Weather Events In Great Britain and Ireland In the Years 1000-1099 (the Martin Rowley, booty.org.uk files)

We found another one! (see Saturday's Weather Events In Great Britain and Ireland In the Years 500 to 750 (the Martin Rowley, booty.org.uk files) for an explanation of what's going on with these pages)

We will post the individual pages as they turn up, meaning they will probably not be in chronological order.

One quick note: (CHMW/Lamb) is Hubert H. Lamb, historian and founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia with CHMW being one of his books: Climate, History and the Modern World, 1982.

http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1000_1099.htm

main historical menu

(T: warm/cold events; R: dry/wet events; S: 'stormy' events)

Date	T	R	S	Description	Ref:
				1000 - 1099
1014				"St. Michael's day Flood"; Possible major flood due storm-surge (or some have "tsunami") occurred on 'St. Michael's Day, which is September 29th (OS) in the western / Christian calendar. (Note that Dutch chronicles have this as September 28th). Great damage to coastal communities along the English south coast & given the impact on the eastern side of the southern North Sea, surely had a significant effect on the English side of that water.) [ http://www.soton.ac.uk/~imw/chestorm.htm ]	(See text), GOTT
1020				Possible severe winter (London/South).	8
1032/1033 (Winter)				A cold winter. (Easton, in CHMW/Lamb)	1
1042 (November)				November 2nd (OSP); some sort of major flooding occurred on the eastern side of the southern North Sea (Dutch coastal communities), which might have been a storm surge event; could possibly have affected the English side of that water.	GOTT
1043/1044 (Winter)				A cold winter. (Easton, in CHMW/Lamb)	1
1047				Reputed to be the worst winter 'in living memory'. Severe frost & heavy snow.	6, 8
1051
1061				Thames frozen for seven weeks.	8
1063				Severe winter (London/South).	8
1066: (late summer/autumn):				WILLIAM OF NORMANDY - INVASION OF ENGLAND In AD1066, after a long/dry summer, W/WNW winds prevailed in the Channel all through September. It was, according to TEC/Lamb, only the breaking of this anticyclonic NW'ly (ANW) spell that gave Duke William his chance to cross the Channel on the 7th October 1066 (New Style calendar).	6
1067/1068 (Winter)				A cold winter. (Easton, in CHMW/Lamb)	1
1070 OS (early summer, probably June)				Apparently, there was a 'violent storm' in the North Sea as the Danish King, Sven II, was returning to Denmark with looted treasures from the east Midlands / Fen lands after being defeated (then reconciled) with William I ('The Conqueror') in early June.	Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
1073/1074 (Winter)				A severe winter. (Easton, in CHMW/Lamb)	1
1076/77 (Winter)				Severe winter in Britain.	1, 8
1078 (Summer)				"A dry summer, with many 'wild-fires' in many shires burnt down towns and strongholds". [from the web site .. www.tree-ring.co.uk/ but with no references there.]	x
1085 (or 1086)				Severe winter (London/South).	8
1086 (and / or perhaps 1087)				'Wet' year (s): much famine / want & 'pestilence' over these 2 years. 1086 was also noted as 'a very thundery year', with much flooding & many people killed by lightning. The description may also be applied to 1087, but as always, caution is advised regarding whether both years were similarly afflicted & indeed just how much of the island of Britain was affected: it may be the old problem of the 'ecclesiastical' year starting on Lady Day, and events in what we would regard as 1087 in fact being credited to 1086, or, 'bad' weather from one year causing problems in the ensuing year, irrespective of the weather conditions. (London/South?)	8
17th October 1091				Violent 'whirlwind' (probably a tornado/T8 according to TORRO .. date in some sources 23rd, and best not to stick rigidly to date given the antiquity of the report.) More than 600 houses destroyed, much damage to churches (chronicled well of course), and damage also to the not-long built Tower of London. (Some references also talk about a 'gale' which implies a more widespread event - difficult to be precise I would have thought as to what exactly the phenomenon was; 600 houses is a lot of property for a tornado, though not impossible of course.)	7, 8
1092				A very wet year overall (London / SE?).	8
1092/93				Severe frost in this winter. English rivers frozen so hard that horsemen and wagons could travel on them. When the thaw came, drifting ice destroyed bridges. (Followed a very wet year - see above.)	8
1098 (Annual)				Almost certainly a very wet year across England. Contemporary reports suggest heavy rain events throughout the year, rather than just concentrated in one season or a cluster of months.	8
11th November(OS), 1099				A tidal flood affected the R. Thames estuary & adjacent areas of north Kent; it is not known whether London was affected, but according to legend, this inundation was responsible for the formation of the Goodwin Sands. The flooding also affected the Dutch coastal areas, so 'tidal' is problematic: I would suspect a wind-driven storm-surge which coincided with a high tide (?spring / exceptional?), and possible excessive autumnal land-water. "Thousands" of deaths reported in areas affected. (I would have thought that if London had been seriously affected, some chronicle of it would have survived?: The 11th century saw a high number of disastrous floods along the English east coast.)	7, 8

main historical menu

1100 to 1199 >>>>

"Agrichemicals sector consolidation..."

From Agrimoney:

The wave of consolidation among major agrichemicals groups will be a boon to smaller rivals, Plant Impact said, even as it unveiled results marked by a hiccup in tie-up with sector giant Bayer.

The merger spree which is seeing Bayer bid for Monsanto, ChemChina for Syngenta, and Dow and DuPont form a merged ag business, "will benefit small companies" in the sector, said John Brubaker, the Plant Impact chief executive.

The lesson from the pharmaceuticals sector, after its own consolidation, under which the number of sector majors shrank from 60 to 10 in the 20 years to 2015, was that the large drug development companies expanded their quest outside for technologies to underpin their leadership.

In agrichemicals too, "these companies as they go through consolidation will become more open to partnership… and seeking product from smaller companies".

Whether this quest for fresh intellectual property leads to fresh acquisitions of more minor groups was too early to say, Mr Brubaker said.

"It may be that smaller companies themselves pair up," although this was in the realm of "crystal ball gazing", he told Agrimoney.com.

'Significant inventory'

Plant Impact highlighted the role of "depressed" crop prices in spurring the deals between the top players, with the weak values creating "significant pressure on growers' profitability", feeding through into the supply chain too.

"Cost-cutting behaviour by farmers has reduced input consumption, creating significant channel inventory in many markets, notably Brazil and the US," said David Jones, the Plant Impact chairman....MORE

Questions America Wants Answered: "Why Does Vladimir Putin Walk So Weird?"

From Today I Found Out, Sept. 12:

Zach L. asks: Why does Vladimir Putin walk with one arm moving and the other stuck at his side?

While there is no single correct way to walk, most of us have a gait where we swing each arm forward when its opposing leg moves forward; likewise, as with the length of the stride, which is generally the same for both legs, the distance of the arm swing is usually about the same for both the left and right arms. While exactly why humans do this hasn’t yet been definitively proven (with the most popular theory being that, while not essential, it’s mostly about improving balance and decreasing angular momentum of the body), the fact remains that this is how the vast majority of humans all over the world walk… But not so with Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation.

For those who’ve never seen Putin’s rather odd walk, as is more common, when Putin walks, his left arm swings freely forward with his right leg stride. However, when his left leg strides forward, his right arm barely moves at all, remaining nearly still and close to his torso. This has resulted in some idly speculating that maybe there is some neurological cause for the gait, perhaps even a sign of Putin being in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, as reduced arm swing is a potential early indicator (though generally with tremors in the limb or other such additional indicators as well). (Incidentally: The Man Who Parkinson’s Disease is Named After Was Implicated in a Plot to Assassinate King George III.) Others have speculated Erb’s palsy or even a minor stroke might be the underlying cause.

The problem with all of these hypotheses is that Putin not only has full use of his right arm and hand for day to day activities like writing, eating, etc., but even likes to show off his prodigious Judo skills, as well as strength in weightlifting. In both cases, the right hand and arm seemingly show no sign of weakness, tremors, etc. Combined with the fact that Putin’s had this gait for many years without change, this all seemingly rules out any of the aforementioned potential causes.

So what’s going on? Well, thankfully as Putin himself has never commented on it as far as we can find, a team of doctors, led by movement disorder specialist Dr. Bastiaan Bloem, decided to look into the matter, publishing their paper on the subject in the British Medical Journal in 2015. In it, they came up with an intriguing and quite probable hypothesis as to why Putin walks this way....MUCH MORE

See also the Run-D.M.C./Aerosmith 1986 collaboration:

The Venture Capitalist Microsoft Allowed To Invest Early

As noted in the outro from March 2012's "Batteries: The Venture Capitalist's Holy Grail":

...Microsoft famously didn't need venture capital either.
(Technology Venture Investors was the sole VC investor and got that plum only because Marquardt and Ballmer were buddies)
That's the Holy Grail, finding a company that doesn't need you but will let you in.

The battery on the other hand....that's going to be a longer slog than the press releases would lead one to believe. 

If you want you can look it up, here's October 2012's "The 1986 Microsoft Prospectus and Stock Performance vs. Google (MSFT; GOOG)"

And here's the headline story from TechCrunch, June 2014:

Sand Hill Road’s Consiglieres: August Capital

In his best-selling book “Give and Take,” Adam Grant argues that the fourth ingredient to success — aside from hard work, luck and talent — is the ability to connect with people.

After 10 years of research, he chose Sand Hill Road’s David Hornik as a prime example to prove his case that good guys can finish on top. If venture is a long game, then long-term relationships are paramount. In fact, August Capital’s story begins with a long-term relationship between a young VC, Dave Marquardt, and a friend-of-a-friend named “Billy Gates.”

The Making of a Firm
It was 1980, and 30-year-old David Marquardt was a young, hotshot VC at Technology Venture Investors looking for his next deal. He heard through the grapevine that another young hotshot, “Billy Gates,” was having success with a startup called Microsoft, so he called one of Gates’ employees and former classmate at Stanford Business School, Steve Ballmer, to get a meeting.

At the time, Marquardt was a rarity in the VC world filled with ex-bankers; he was a design engineer and deeply technical. This resonated with Gates and Ballmer, and Marquardt spent the next year going up to Redmond almost every weekend to spend time with Gates and his team.

Sometimes they would go to University of Washington football games, and other times they would brainstorm. But in that year, Marquardt sealed the deal, and became one of the investors in Microsoft’s Series A in 1981. At the time, Marquardt and TVI invested $1 million for 5 percent of the company. Thirty-three years later, he still sits on the board of Microsoft.

Relationship building and company building has been Marquardt’s ethos as a VC; and he carried that view of venture capital to August Capital, the firm he co-founded with fellow TVI colleague John Johnston.

Relationships Before Returns
“The venture business is an intensely personal relationship business. And it’s not an industry that scales well,” explains Marquardt. He says he would never consider adding a value added service. “Companies should do that themselves,” he adds. Bill Gates wouldn’t let me bring in outside PR people and marketing talent — that’s what founders do, Marquardt maintains. “My view is that the CEO is ultimately responsible and accountable for everything, and they are the ones that make the decisions. The VCs are there to support and be steady”

Marquardt says that he’s seeing a lot of VCs who are closet operators who have been on boards and start pointing fingers at founders when things go wrong. “That’s not our style. Our style is more like telling the CEO, ‘Have you thought about this approach or this hire?’ We don’t believe we are there to make the decisions.”

While August may not have the marquis WhatsApp deal in its portfolio, or did not back Instagram early, the firm has had a number of early wins, such as Seagate, as well as quiet successes like Zulily and Splunk, which have helped its returns over the past few decades. And it’s clear that August isn’t all that concerned with getting some of the hype; the firm continues to be focused on its entrepreneurs and providing the kind of support Marquardt provided for Gates. 

By the time Marquardt and Johnston teamed up to found the firm in 1995, they had already backed Microsoft and did the Series B in Sun Microsystems. (Marquardt went to business school with the company’s co-founder Vinod Khosla). Their fellow TVI alum Bob Kagel went on to found Benchmark.

The company closed its first fund, of around $100 million, and brought on Andy Rappaport. Andrew Anker joined the firm in 1998. The mid-nineties were an inflection point in the VC world, explains Marquardt, as many firms were starting to split based on ideological differences. Some VCs wanted to do more packaged consumer goods, but some ‘renegade VCs’ were betting on technology and networked computers....MUCH MORE

A few months after this TechCrunch profile, in September 2014, Microsoft announced Mr. Marquardt was retiring  from the Board of Directors, a position he had held since 1981:

Microsoft announces board changes and quarterly dividend increase

...The company also announced that Dave Marquardt and Dina Dublon have decided not to seek reelection to the board of directors and will retire from the board at the expiration of their current term following the annual shareholders meeting in December....

News You Can Use: "How to Arbitrage Bordeaux’s Superb 2016 Vintage"

With the news of the disastrous 2017 French harvests—not just quantity but quality as well— in the headlines, the pressure on 2016 vintage prices are increasing almost daily. 

Do note: what's discussed here is not really an arbitrage—very few things are, rather more of a substitution list.
Not mentioned as an alternative is skipping the 2016's and going straight to the 2005's, generally acclaimed by common-sewers connoisseurs to be the best of this century with the '09's and 00's giving them a run for the (increasingly large) money.

From Barron's Penta:

The renowned French region’s 2016 wines are among the best. Be choosy about what you pay.

Wine experts are praising the quality of Bordeaux that was produced throughout the wine region in 2016, whether you prefer the weightier reds of the Cabernet-dominant left bank of Bordeaux’s Gironde River or the more fruit-forward wines of the Merlot-dominated right bank. To Hortence Bernard, general manager of Millesima USA, a branch of the Bordeaux-based merchant founded by her family, the 2016 vintage is a return to classic Bordeaux, where the juice is “charming” and elegant. “What I love with 2016 is, I really feel back home,” says the wistful Bernard.

Which raises an important point for wine lovers: Given the abundance of great wine, collectors need to think carefully about price.

The 2016 Château Lafite Rothschild is top-rated and unquestionably of the highest quality. But some wonder whether you want to buy it at the current market price of GBP5700/case (about $7,330), when you can also buy the excellent Château Grand Puy Lacoste for GBP643 ($830). (Prices are according to en primeur market prices collected by Liv-ex, a London firm that tracks the global fine-wine market.)

Both wines are from Paulliac, a district in Bordeaux’s left bank that some argue produced universally excellent wines last year, from legendary “first growths” like Lafite to “fifth growths” like Grand Puy Lacoste. Wines of the left bank are ranked first through fifth according to an 1855 classification system. But is the price spread between the two growths still justifiable in a vintage universally lauded as superb?

Bernard is among those who give special praise to the wines of Pauillac —  which she describes as “really strong” and “full bodied” — as well as those of neighboring St. Julien, which produces both full-bodied wines as well as those with more acidity and subtler fruit. “You can almost buy any of those wines, it will be a real treat,” Bernard says. The vintage also allowed for a “perfect expression” of the right bank wines, in the bolder flavors of modern-style wines like those produced by Château la Dominique and in more classic styles, like Château la Gaffelière’s.

Bordeaux continues to use futures, or en primeur, for setting prices two years before wines are released in bottles. Collectors buy en primeur to secure the wines they love at the best price and to avoid chasing them later, says Ron van Vlaardingen, fine wine sales director at Grand Vin Wine Merchants in Olympia, Washington.

Others point out the risk in paying too much to buy wine for future delivery when bottles from earlier great vintages by the same producer may sell for less on the secondary market. Liv-ex, a London-based firm that tracks the global fine-wine market, found this was true with several producers this year, including right-bank Châteaux Troplong Mondot and Vieux Chateau Certan.“The pricing was as random as ever,” says Justin Gibbs, Liv-ex’s co-founder.

Overall, Bordeaux prices rose 10% to 30% in euro terms, roughly hitting the same level as  the pricey 2010 vintage. But, this year, hikes in top growths were modest compared with the so-called Super Seconds —  the best of the second-growth wines —  as well as other wines with lower classifications on both the left and right banks....MUCH MORE

Previously:
May 6
"French Bordeaux vineyards could lose half of harvest due to frost"

Needed: 800 Million Jobs For Africa

By now most of our readers have seen a version of the U.N. projections for world population in 2050 and 2100. If not, here's a post from April with the graphic:

IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough (UPDATED)
Update below.
Original post:
This may be one of the more important graphics you are likely to come across today.
Africa's population is projected by the United Nations to reach 2 billion people by 2045, 4 billion before the end of the century:

via CityLab

We followed up with "To Jumpstart Development, Should We Give Africa Bonds a Whirl?"

The problem, as always, is keeping the money from sticking to the hands of the kleptocrats,
And whether investment will actually do any good.

Following on "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" here are a couple women who have thought about this stuff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a former two-time Finance Minister of Nigeria and World Bank Managing Director, currently a senior advisor at Lazard and Nancy Birdsall, former EVP at the Inter-American Development Bank where she ran a $30 billion loan portfolio....

And today it's the population analysts at Populyst, September 28:

Africa: 800 Million Jobs Needed
African economies are in a race to get ahead of the demographic boom.

Let us share without fear the journey of migrants and refugees. #ShareJourney

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) September 27, 2017

“Let us share without fear the journey of migrants and refugees.” Pope Francis (@Pontifex) tweet on 27 September 2017.

While some people in the United States are sweating the presence, against the backdrop of a demographically stagnant white population, of the 11 million undocumented immigrants or of the 30+ million other foreign-born residents, there are far bigger numbers brewing in other parts of the world, numbers that are so large that they could affect, decades from now, the life of an American citizen far more than would the rare determined Mexican or Guatemalan who manages henceforth to scale President Trump’s purportedly impenetrable border wall.

In the next decades as was so often the case in history, the future shape of the world could once again be decided in Europe and by Europe’s and the West’s handling of Africa’s incipient demographic boom.

In fact, if you are a generous-minded European who shares the Pope’s noble sentiment and who views the ongoing wave of migrants coming into your country as a benign and positive development; or, if you believe that borders are outdated constructs and that all refugees and other immigrants should be welcomed into the rich world; indeed, if it is your view that anyone who stands in the way of this openness is misguided by racist and nefarious motives, then it behooves you to test the strength of your belief by examining the larger demographic data coming out of Africa and Asia.

Because it is likely that your kindness and generosity will be, in the next decades, tested to their limits (unless they are limitless like the Pope’s). Because the two million people who have entered Europe on foot or via inflatable rafts in the past few years are, in scale, only thin vapor rising out of the demographic cauldron that is boiling up in Africa and south Asia. There are potentially many many more to come.

The Numbers

If Africa does not get its act together to start creating jobs at a rapid rate, there may be tens of millions more such people attempting to migrate in the future. The world population in 2015 stood at 7.3 billion and, on the UN’s medium variant, was expected to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050. Half of this 2.4 billion increase would take place in sub-Saharan Africa where the population will more than double in nearly every country.

(See at the bottom of the article region and country tables derived from the UN’s medium variant).

Today sub-Saharan Africa has a billion people. In 2050, it will have 2.1 billion. Of more vivid concern is the fact that the working-age population, aged 15 to 64, will grow by 800 million people from 500 million to 1.3 billion. This 800 million increase is roughly equal to five times the current size of the US labor force.

It is possible that these numbers are too high. But it should be noted that, in arriving at these forecasts, the UN Population Division has plugged into its assumptions a significant decline in fertility rates across the sub-continent, from 4.8 children per woman today to 3.1 in 2050. On a constant-fertility scenario assuming no decline in the fertility rate, the population boom would be even larger. The working age population would rise to 1.6 billion (instead of 1.3 billion under the median variant) and the increase from today would then be equal to 1.1 billion (instead of 800 million). These are unimaginable numbers that are unlikely to materialize.

(See this article for the Total Fertility Ratio of every African country from the highest, Niger at 7.7, to the lowest, Mauritius at 1.5.)

In some ways, the precise magnitude of the boom is unimportant, so long as we accept that it will be somewhere between large and very large. Even a sanguine scenario that would halve the increase of the working age population from 800 million to 400 million would still present a challenge that African economies are today ill-equipped to handle. Economic conditions are insufficient even today to adequately feed, dress, educate and shelter the population.

One reason to feel some optimism is the fact that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) also experienced a big rise in their working-age populations in the past thirty-five years and they managed to handle their demographic boom effectively. But this positive outcome was greatly assisted by a steep decline in China’s dependency ratio (DR) from 0.77 to 0.38. The DR is the ratio of dependents, children and the elderly, to working adults.

By comparison, the DR of sub-Saharan Africa is projected to fall from 0.86 today to a still elevated 0.63 in 2050. The decline in the youth DR (see tables below) is somewhat offset by a rise in the old-age DR that is itself due to an expected increase in life expectancy.

Certainly, if African fertility falls faster than median variant estimates, the total DR would decline more rapidly and there could be a faster acceleration in job creation and in GDP per capita.

(See at the bottom of the article the change in the dependency ratio for every country).

The Drive for Change

Africa is a wealthy continent but its wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of a few and it is often domiciled outside of Africa, in offshore financial centers, and in real estate  and other assets all over the developed world. For decades, this configuration has worked wonders for Africa’s rulers and their entourages.

If the above numbers are correct, that configuration is not sustainable in the long run. Not only will there be many more Africans in the future than in the past, but the advances in global connectivity through the internet and mobile phones mean that these future Africans will be much more aware of the prevailing living standards in the rich world. Even now, each has in the palm of his hand a direct visual connection to Europe, the United States and other prosperous places. They have seen what a rich society looks like and they want their own place within it.

So what are the steps that can be taken to improve conditions in Africa? They can be summed up as the following:

• Fight corruption and cronyism. They divert capital to a small percentage of the population, capital that should be re-invested within Africa.
• Stop or reduce capital flight from poor to rich countries. A lot of Africa’s money is parked in offshore bank vaults, real estate projects or trophy property in the West.
• Raise confidence among foreign investors. With less corruption and clearer exit strategies, foreign money would flood into Africa.
• Institute a more inclusive form of governance that helps spread power and wealth away from the elite and to a greater segment of the population.
• Create or reinforce an independent judiciary, strengthen the rule of law, including respect for contract law and property rights.
• Invest in infrastructure. Africa needs trillions of dollars for projects ranging from power generation and water treatment plants to new roads and transportation systems.
• Boost literacy to rich-country levels, and close the gender gap in literacy. There is a strong correlation between female literacy and fertility. The greater the literacy, the lower the number of children per woman.
• Lower fertility. There is also a strong correlation between fertility and GDP per capita. Several countries like China that experienced a sharp decline in fertility enjoyed a significant demographic dividend.

...MUCH MORE

Also at Populyst:
June 26 
New Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa

"The Coming Software Apocalypse"

From the Atlantic, Sept. 26:

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Because the counter was used to generating a unique identifier for each call, new calls were rejected. And because the programmers hadn’t anticipated the problem, they hadn’t created alarms to call attention to it. Nobody knew what was happening. Dispatch centers in Washington, California, Florida, the Carolinas, and Minnesota, serving 11 million Americans, struggled to make sense of reports that callers were getting busy signals. It took until morning to realize that Intrado’s software in Englewood was responsible, and that the fix was to change a single number.

Not long ago, emergency calls were handled locally. Outages were small and easily diagnosed and fixed. The rise of cellphones and the promise of new capabilities—what if you could text 911? or send videos to the dispatcher?—drove the development of a more complex system that relied on the internet. For the first time, there could be such a thing as a national 911 outage. There have now been four in as many years.

It’s been said that software is “eating the world.” More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal’s website crashed; and Seattle’s 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack. Almost more frightening was the realization, late in the day, that it was just a coincidence.

“When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. She became known for her report on the Therac-25, a radiation-therapy machine that killed six patients because of a software error. “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations; a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing. Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”

This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity,” as Leveson puts it, “is invisible to the eye.”...MUCH MORE

HT: The Big Picture's 10 Weekend Reads 

"Why nation-states are good"

Yesterday two Alphavilleins, Izabella Kaminska on Twitter and Kadhim Shubber in the Further Reading post highlighted this Dani Rodrik essay at Aeon.

We've been kicking around ideas on how to profit from a devolution of power from larger entities (nation-states) to smaller (city-states) should said devolution occur. So, stealing a way of thinking from Eisenhower, in another context, obvs.:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

 - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Our most recent piece on what may or may not be a phenomena was last month's "Return of the City-State, Or: The End of the Nation State May Be Upon Us" which also linked to Aeon.

I'm not sure where Kadhim comes down on the structure-of-power thing but I suspect Izabella might not be aghast at a return to prominence of the Baltic City-States although probably not the Hanseatic League.

From Aeon:

Why nation-states are good
The nation-state remains the best foundation for capitalism, and hyper-globalisation risks destroying it

The populist revolt of our day reflects the deep rift that has opened between the worldview of the global intellectual and professional elites, and that of ordinary citizens. These two groups now live in parallel social worlds and orient themselves using different cognitive maps. Yet the intellectual consensus that brought us to this chasm remains intact. Proposed remedies among mainstream thought leaders rarely go beyond an invocation of the problem of inequality, and a bit more focus on compensating the losers.

But the problem lies deeper, in elites’ attachment to a globalist mindset that underplays and weakens the nation-state. Without a shift, we might find not only our open global economy, but also our liberal, democratic order swept away by the backlash wrought by the blind spots and excesses of this mindset.

Among the intelligentsia, the nation-state finds few advocates. Most often, it is regarded as ineffectual – morally irrelevant, or even reactionary – in the face of the challenges posed by globalisation. Economists and centrist politicians tend to view globalism’s recent setbacks as regrettable, fuelled by populist and nativist politicians who managed to capitalise on the grievances of those who feel they have been left behind and deserted by the globalist elites. Last October, the British prime minister Theresa May ignited an outcry when she disparaged the idea of global citizenship. ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world,’ she said, ‘you’re a citizen of nowhere.’

Markets need regulatory and legitimising institutions to thrive – consumer-safety rules, bank regulations, central banks, social insurance and so on. When it comes to providing the arrangements that markets rely on, the nation-state remains the only effective actor, the only game in town. Our elites’ and technocrats’ obsession with globalism weakens citizenship where it is most needed – at home – and makes it more difficult to achieve economic prosperity, financial stability, social inclusion and other desirable objectives. As we’ve all seen, elite globalism also opens political paths for Right-wing populists to hijack patriotism for destructive ends.

The globalist worldview is grounded in the argument that an interconnected world economy requires collective action at the global level. But this premise is largely false. The conventional picture of the world economy as a ‘global commons’ – one in which all nations would be driven to economic ruin unless they cooperate – is misleading. If economic policies fail, they most often do so for domestic not international reasons. Global governance remains crucial in some areas, for example climate change or health pandemics, where the provision of global public goods is essential. But in the economic sphere the best way in which nations can serve the global good is by putting their own economic house in order.....MORE

Weather Events In Great Britain and Ireland In the Years 500 to 750 (the Martin Rowley, booty.org.uk files)

Dorset's own Martin Rowley spent much time and effort looking at historical weather and compiling his results at:

 http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/

In 2014 a notice appeared on his site:

IMPORTANT! For various reasons, I shall no longer be able to maintain this web site - these files will not be updated / extended as of December 2014: the site itself should remain 'active' until spring 2017 [at least] - but, if there's anything you find of interest, please take a copy for off-line reference as it may disappear at some point in the future. This site will however have a permanent archive 'home' with the British Library HERE: enter 'Booty Meteorological' in the search box.

We made note of the change and thought the database was in good hands.
Maybe not.

The British Library link goes to "https://web.archive.org/web/20170114112646/http://www.webarchive.org.uk/" which may or may not lead you to "https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/286294101/source/subject" which in turn offers up a couple links to the Wayback Machine's:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20130417044152/http://www.booty.org.uk/booty.weather/

It seems the Library may have misplaced the actual data pages.

A further keyword search exposed (!) the hazards of  a URL such as www.booty.org.uk/booty.weather/, returning, among other hits a Mexican meteorologist who appears to enjoy taking her clothes off.

Because the data is a unique compilation we are going to do what we can to get it back on the internet, this time hosted on Google's (Blogger) servers but it might take some time to find what pages went where.

In defence of the British Library, they have a lot of stuff to keep track of and probably have the pages on some dusty old server down in one of the sub-basement archives. The fact the Wayback machine didn't catch the individual pages is a bit more troubling.

It would be a real shame to have the pages disappear completely.

That said, here's the only page we had that was easily found on our servers but, as indicated above I believe we have more.
Somewhere.

http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/500_750.htm

main historical menu

<<<<100 BC - 499 AD

Date	T	R	S	Description	Ref:
				500 - 750
~ AD500				By this time, the storminess of the latter part of the 5th Century (q.v.) had 're-arranged' some coastal alignment in East Anglia. A sea-level rise noted, BUT, Lamb considers that this may have more to do with reporting of increased frequency of inland storm-driven surges, rather than a general world-wide sea level rise. Also note that evidence of significant rise in peat bog deposits by or around this time: therefore implies greater 'wetness' (and presumably cyclonicity).	1
AD508				Possible severe winter. Rivers frozen for two months. Years also quoted as 507 or 509.	8, LWH
AD520				Major storm surge in Cardigan Bay.	1
AD525				Possible severe winter. Thames frozen for 6 weeks.	8
AD536 [or perhaps AD535] (spring/March?)				Volcanic eruption# (East Indies) at around 4degS is estimated to have put around 300Mt of aerosols into the stratosphere (c.f. Tambora in 1815 of 200Mt which led to the 'year without a summer' q.v.). This would have brought about an abrupt drop in world-wide temperature, and concomitant changes in atmospheric (& perhaps oceanic) circulation. It is thought that the effects (famine etc.) were experienced over the (then) known world, with a 'severe plague' in the years 541-544 possibly connected; up to 25% of the populations of Africa, Europe and Asia affected. A 'famine' / shortage of bread noted over Ireland in 538, and, if accepted as part of this phase, a severe winter in 554. [ some publications have the effects lasting until at least 555, and certainly tree-ring data suggest a period of reduced growth for western Europe up to at least 545. The implied NAOI would have been highly negative, with well-above average pressure over Greenland / Iceland sector, and lower values around the Azores. These events may be the origin of the 'Fimbul winter' of Norse legend.] (R.Met.S/'Weather' Feb. 2004 & "The Long Summer"/Fagan: see also: .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 ** There is confusion with dating in some texts: 536 is mentioned a lot, but I fancy this is the year when the major world-wide effects were noted: Ice-core sampling suggests the actual year of the major eruption was 535. ## Alternative theories have been put forward for the world-wide effects noted: either a large comet hitting the earth, injecting huge amounts of debris into the atmosphere, or the Earth passing through a cloud of inter-stellar dust.	R.Met.S, 20
AD544/545 (Winter)				Intensely cold winter (London / South) & possibly over a wider area (according to Easton, in CHMW/Lamb).	1, 8
AD548 (perhaps 549)				Possible severe gale/storm in London; many houses damaged and several people killed.	8, LWH
AD553/554 (Winter)				Severe winter: Some confusion between 545 & 554, but Easton (in Lamb/1.) notes both winters as being notably cold / severe. Winter 'so severe' with frost & snow that 'the birds and wild animals became so tame as to allow themselves to be taken by hand'. (A Meteorological Chronology, quoted in "The Long Summer"/Fagan ref: 20)	1, 8, 20
AD565/566 (Winter)				A cold winter. (Easton, in CHMW/Lamb)	1
AD566				[ date / season not given, but possibly linked to the cold winter noted above. ] Possible 'Great Storm' affecting eastern & mid-coasts of southern England - 'serious damage'.[ http://www.soton.ac.uk/~imw/chestorm.htm ]	(See text)
AD580 - 600				Indications of several, or a succession of wet years. Also, tree-lines by this time were falling & glaciers advancing.	1
AD586				North Sea: floods & great storm.	LWH
AD589				Durham: storm flood - sea swept away villages, many drowned.	LWH
AD592: (January - September)				England: drought. Taken with the entry below, implies considerable blocking / extended periods of high pressure.	LWH
AD592/593 (Winter)				A cold winter. (Easton, in CHMW/Lamb)	1
AD604				Severe frost in England. Also noted as a 'severe winter' in Scotland, with 4 months frost.	8, LWH
AD605				Drought (possible). Also, 'great heat'.	8
c.AD630				Thames flood in London.	8
AD634 (Winter)				Ulster, Ireland: snow - killed many.	LWH
c. AD640's				around this time, some 'cold' years noted.	1
AD650
AD679-681				According to legend, the drought (only certain for southern England) which ended in 681, and which was claimed to have lasted for three years, was broken on the day that Bishop Wilfrid converted the South Saxons to Christianity. (Actually, converting the King of the time, who would have then imposed the religion on his court and subsequently the people). Known as 'St. Wilfrid's drought'.	8, LWH
AD684				Ireland: Cold - lakes, rivers & sea froze. [ If this sort of weather was noted across Ireland, I would think that Britain would also have been affected: suggests anticyclonic / blocked, with an easterly type resulting. ]	LWH
AD685				Coloured rain: often noted as 'Bloody Rain'. [ Coloured rain (or contaminated rain) is usually due to the atmosphere carrying very fine sand / dust, due to sand/dust-storms in arid areas, or volcanic dust [ due to major eruptions ] which may have an origin a considerable distance away from the place where the rain fell - often measured in thousands of miles / km. The sand / dust is washed out from the middle troposphere. Vesuvius and Etna are thought to have been very active in 685, and the 'bloody rain' which fell in this year probably contained volcanic dust. Whatever the source, it does suggest that the atmospheric conditions were such that tropical continental (Tc) airflow was involved, with a highly-blocked long-wave pattern in place. A mobile, westerly (or Atlantic) type doesn't allow the lengthy fetch at mid-levels of these contaminated winds. (Various years given, from 684 to 689)	8
AD693				Ireland: Flooding due to heavy / prolonged rainfall - Leinster rivers flood for 3 days & nights.	LWH
AD694/695 (but possibly 695/696) (Winter)				Severe winter. Thames frozen for six weeks - booths were built on the thick ice.	1, 8, LWH
AD720 (or perhaps 721) (Summer)				Wales - very hot summer (& assumed to be dry).	LWH
AD737				Great drought .. London/South.	8
AD738				Scotland: flood (assumed to be due to heavy / intense rainfall) - 400 families drowned in Glasgow.	LWH
AD741				Great drought .. London/South.	8
AD748 (but could be anytime between 744 & 748) (Winter)				Ireland - Great snow destroyed herds. This would have been a major disaster.	LWH

main historical menu

751 - 999>>>>

Scientists Can Now Harvest Electricity From Your Tears

This news comes out of Ireland which somehow seems appropriate.
From the Irish Times, Oct. 2:

Irish scientists unlock how to make electricity from tears
UL research may ultimately provide alternative way to control drug release into body

Because it is a biological material it is non-toxic and could have innovative applications involving medical implants, said Tipperary scientist and lead author of the research findings, Aimee Stapleton.

“Crystals of lysozyme are easy to make from natural sources,” she added.

Prof Tewfik Soulimane, report co-author, said although the protein’s structure has been known about since 1965, “we are the first to use these crystals to show the evidence of piezoelectricity”....MORE

 Here's the University of Limerick press release at EurekAlert.
And the paper at Applied Physics Letters.

The "appropriate" line relates to the introduction to a 2015 post:

I once had a very learned gentleman tell me there are four types of drunks.
His categories were:

Verbose
Morose
Lachrymose
Comatose

The learned gentleman was very, very proudly Irish and a keen observer of the human condition.
See also Heraclitus.

"Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet"

I mentioned, in our first post on Dopamine Labs, one of the most common sights in any city in the world, folks and their phones:

...The obsessive checking behavior some users exhibit is virtually indistinguishable from obsessive-compulsive disorder while the anxiety occasioned by withdrawal sure looks miserable....

Yep that's me, an amazing grasp of the obvious.

From The Guardian, October 6:

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

In 2007, Rosenstein was one of a small group of Facebook employees who decided to create a path of least resistance – a single click – to “send little bits of positivity” across the platform. Facebook’s “like” feature was, Rosenstein says, “wildly” successful: engagement soared as people enjoyed the short-term boost they got from giving or receiving social affirmation, while Facebook harvested valuable data about the preferences of users that could be sold to advertisers. The idea was soon copied by Twitter, with its heart-shaped “likes” (previously star-shaped “favourites”), Instagram, and countless other apps and websites.

It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.

“One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.

It is revealing that many of these younger technologists are weaning themselves off their own products, sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads and even laptops are banned. They appear to be abiding by a Biggie Smalls lyric from their own youth about the perils of dealing crack cocaine: never get high on your own supply.

•••
One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.....MUCH MORE

Our second look at Dopamine Labs, a couple weeks ago also has a link to the Financial Times' Izabella Kaminska interviewing Robert Lustig, MD; MSL on this very topic (among others):

If You Want To Be Happy, Listen Up. Now! alternative title: The FT's Izabella Kaminska Is...

...trying to destroy one of my upcoming "set it and forget it" trades...

Oil & Gas Data Biz: "Rigzone founder sentenced for data duplication scheme"

What a he-whore:
"I got it, I sell it, I still got it."

Or is the term of art "Presstitute"?

From the Register:

After selling his site for millions, founder hacked it for a second payday

"Operation Resume Hoard" was going well. Initiated around April 1, 2015, it represented David W. Kent's plan to build the membership of his oil and gas industry networking site Oilpro.com.

Court documents indicate that Kent, 41, of Spring, Texas, USA, had a buyer in mind: DHI Group, the employment data biz that in 2010, when known as Dice Holdings, had purchased an oil and gas industry networking site he had founded a decade earlier, Rigzone.com, for $51 million.

Kent wanted more and hoped to get it by growing Oilpro.com – a site he founded around October 2013, shortly after the expiration of the non-compete agreement that followed from the Rigzone sale – into an attractive acquisition target.

By January 2016, Oilpro's membership database had grown to at least 500,000 members. It would have been an impressive feat of marketing but for the fact that Kent hacked Rigzone to obtain the email addresses he would use to build membership at Oilpro.

His sales pitch to the DHI Group attributed the site's growth to reaching out to the contacts of Oilpro members, traditional marketing techniques, and "network effects."

Had DHI Group gone through with the deal – at a suggested cost of $20 million or more – it would have bought data is already had.

But as it happened, a spam complaint alerted the company that something was wrong. A Rigzone member contacted customer support to complain about receiving a solicitation from Oilpro despite having never submitted any information there.

Honeypot
Court documents describe how Rigzone.com, after finding no evidence that anyone from Oilpro had accessed its database, set up a honeypot: two fake accounts in its database with no public facing profiles.

Lo and behold, those accounts each received email solicitations to create profiles on Oilpro.com. Eventually, Rigzone figured out what was going on.

Between 2013 and 2016, Kent and at least one of his Oilpro employees accessed Rigzone's database several times without authorization, coming away with more than 700,000 customer accounts....MUCH MORE

"Economists React to the September Jobs Report: ‘Doesn’t Carry Weight This Time’"

From the WSJ's Real Time Economics:

U.S. employers shed a seasonally adjusted 33,000 nonfarm jobs in September, the first negative reading on payrolls in seven years, and the unemployment rate dropped to a new business-cycle low of 4.2%. Forecasters had predicted hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which hit the U.S. in late August and September, would weigh on hiring during the month. Here are early reactions from economists and analysts to Friday’s report:

“The first thing that comes to mind here is the scene in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ where we hear the line ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.’ Because of the impacts from hurricanes and flooding, the decline reported in September payrolls doesn’t carry weight this time around. Case in point, the loss of more than 100,000 jobs in food and drinking establishments is surely only temporary.” —Mark Hamrick, Bankrate.com

“Nominal wages…showed a nice boost. The BLS commissioner notes that this may be due in part to the hurricanes and their aftermath, as well. The food services sector was particularly hard hit in September—losses in this lower-wage sector likely pulled up the overall average wage.” —Elise Gould, Economic Policy Institute

“On a three month average annualized basis average hourly earnings are up 3.6%. This is a far better reflection of the wage environment in the real economy where there are simply not enough workers to meet current demand for labor. From our perspective, there is roughly only 1.3 individuals for every job opening and wage gains are in the pipeline with some inflation trailing behind.” —Joseph Brusuelas, RSM

...MORE

The highlighted bit is reminiscent of the Will Rogers  phenomenon -via Wikipedia:

The Will Rogers phenomenon is obtained when moving an element from one set to another set raises the average values of both sets. It is based on the following quote, attributed (perhaps incorrectly)^[1] to comedian Will Rogers:

When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states.

The effect will occur when both of these conditions are met:

• The element being moved is below average for its current set. Removing it will, by definition, raise the average of the remaining elements.
• The element being moved is above the current average of the set it is entering. Adding it to the new set will, by definition, raise the average....MORE

See also New Zealanders moving to Australia:

''New Zealanders who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries,''

— Prime Minister Robert Muldoon

Soylent Has Competition and the Marketing is Gonna Get Weird

From Inverse:

When your product does nothing but keep folks alive, you sell them...life.

When Soylent hit the market it was a novelty item (get it?) in search of a non-novelty audience. It found one — more or less. Though some people still subsist on the stuff after losing bets, Soylent has many loyal customers who eagerly consume the company’s kinda-gooey product. Now, a British company called Huel is trying to hone in on the nutrition-without-taste game. But how the hell do you market something that will keep you alive when it has no other discernible characteristics? Well, it’s tricky.

The Huel intro video is a master class in deflection. Julian Hearn, the human fuel’s inventor, talks about garbage and fast food, erecting a few straw men then knocking them down. After that, we see a woman running and sipping out of a Huel bottle because this is a lifestyle brand? Well, it kind of is. Like Soylent, which has a distinctly similar stripped-down visual approach, Huel can’t sell itself as food. Huel is not food. Huel is an environmentally friendly shortcut....MORE

Related:
She Tried Soylent. It Didn't Go Well
Soylent Ingredient Provisioner Pooh-Poohs Diarrhea Accusation, Cuts Off Gruel Maker's Algae Flour Supply
Soylent's New Food Bar Is Giving People Diarrhea
Disruption: Soylent Says It Knows Why It Is Making Its Customers Poop and Puke

If interested see also (no diarrhea, I promise):
Andreessen Horowitz on Soylent: It's not just Soylent, It's the Soylent community (GPRO)

The Future of Food Is Food
Soylent, the sludge-like drink that claims to replace real food, valued at $100 million

"Sidewalk Labs’ bid to build a smart city hub in Toronto may soon be a reality" (GOOG)

From Curbed, Oct. 5:

The Alphabet subsidiary may soon develop 12 acres on Toronto’s waterfront

Google parent company Alphabet Inc.’s plan to build a smart city on Toronto’s waterfront may soon see the light of day. 

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Sidewalk Labs LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is nearing a deal with the Canadian city to develop a 12-acre section of the eastern waterfront into a digital downtown. 

The board of Waterfront Toronto, the agency overseeing the Quayside project, as it’s called, is expected to vote at a meeting on October 20 whether to approve the agency’s recommendation to partner with Sidewalk Labs resulting from a competitive bid process after a request for proposals was launched in May, according to the Toronto Star.

Quayside, whose website envisions the district as “an exemplary waterfront community that achieves precedent-setting standards of sustainability, resiliency, innovation, inclusivity and design excellence,” is an attractive site for Sidewalk, which has been searching for a home for over a year....MORE 

Previously on the Sidewalk: 

"Google wants to build a city" (GOOG)

"Alphabet is plotting a digital city full of Google cars, high-speed Internet and maybe more!" (GOOG)  

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is eyeing a contest to build its own internet city (GOOG)

As former Deputy Mayor to Michael Bloomberg, Doctoroff pretty much epitomizes the intersection of big money/big politics. That Medium post is not quite a blueprint but interesting nonetheless. 

No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. 

No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming.

Here's Google's Sidewalk Labs' Pitch To Insert Itself Into America’s Urban Transportation Infrastructure (GOOG)

"Google’s sister company wants to be in charge of public transportation"

"2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year" (now mit umlauts and not just in the Hästkött)

Money, Murder and Sadomasochism: A Look At the L.A. Tech Scene

"Facebook can unlock your account with facial recognition" (FB; GOOG)

As mentioned in the outro from Wednesday's "What Google Says It Is Using Artificial Intelligence For: An Interview With the CEO (GOOG)" giant databases of images are treasure to machine learning AI.
This is one area where Facebook has an edge on the GOOG.

And if they can get you to work as an unpaid pic identifier all the better. Remember Google's picture captchas?  We can now identify a road in the pictcha.
Thank you very much.

From TechCrunch, Sept. 29:

Facebook has its own version of Apple’s Face ID. If you get locked out of your Facebook account, the company is testing a way to regain access by using your face to verify your identity. That could be especially useful if you’re somewhere that you can’t receive two-factor authentication SMS, like on a plane or while traveling abroad, or if you lose access to your email account.

 
Social media researcher Devesh Logendran (a pseudonym) sent a screenshot of the feature to TNW’s Matt Navarra. We asked Facebook about it and got this confirmation:

“We are testing a new feature for people who want to quickly and easily verify account ownership during the account recovery process. This optional feature is available only on devices you’ve already used to log in. It is another step, alongside two-factor authentication via SMS, that were taking to make sure account owners can confirm their identity.”

If the feature proves reliably helpful to users and isn’t fooled by hackers, Facebook could potentially roll it out to more people.

Over the years Facebook has tried a number of novel ways to help you get back into a locked account. In some cases it asks you to identify photos of your friends to prove you’re you....MORE

pic.twitter.com/ka7exigGWg

— Evert Groot 🙃🎵 (@absoluut) September 30, 2017

"How a whole lot of hype sent Endocyte’s stock soaring for no good reason" (ECYT)

Interesting chart:

FinViz

From STAT:

I asked a seasoned biotech business development executive, a guy who spends a lot of time digging deep into cancer drugs for potential licensing deals, what he thought about the experimental prostate cancer drug acquired by Endocyte (ECYT). Since announcing the deal on Monday morning, Endocyte’s stock price has quadrupled.

“PSMA is a target proven over and over as ineffective in treating prostate cancer due to significant off-target toxicity. Anyone looking at this can pretty much stop there,” he told me....

Indiegogo-funded Kuli Kuli Introduces Moringa

What?

They're backed by Eighteen94 Capital.
Don't tell me you've forgotten Eighteen94.

Last May? Headline: "Nine of the World's Biggest Packaged Food Companies Have Launched Venture Capital Units"

...“This is a form of R&D for us, or access to places where the company isn’t currently participating,” said Simon Burton, who heads Kellogg’s new venture capital arm, Eighteen94 Capital. 

Its first investment, announced in January, was in California-based Kuli Kuli, which makes snack bars from the moringa plant. There are more in the pipeline, he said. 

No? 

Here's the latest, from Forbes:

A Startup Backed By Kellogg's VC Arm, Kuli Kuli, Introduces Americans To A New Superfood, Moringa

When Lisa Curtis was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, she discovered moringa, a green with high nutritional content that’s popular in Africa and elsewhere. When she returned to the United States, she decided to start a company that would introduce it to U.S. consumers – and provide better incomes to farmers in Africa. With her friends Valerie Popelka, Jordan Monchamont and Anne Tsuei, she launched Kuli Kuli (named for a popular peanut snack in West Africa) on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, raising $53,000. Today, the Oakland, California-based startup sells moringa bars, powders and energy shots at Whole Foods, Safeway-Albertsons, Target and thousands of other stores nationwide. With $4.5 million in total funding – led by the VC arm of food giant Kellogg’s, known as Eighteen94 Capital – Curtis expects Kuli Kuli’s revenues this year to top $2 million. In a conversation that has been edited and condensed, Curtis, 29, spoke about how she convinced retailers to stock a new “superfood” and landed an investment from Kellogg.

Amy Feldman: How did you find moringa?

....MORE

I'm going to hold off on any Kuli Kuli investments until we have a better idea of their appeal. The memories of the great flavored-pacifiers-for-MDMA-Molly-meth heads fiasco of the late '90's are still too fresh.

As for superfoods, I might start peddling mustard greens: "Isothiocyanates here, getcher tasty isothiocyanates."

So, What's Up With Catalonia?

Via ZeroHedge:

Catalonia’s drive for “independence” has unleashed a chain reaction of viral social media support that’s frighteningly resurrected civil war-era rhetoric, but the most dangerous consequences of this domino effect are yet to come if the separatists are ultimately successful in their quest. 

 

The Nostalgia Narrative
The Catalan “independence” cause has taken the world by storm, thrown into the global spotlight by the heavily publicized referendum earlier this week and Madrid’s forceful response to this unconstitutional measure. Supporters all across the world have been energized by the recent events and have taken to describing them in civil war-era terms as a battle between “democracy” and “fascism”. Furthermore, they also accuse the Rajoy government of being “Francoists”, as they do the country’s post-Franco 1978 Constitution which returned Catalonia’s autonomy in an even more robust way than before and even bestowed this privilege to the rest of the country as well.

Although it can be safely presumed that Spain naturally retained some of the “Francoist” members of its permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) after the death of their movement’s eponymous leader, it’s an exaggeration to refer to the constitution and the present government as “Francoists” in the sense of what the term stereotypically implies. Rather, the improper use of such polarizing civil war-era terms demonstrates that the separatists are trying to capitalize on the revolutionary nostalgia that their domestic and foreign supporters have for reliving the 1936-1939 anarcho-communist experiment via a simulacrum, one which plays out differently depending on their audience.

Two Simulacra
As it relates to the Catalans themselves, this is meant to force them into the false binary choice between “standing with their ancestors against fascism” or “betraying their motherland for the Francoists”. Concerning the foreign supporters of the Catalan separatists, they’re supposed to get riled up and vent their hatred against Madrid and impassioned support for Barcelona all throughout social media, picking up on the cue that they should inaccurately compare modern-day Madrid to post-Maidan Kiev in making the Alt-Media argument that Catalonia has as much of a right to “independence” as Crimea does to its reunification with Russia.

This is a false equivocation, the full debunking of which isn’t the focus of this article however, as it’s important enough in this context to draw attention to the polemical chain reaction that’s being spun by the separatists and their supporters in crafting a self-interested narrative for serving their cause. There are many well-intentioned individuals who are standing behind Barcelona, so it’s not at all to infer that most of them don’t sincerely believe in this interpretation of events, but the point here is just to highlight how Catalonia’s “independence” crusade is exploiting historical memory and revolutionary nostalgia in order to advance its organizers’ argument that the region needs to split from Spain.

Spanish Scenarios
 
Centralized Crackdown:
While most people might be led to think that the Catalan Crisis is solely between Barcelona and Madrid, the fact is that it actually involves all of Spain and is poised to have geopolitical reverberations throughout the entirety of Europe. Concerning the politically unstable Iberian country, Catalonia’s separatist campaign already crossed the Rubicon of no return after the referendum and Madrid’s reaction to it, so there’s no going back to the previous status quo. This means that only three scenarios are probable: a centralized crackdown, Identity Federalism, and separatism. The first one could see the state implement Article 155 of the constitution in temporarily imposing direct rule over the region, though with the expected consequence being that it might catalyze a low-scale civil war if the Catalans resort to terrorist-insurgent tactics to resist.

Identity Federalism:
The next scenario is Identity Federalism, which would require the revocation or reform of Article 145 in devolving the centralized state into a federation or confederation of regions, each of which could theoretically function as quasi-independent statelets with their own economic, military, and foreign policies. Essentially, this would be the transplantation of the Bosnian model onto Spain, albeit with added privileges given to each constituent member. As with the centralized crackdown scenario, this is likely to lead to violence, and would probably only occur as a “compromise solution” to any prolonged conflict. Madrid does not want to lose control of the country and see the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe “Balkanized” like its namesake counterpart in Southeastern Europe, which is why this outcome probably wouldn’t ever happen in peacetime.

Secessionism:
Finally, the last possibility for how the Catalan Crisis could play out is that the restive region becomes “independent” from Spain and is recognized by at least one country or more, which in all likelihood might end up being some of the Baltic and/or Balkan states before anyone else. Spain wouldn’t be able to survive in its present administrative-political format with the loss of roughly 20% of its GDP, so the rump state would either have to be radically reformed, undergo a “stabilizing” military coup, or fully collapse in a collection of “countries” just like the former Yugoslavia did a generation ago....MORE

It's all good then.
As to outsiders, cui bono?