scotian offshore from the Pangaean breakup forward.
The slide from Jean-Claude Sibuet’s presentation showing Nova Scotia and Morocco 190 million years ago. The red outlines show magnetic traces of volcanic activity.(Jean-Claude Sibuet)
Sibuet’s months of research would ultimately boil down to a presentation just seven slides long. The pivotal one, above, shows the world 190 million years ago, shortly after Pangaea began to come apart. On the map, in red, Sibuet’s artists drew a long, meandering, narrow, southwest-to-northeast oval, visible in the left lower quarter. The red represented strong magnetic traces his team had found in the seismic record. These were evidence of active volcanoes: a four- to nine-mile thick body of lava.
That showed that the waters had in fact been shallow—between a few meters to a few tens of meters in depth. These sizzling, roiling volcanoes, which seemed to rise up everywhere from the earth and sea, were a source of heat that kept the geology from sinking and creating a deeper waterway in which the hydrocarbon muck that was the precursor of the source rock would not have managed to form.
For Sibuet, this was evidence of the largely closed, listless marine environment for which Wilson hoped. As Sibuet read the data, the waters were lethargic, the circulation cut off on three sides, all around apart from the south, which was closed off enough. That slide was the centerpiece of how Wilson would argue to the big oil companies that a hot, anoxic and shallow sea existed for 13 million years, enough time to put down the basics for the creation of rich source rock.
Sibuet’s slide from 170 million years ago shows a thickening band of sediment in the waters off Nova Scotia that could end up as a sandstone oil reservoir.(Jean-Claude Sibuet)
Sibuet next pushed ahead by 20 million years. He was looking for a reservoir that, when oil seeped out of the source rock, would keep it bottled up. At 170 million years BC, Sibuet found the ingredients of this reservoir in the beginnings of a river system. It was the precursor to the St. Lawrence River, which today drains the Great Lakes into the Atlantic. In those years—the Middle Jurassic era—the river would have carried sand and mud off of North America and into the deepening water between Nova Scotia and Morocco. Over time, this sediment would have compressed into sandstone, one of the best porous reservoir rocks.
In addition, Sibuet knew of the presence of salt—the remnants of the flats created in the baking sun 30 million years before. That could serve as a cap or canopy on the reservoir and seal in the elemental hydrocarbons.
Wilson and his team concluded that by this stage the marine organisms—lodged in source rock below the Earth’s surface, covered with the sediment and salt, and under immense pressure—would have begun to cook at temperatures that eventually would reach up to 150°C (about 300°F). It would be tens of millions of years before it was ready for migration to the reservoir.
To the analysts beholding these initial findings, it was thrilling stuff. The rudimentary structure of offshore Nova Scotia looked a lot like the undersea Gulf of Mexico, and even the Niger Delta, two of the richest oil plays in the world.
Yet it still wasn’t enough. To persuade the big companies, it was important to establish that this was no localized event but had happened elsewhere—that there was an “analog”.
An example of confirmed and suspected analog oil finds between South America and Africa.(US Geological Survey)
For oil companies, the presence of geological analogs is both comforting—they demonstrate latitude for a broader search should one particular well prove dry—and exciting: when a play looks big, it can create an industry frenzy. Wilson wanted to generate precisely such a response by showing that the rich hydrocarbon system of which he believed his team by now had ample evidence was in fact much, much larger—that it continued hundreds of miles north along Nova Scotia’s coastline up to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
In this respect, the evidence he had in hand so far was not promising. The volcanic signature of a restricted marine environment, the indicator of source rock, faded as you went north, then vanished altogether. But the team wanted a whopper of a story to tell the oil companies. If they couldn’t find the answer they sought in Nova Scotia, perhaps they could in Morocco, where oil companies had been prospecting even longer than they had in Nova Scotia.
To find out, a member of Wilson’s team called the Moroccan state oil company. Morocco had commissioned a good offshore seismic survey in 2001, and he had a friend there. Could he have a copy of the results?
“If it’s present in Morocco, it has to be in Nova Scotia. You can’t have a one-handed clap.”
When they inspected what the Moroccans forwarded, Wilson’s team concentrated on the geology that formerly conjoined the north African country and Nova Scotia—the connecting tissue known as the conjugate. They pretty instantly spotted what they were looking for—seismic lines suggesting volcanic material extending far toward Morocco’s northeast.
This was the prize. If Morocco had such volcanics, that potentially meant considerable hydrocarbons, and “if it’s present in Morocco, it has to be in Nova Scotia,” said Matt Luhesi, Wilson’s deputy. “You can’t have a one-handed clap.”
The evidence went both ways. The evidence in southerly offshore Nova Scotia demonstrated potential hydrocarbons in the mirror region of Morocco, and the report from Morocco stretched Nova Scotia’s hydrocarbon zone north. The respective evidence was self-reinforcing and suggested the presence of future rich discoveries in both places.
In January 2011, Sandy MacMullin arrived with Wilson’s team in the French capital. There, a group of experts from four supermajors would examine the findings. Before MacMullin went into high-stakes presentations with the oil companies, he wanted fair warning if they were missing anything.
For a day and a half, the reviewers scrutinized Wilson’s model. When they were done, they met with MacMullin and Wilson’s team. They were impressed, they said: The paleogeographic evidence was precisely what a supermajor itself would assemble before a big investment decision. And they knew of no nation or province around the world that had bothered to present its case in the form of the tectonic record. Usually, only oil companies bothered to do such scrupulous preparation.
Except, they said, that the case was still incomplete. Yes, Wilson’s team had far surpassed the basics and asserted the potential for a vast new hydrocarbon region, one that the industry itself had missed despite drilling 127 wells. It was a region extending along both sides of the central Atlantic in the early Jurassic era, an older subterranean dimension than those explored by prior drillers. The analog argument—the team’s interpretation of volcanic, seismic and magnetic data in both Nova Scotia and Morocco—advanced this. It made a forceful case for the conditions in which oil could have formed.
But the reviewers wanted signs that such conditions actually existed. They sought what is called geochemical validation, another standard oil prospecting tool. If Wilson’s team could provide some solid geochemistry, “you will have a pretty compelling story,” a reviewer said.
The oil province was potentially very large, all of it going back to the original configuration of Pangaea.
The critique was a reference to the presence—or absence—of gammacerane (pronounced guh-MAH’-suh-rain), a substance known as a biomarker. If oil has moved through a rock, it leaves behind such traces. So does hypersaline, swamp-like water, the type that would have been present in the volcano-induced, shallow and restricted waters that Wilson’s team concluded had persisted for 13 million years. If northeast Nova Scotia’s offshore rocks had traces of gammacerane, it would be the defining verification of the conditions necessary for a hydrocarbon province. The reviewers were not being capricious—Wilson agreed that the oil supermajors were much more likely to change their opinion if gammacerane was found.
Nova Scotia maintains a library of samples from all the wells drilled offshore over the decades. A member of Wilson’s team began to scrutinize them. Three months later, he came upon traces of gammacerane in a sample from a dry well drilled by a Canadian company in 2004. That confirmed that the rock had once been part of a hypersaline swamp, adding a bolstering cushion to Wilson’s hypothesis that entirely new, unexplored source rock lay off of Nova Scotia’s shores.
But that was not all: Wilson’s geochemist went on to cast his search across the central Atlantic, and found more gammacerane—in wells in the Canary Islands, in Newfoundland and Portugal. The oil province that Wilson was depicting was potentially very large, all of it going back to the original configuration of Pangaea.
MacMullin and Wilson’s team readied to visit the supermajors.
The moment of truth
When oilfields are put up for lease, the seller, whether a country or a locality, typically charges a fee for access to the data required to understand their value—the seismic studies, reserves estimates and so on. The rationale is to immediately weed out unserious bidders, as well as rivals that may simply wish to understand a competitor’s assets. Not MacMullin, though—he decided that the 350-page atlas of its offshore that had cost Nova Scotia $15 million would be given away for free. For him, worse than the possibility of theft or caprice was the risk that a supermajor might not even look at Nova Scotia’s reinterpreted geology. In July 2011, MacMullin’s technicians posted the atlas on the Nova Scotia government website, where you can still read it.
Wilson’s team had put Morocco and Nova Scotia back together. Slides showed how the two rifted apart in the early Jurassic era, along with microscopic fossils that probably generated oil, migrated into sandstone and were trapped there. They had calculated how much in the way of hydrocarbons were probably trapped—8 billion barrels of oil and 120 trillion cubic feet of gas, four times more than had been discovered to date in the entire province.
Wilson told the companies that the problem all along had not been the geology, but where companies had drilled. They needed to follow former rivulets coming off of the main ancient St. Lawrence river, deeply buried channels in which sandstone reservoirs had stealthily formed.
Wilson’s team calculated Nova Scotia had four times as much oil and gas as previously discovered.
In meeting after meeting at supermajor offices, Wilson and Luheshi, his deputy, explained their findings. With questions, each meeting took two to four hours. Of the specific spots where they were suggesting the companies look, Luheshi said, “If I was going to bet my grandmother’s money, that is where I would drill for oil offshore Nova Scotia.” If they were right, Luheshi would say, “it will be a major new oil province.”
The response, MacMullin said, typically went like this: “The first hour would be polite. The next hour, they were getting their pens out and taking notes. The third hour was…” and he mimicked staring into space, loose-jawed, wide-eyed, shaking his head.
Months passed with no positive responses. Some of the companies passed—ExxonMobil, for example, declined to bid. But in January 2012, MacMullin received the news that Shell would pay $970 million for rights to explore in 2,000 meters of water. Ten months later, BP bid even higher—$1.05 billion—for rights to drill right alongside Shell. Two of the world’s five biggest oil companies had jumped in with both feet.
The waiting begins
Shell will begin to drill first—it plans to sink its first well in the second half of 2015. Its results will be the first sign of whether MacMullin was right; BP plans its first well in about two years.
With world oil prices crashing, continuing to explore might seem foolhardy. In recent weeks, oil companies around the world have slashed their exploration budgets. But neither Shell nor BP has so far cut Nova Scotia. A Shell spokesman said one reason is that this stage—drilling a single exploration well to try to determine whether there is oil—is comparatively cheap. It is later, when fields are developed, that the big costs come. And the timetable for such oil projects is long; there is no knowing where prices will be by that stage.
“Nova Scotia spent $15 million and got a $2 billion return.”
A number of leading petroleum geologists are still critical of analog exploration. They say that mirror-imaging is an interesting framework for exploration but that you can’t blindly go from one basin to another just because they were once fused. Much has happened in the tens of millions of years since that will make them different, often fundamentally so. No two basins are identical, they say, even when they start out as one.
Yet 11 months after signing the Nova Scotia deal, BP bought into its direct analog in offshore Morocco, explaining to its shareholders that the two were effectively identical and organizing them as a single venture (pdf, p. 20). Its more than $1 billion of planned spending in the two places is squarely an analog play. Last year, the British company conducted seismic tests of its Nova Scotia blocks.
Even if no oil is found, John O’Leary, a senior BP executive, said the ambition of MacMullin’s approach was important to his company’s decision. Giving away the results of the survey “sparked a lot of interest.” Other petroleum states should pay heed, he suggested. “Nova Scotia spent $15 million and got a $2 billion return,” he said.
Does Halifax know what’s about to hit it?(Andy Fillmore)
An oil boom can and does wallop the place where it occurs, and sometimes, if it’s big enough, its neighbors as well. This has been a feature of oil since the first gushers 140 years ago in Pennsylvania and Baku. Today, look at Accra, Atyrau, Erbil and Maputo, not to mention Williston, North Dakota—all former backwaters overrun in varying degrees by cash and newcomers drawn to the respective El Dorados. Such booms typically attract tens of thousands of outsiders—oil hands, of course, but also accountants, lawyers, haberdashers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, building contractors, luxury shopkeepers of various sorts, automobile showrooms, garages and filling stations, and more.
There is a reasonable chance that Halifax will be next. If it is, that will in a big way be a blessing for always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride Nova Scotia. But oil booms also almost always tear at the fabric of places they touch—old and fragile communities are particularly at risk.
There are plenty of cautionary tales. Ghana became a magnet for fawning foreign investors and hangers-on after oil was found 2.8 miles below its offshore waters seven years ago. But it has become clear that the country is failing to manage the bonanza well: The population of 26 million has endured fuel and electricity shortages. In June last year, politicians decided to cut local power to aluminum smelters so Ghanaians could watch the World Cup. The humiliation reached a crescendo in October, when the International Monetary Fund had to step in with an $800 million bailout.
An oil boom? What are you talking about, an oil boom?
Nova Scotia, of course, is hardly comparable to Ghana; its GDP per capita is some 20 times as big. But the same story has repeated up and down the southern Atlantic Margin, where pockets of new wealth have sprung up in bastions of corrupt autocracy. The few places that have handled their oil right—Alaska and Norway, for instance—had, almost as a first order of business, established long-term investment funds, meant in part to improve the current lifestyle but more to support a future when the oil is gone.
Halifax is not innocent—with its long history as a garrison city and military port, it has seen bawdy times. Despite it all, Haligonians talk like unexposed townspeople everywhere, a genteel unworldliness that carries over into the feel of their city—low-slung, shopworn, yet somehow fresh. One wonders what would survive the teems of oilmen and carpetbaggers, the skyscrapers, and the billions of dollars of temptation.
Perhaps because of their general skepticism, Haligonians seem oblivious to the danger. In government offices, shops, restaurants, and on the street, you hear a philosophy that, despite the fact that two supermajors have committed serious investment dollars to drill offshore, there simply is no reason to contemplate what-ifs. An oil boom? What are you talking about, an oil boom?
Not that no-one is thinking to the future at all. In recent years, Halifax has ripped up a string of parking lots on the waterfront and built a wooden promenade. Construction is going on, and the tawdriness becoming less and less. Andy Fillmore, a city planner who supervised much of this sprucing up (and is now running for Parliament), grew up in Halifax, the son of a mathematician father who taught at Dalhousie, and he has further dreams for the city. He wants it to be like Copenhagen or Stockholm—a city with “the most delightful urban core where people would be drawn to live in. Why have two cars when you can walk wherever you want?”
“Are we going to be like the kid with the new car who crashes it?”
Like everyone else, Fillmore says he does not dream of oil riches, although, when pushed, he wonders aloud whether, if it did come, “are we going to be like the kid with the new car who crashes it?” In Fillmore’s mind, Halifax’s likelier future is tourism. One scheme on which his team is working at the moment is positioning the city as a destination for super-yachts, the oversized vessels on which the world’s new class of hyper-rich sail the seas for three or four months a year. He said, “The amount of money they spend while in port is phenomenal.”
Even Sandy MacMullin, who knows more than anyone else in the province about the prospects for oil, sees no reason to look too far ahead. “When you are trying to balance a budget and make payments on principal,” he said, “debt tends to take the priority.” As it is, provincial officials are pretty happy with him now—they are no longer resisting his ideas. In May, the government allocated another $12 million for seismic and other geological studies. “It’s planning for success,” he said.
A week or so after my conversations in Halifax, an email arrived. It was from Fillmore. “I have been telling the story of our discussion to various well-placed folks in the city,” he wrote. “To a person, people have been having the same reaction that I had to our lack of a plan should the offshore hit.” He said people respond first with a kind of open-mouthed surprise, then with a sense of urgency about how they can get a plan in place. And so Fillmore had a question for me: Whom do we call in Norway for advice?
Architect Fernando Menis has developed a concept for a residential tower complex with rock-like walls, a cavernous swimming pool and plants growing out of every crevice. (more…)
This month we’ve run a series of gift suggestions. In our final installment, Cool Tools founder Kevin Kelly selects his favorite toolish gifts. Happy holidays!
Magna-tiles are large plastic shapes with super magnets buried along their edges so that they can be linked into solid sculptures. They are an open ended construction system that can make tall and complex buildings very fast. They are a lot of fun for kids who are too small to use Legos. We’ve reviewed them previously on Cool Tools.
To do much with them, though, you need lots of tiles, which can get expensive. But now there are a number of cheaper knock-offs, or alternative systems, that are compatible with Magna-Tiles. Brands include PicassoTile, Connect Tiles and Stick N Stack. These systems work interchangeably with Magna-Tiles — their magnets line up exactly in the same places on the same sized pieces. They seem to be just as durable, but they are cheaper. I have the 150 piece Stick N Stack set and the pieces work perfectly with my MagnaTile pieces, and they come in a few more shapes, such as windows, arches, and frames. With a large set like this, the magnets allow even small kids (and grownups) to rapidly build complicated structures.
The Perplexus is a 3D maze that requires concentration and dexterity to solve. It’s designed so you keep advancing to levels of greater difficulty, but you need to start over if you die. However starting over is easy. The kinetic manipulation of your hands needed to solve this resemble the twitches of a video game controller, but there are no electronics at all in this game. It’s a lot of fun because it is so physical, but it is not easy to solve. We previously recommended this as a great Cool Tools toy that won’t get old very fast, and will never need batteries.
Still, I never made it to the end (although my teenage kids did). To give beginners more a chance, Perplexus came out with a simpler version called the Rookie. I can actually complete this one, and so can 6-year olds. At the same time they also released two more difficult Perplexus versions for that smarty-pants in your family who found the original Perplexus too easy. The Perplexus Twist ($25) requires some problem solving and the Perplexus Epic ($22) is epically difficult to complete. All three of these (and the original) are beautiful works of art that could also sit in a glass display case with ease.
This is a kit for assembling a small working version of Theo Jansen’s famous walking machines called Strandbeests. Jansen’s original contraptions were larger than human machines made of PVC pipes that would walk along the beaches in the Netherlands, powered by the fierce winds. This miniature kit version uses the same geometry. The tiny Strandbeests can be powered by a hair dryer or small fan. This kit is released as a special issue of a Japanese magazine, but it comes with a minimal set of instructions in English. It is not difficult to assemble (most parts are duplicated) needing about 2 hours for someone say 8 or older. To appreciate the genius of its design, be sure to watch any of Jansen’s video of the large-scale machines in action.
There are other knock-offs which I have not built yet.
These plastic anatomical models are inexpensive and small. Putting them together from even smaller pieces is a bit of a puzzle, in that the directions are almost non existent. You have to just see how your body parts fit. Younger children will need help, and even adults may be challenged. Yet the models are highly detailed, informative, revealing, and for an anatomical model, incredibly cheap. I have put together the eyeball, the heart, the muscle man, and head. I learned a lot about each by putting them together. In addition to being instructive and useful for health education, they make great displays. — KK
Expensive but indestructible. This is the microscope that science museums and public education teachers use. These scopes take a lot of abuse, yet are simple to use. I’ve also seen them used on sailboats because they don’t corrode. It has only one moving part, no electricity, and provides decent magnification. We keep one out on the table at our home, with the philosophy that the best microscope is the one that is open and ready to use. It’s fine for very young kids to use all by themselves, with almost no instruction. It will last several lifetimes. You can easily make micro photographs by holding a camera or phone right against the eye piece.
When we last caught up with Seedcamp, it had just invested in seven new startups. Now it’s ready to announce its latest batch of investments with five springing from Seedcamp Berlin and two graduates of previous Seedcamp weeks emerging from working in stealth. At Seedcamp Berlin, the micro-seed investment and mentoring program invited 19 companies to attend from hundreds of applicants. Five were chosen to receive investment. They are… Branchtrack Based in Riga, Latvia, Branchtrack allows users to create ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-style simulations for sales and customer care training online. The company was founded in 2009 when the co-founders’ experience…
India’s steel mills are scrambling to source one crucial commodity—iron ore.
Even as the country’s coal sector inches towards normalcy, with the central government adopting a new policy of auctioning coal blocks, India’s iron ore sector is still in the doldrums.
From one of the world’s biggest exporters of iron ore four years ago, India has now turned into a net importer of the mineral as it seeks to feed its steel plants.
Partly, this is a consequence of the Supreme Court’s ban on mining iron ore from four years ago, after the apex court moved to curb illegal mining. Other factors include uneven actions by a clutch of state governments as they dither in renewing mining leases that steelmakers badly need.
“We wish the central government had given as much importance to iron ore sector as coal sector,” Prasad Baji, an independent market analyst told Quartz.
And the result is that some of India’s largest steel companies are being forced to source ore from the international markets—some for the first time in over a century—while others are shelving expansion plans.
Two years later, in 2013, the court allowed the resumption of iron ore mining in Karnataka, but with a cap of 30 million tonne per year. However, many mines in the state are still shut on the back of pending clearances.
In 2014, the Supreme Court lifted the ban on iron ore mining in Goa, although it imposed the issuance of fresh leases as a pre-condition. The court also capped iron ore mining in Goa at 20 million tonne per year. And in Odisa, in May this year, the court ordered closure of mines due to non-renewal of old leases.
Jharkhand government, too, closed 12 of its 17 iron ore producing mines as their leases had expired, hitting Tata Steel hard, but the Jharkhand High Court on Dec. 11 reportedly allowed Tata Steel to resume its operations.
Even though there have been some mine renewals in Goa, the second largest iron ore exporter in India, the state government wants to take it slow and decide only by March 2015 to clear the renewals. Odisha government, too, has decided not to renew any iron ore mines for now.
“Looking at the current scenario, it does not look like mining will resume soon in Odisha and Jharkhand,” Dhruv Goel, managing partner at SteelMint, a steel research, analysis and consultancy company, told Reuters. “Imports are expected to hit 11-12 million tonnes this financial year.”
Reform please
“Even though the iron ore mining issues are state government specific, like in Karnataka, Goa, Odisha and Jharkhand, the central government can still do a lot as all mines are governed by the Mines and Minerals [Development and Regulation] Act,” Baji said.
The Narendra Modi government intends to amend the Mines and Minerals [Development and Regulation] Act—or simply, the MMDR Act—to include provisions that would allow bidding for mineral mines like iron ore and auctioning of the same.
“While the draft amendment to the act proposes auction for non-coal minerals, central government can revise other parts of the act to address the current issues, for instance, those related to second and subsequent deemed renewal,” Baji added. For a second or subsequent renewal of a lease, the state government typically only gives its approval if it feels the renewal is necessary for mineral development.
Till then, the fate of India’s iron ore sector—and that of its steelmakers—lies in the hands of individual state governments.
The only silver lining is perhaps that global iron ore prices have also bottomed out.
This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.
It’s not just Americans who are outraged about the killing of unarmed black men by police officers in the US—and the criminal justice system’s seeming inability or unwillingness to sanction such conduct. In cyberspace, at least, a shared language of protest—the hashtags #HandsUpDontShoot (in purple), #BlackLivesMatter (in yellow), and #ICantBreathe (in red)—is lighting up the planet, as you can see in the animated map above (h/t @RickBrooksWSJ).
For instance, here’s the Twitter chatter using these three hashtags on Dec. 3, just before it was announced that a grand jury in Staten Island, NY, declined to indict (paywall) white police officer Daniel Pantaleo on any charges related to his suffocating Eric Garner to death using a forbidden chokehold technique. Before:
For those who don’t know, #ICantBreathe refers to Eric Garner’s last words, as Pantaleo and two other police officers forced him to the ground, face down. The 43-year-old father of six, who was overweight and asthmatic, uttered the phrase 11 times as Pantaleo crooked his arm around Garner’s neck.
It’s the latest hashtag embraced to decry the use of deadly force against unarmed black men and what many see as the devaluation of black male lives by the criminal justice system. Though it’s long since become the umbrella slogan of sorts for the movement, #BlackLivesMatter grew out of the 2012 death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was followed and then killed by George Zimmerman while returning from a walk to get Skittles and AriZona fruit juice. Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder, claiming that he had been forced to shoot Martin in a fight, though Martin was unarmed.
#HandsUpDontShoot stems from the Aug. 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, by white police officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department. Witnesses reported that Brown, who was unarmed, held up his hands in surrender just before white officer Darren Wilson killed him. Here’s the explosion of #BlackLivesMatter just after the Nov. 24 announcement that the grand jury declined to indict Wilson:
Young black men are 21 times more likely than their white peers to be shot dead by law enforcement, according to ProPublica, an investigative journalism non-profit. While young black men clearly bear the brunt of this phenomenon, the deaths of Garner and Martin show a far broader problem with how black men are perceived as dangerous, not just by police but also by members of the public. Garner was already twice a grandfather, and Martin was killed by a civilian. The Nov. 22 shooting death of Tamir Rice by a white rookie police officer in Cleveland doesn’t fit that category either. Rice was a black 12-year-old—a child—playing alone with a toy gun on a Cleveland playground when he was shot (here’s a video). The frequency with which black men and boys of all age groups are killed by police—six reported since late July alone—suggests that there will be many more hashtags to come.
A month ago I mentioned that lots of folks are now saying “this time is different” – we’ll soon see a big increase in jobs lost to automation, even though we’ve heard such warnings every few decades for centuries. Recently Elon Musk joined in:
The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe … 10 years at most.
If new software will soon let computers take over many more jobs, that should greatly increase the demand for such software. And it should greatly increase the demand for computer hardware, which is a strong complement to software. So we should see a big increase in the quantity of computer hardware purchased. The US BEA has been tracking the fraction of the US economy devoted to computer and electronics hardware. That fraction was 2.3% in 1997, 1.7% in 2003, and 1.58% in 2008, and 1.56% in 2012. I offer to bet that this number won’t rise above 5% by 2025. And I’ll give 20-1 odds! So far, I have no takers.
The US BLS tracks the US labor share of income, which has fallen from 64% to 58% in the last decade, a clear deviation from prior trends. I don’t think this fall is mainly due to automation, and I think it may continue to fall for those other reasons. Even so, I think this figure rather unlikely to fall below 40% by 2025. So I bet Chris Hallquist at 12-1 odds against this (my $1200 to his $100).
Yes it would be better to bet on software demand directly, and on world stats, not just US stats. But these stats seem hard to find.
Added 3p: US CS/Eng college majors were: 6.5% in ’70, 9.7% in ’80, 9.6% in ’90, 9.4% in ’00, 7.9% in ’10. I’ll give 8-1 odds against > 15% by 2025. US CS majors were: 2.4K in ’70, 15K in ’80, 25K in ’90, 44K in ’00, 59K in ’03, 43K in ’10 (out of 1716K total grads). I’ll give 10-1 against > 200K by 2025.
Added 9Dec: On twitter @harryh accepted my 20-1 bet for $50. And Sam beats my offer:
@GarettJones@robinhanson I offer to make the same bet as Robin at 30-1 odds (my $300 vs your $10 to keep things reasonable, up to 5 people)
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Micheal L. Dent, a University at Buffalo psychologist, listens to what is inaudible to others. And what she's hearing might one day help us better understand human hearing loss.
Best College Reviews has published a ranking of the 20 Best College Farms in America. Best College Reviews is an editorially independent college review website focusing on college rankings, reviews of college features, and thought leadership on helping students find their place in the higher education landscape. I am excited to see a Missouri school on the list that is right in my back yard.
(a) Magnetic hysteresis loops in perpendicular and in-plane magnetic fields. Inset is the AFM topographic image of YIG thin film surface. (b) Optical image (without top gate) and (d) schematic drawing (with top gate) of the devices after transferred to YIG/GGG substrate (false color). (c) Room temperature Raman spectra of graphene/YIG (purple), graphene/SiO2 (red), and YIG/GGG substrate only (blue).
