Daily Archives: August 6, 2021

Books that mattered to me this year – The Cancer Letter

Posted: August 6, 2021 at 10:36 pm

Over the past year, I noticed several books written by giants in our field, people everyone knows, people I am honored to know personally. I was interested in what they wrote, and I thought their books would be of general interest to The Cancer Letter community.

Going beyond merely recommending the books, I set out to write in a book review format, providing critiques that would enable everyone to appreciate more of the details (and want to read the books).

Because of my interest (or because I know the subject matter and, in some cases, am acquainted with the authors), I included reflections on the aspects of the books I found interesting, adding perspective or insight when appropriate.

You will find a lot of interesting history and fascinating tidbits within these volumesincluding the personal human side of science and medicine. Perhaps I got a little carried away with the number of words, but I wanted to do these books justice. I know my colleagues will be eager to read every word. And maybe some will be inspired to do similar thingsmaybe we could start something new here.

Perhaps it was an unusual year for those types of books that I gravitated toward. Rather than sticking with my typical diet of sci-fi, social justice, history, and entertainment, I gravitated toward important and timely social and ethical issues in science and oncology.

I hope the reader gets all the way down to the bottom of the list (especially the book my daughter Julie is reading), and, finally, I wish there were more hours in the day.

The books reviewed here are:

Other books on my reading list are:

And a book my daughter, Julie, is reading:

When a Nobel Laureate like Paul Nurse stops to ask what it means to be alive or what defines life, one can be sure that something interesting and important will be learned.

The basic unit of matter is the atom. The basic unit of life (the first step), the cell varies widely in size, for example 3,000 bacteria add up to a mm, while a single nerve cell from the spine to the big toe can be a meter long. Virchow Omnis cellula e cellula, or all cells come from other cells, is pretty profound.

We all were single embryonic cells; life does not ordinarily arise from inert matter. At the core of cells are the genes, and their history dates back to before it was known what genes were. Gregor Mendel studied inheritance patterns in pea plants and referred to pairs of elements and specific patterns he observed were later understood to apply to all sexually reproducing species. Microscopy was used by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, and later by Matthias Schleiden and Theodore Schwann in the late 1830s to observe cells.

By the 1870s, Walther Flemming observed threads in cells that separated as cells divided, later called chromosomes, physical manifestations of genes, the heritable particles proposed by Mendel. While it became known that chromosomes contained deoxyribonucleic acids, work of Oswald Avery in the early 1940s, most biologists thought that DNA was too simple and boring a molecule to be responsible for such a complex phenomenon as heredity.

Nurse recounts how the structure of DNA was transformational as were its implications for heredity. The gene is the second step in understanding the biology of life. He got to know Watson and Crick and describes how they were and how they complemented each other.

The genetic code was broken in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nurse describes Sydney Brenner as having interviewed him for a job he didnt get, during which he compared his colleagues to the crazed figures in Picassos painting Guernica, which hung on the wall of his office.

Genetically modified bacteria were developed by the late 1970s and instructed to produce insulin, while Fred Sanger worked out methods to sequence DNA, and the human genome was sequenced by 2003. Nurse goes into how the control of mitosis and the cell cycle to ensure faithful replication and cell division is what makes life possible for a cell. He recounts laborious work with yeast mutants that led him to identify the small wee mutants, at least 50 of them, and then the cdc2 mutant that unlocked a fundamental mechanism of cell division.

Nurse recounts a personal story about his own genetics with shocking revelations for him as he was moving to become president of Rockefeller University. Youll have to read his book for that information.

The book turns to evolution, natural selection as an important feature of life (the third step), ideas of Lamarck and (Charles) Darwin (and his grandfather Erasmus who was also a doctor and poet). He mentioned others before them and also described the influence of artificial selection used by humans, such as breeding pigeons or dogs, on directed evolution.

Even the error rate of DNA replication is subject to natural selection. Nurse describes life on our planet as all connected, and recounts an experience on a visit to Africa with a gorilla and then the amazing conservation in cell cycle control between yeast and human cells, at least as far as cdc2.

It is interesting to me, that four decades after its discovery, there has not been a description of a yeast p53 homologue or a cell cycle checkpoint mechanism like p53 activation of the mammalian CDK inhibitor p21(WAF1)/CDKN1A, one of my most favorite genes that mediates growth arrest to allow DNA repair in damaged or stressed cells.

Nurse gets into another (the fourth step) aspect of life through chemistry and chemical reactions. He describes insights by Pasteur that chemical reactions are expressions of the life of the cell. Metabolism is the chemistry of life is something that many cancer researchers in 2021 are focused on.

He points out that enzymes are catalysts that support life. The compartmentalization within cells is viewed as a way that a vast array of chemical and metabolic reactions can occur to sustain life. Life is also powered by ATP made in mitochondria. Finally, Nurse describes a key aspect of life (the fifth step) as information, sensing, responding and adapting, and posits that purposeful behavior is a defining feature of life.

The book discusses much more about the organization and regulation that makes life possible. Nurse includes a chapter about changing the world with new ideas and technologies, and how the world has changed as a result of all the progress that has been made through science. He ends the book with his approach to defining life by providing essential principles that build upon the five steps, recounts ideas of others, and offers some of his own speculation about the origin of life.

I read this book while in medical school, but became interested in it this past year, as I think it brings back a history of medicine and a kind of explorer who has been lost in the modern era.

If bureaucratic heads would roll in Washington, the answer from the FDA would have to be no as far as starting human studies with thymidine as a cancer therapeutic without preclinical evidence of safety.

Thus, Dr. Beppino Giovanella wrote a clinical protocol for himself, and took thymidine orally in increasing doses. He developed diarrhea and couldnt absorb enough to reach high blood levels. So, he injected himself with IV thymidine and went to the FDA with evidence of safety and they reversed their decision to allow clinical testing in patients with terminal cancer. But not all chemotherapy works

Dr. Horace Wells, a dentist and inventor in Hartford, CT, was successful but felt his profession was unpleasant because of the pain his patients had to endure. He observed a demonstration of the effect of laughing gas when a circus performer hurt himself and felt no pain. He set up a demonstration on himself of what would be a painless tooth extraction.

His demonstration in Boston to the Harvard surgeons didnt go smoothly because of his nervousness and their arrogant skepticism. He abandoned dentistry but was urged by his family to patent the nitrous oxide gas.

He wouldnt give his former student Morton, in Boston, the gas, and Morton eventually experimented with ether, also being talked about at the time, on his dog and goldfish. Morton eventually made a demonstration for the surgeons at Harvard and it went well for the removal of a neck tumor painlessly.

The story gets interesting with disputes in 1846 between Wells, Morton, and Jackson each claiming they made the invention. Desperation, anguish, and madness are part of this story and eventually credit for the discovery of anesthesia is settled but not before a human toll is taken. Read about it to find out what happened.

Several other guinea pig doctor stories are included about cholera, yellow fever, tubes inside the bodywhether its the heart or kidneys combined with X-rays, to push back the frontiers of medicine. One story I read in the 1980s is about Dr. William J. Harrington, who was chair of medicine at University of Miami, who was also head of hematology and on the faculty while I was a student there.

I met him at the end of my hematology rotation and remember, to this day, that when examined by a hematologist, one should always have in the back of their mind that the answer might be to do a bone marrow examination.

Dr. Harrington had met a young patient who was bleeding when he was a medical student in Boston. His patient had no platelets and died from surgery to remove her spleen. Later, as a hematology fellow at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, he would inject himself with a pint of blood from a patient with severe ITP who had not improved despite a splenectomy.

Bills own platelet count went down to zero for 5 days and he had bleeding around his ankles and in his stools. He had multiple blood and bone marrow examinations during the days that followed until his platelets recovered. His self-experimentation was the first example of a demonstration of autoimmune disease.

Interestingly, the book recounts that other staff members, secretaries, medical students and physicians in the summer and Fall of 1950 participated in similar experimentation with transfusions under more controlled settings. Dr. Harrington presented his paper at the 43rd annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

It was quite a treat for me to read this book, as I had met Dr. [Suzanne] Koven during medicine house-staff training at Johns Hopkins, and in fact she was my chief resident (the third woman in the departments hundred-year history and the only married woman or woman with a baby to be selected for this honor.) during my senior medical resident year.

Dr. Koven, who was an English major in college, and had wanted to become a journalist, has an incredible talent for writing and flowery language. She recounts her journey with a special kind of humor. The only thing I remember from my introductory chemistry course is that Einstein calculated Avogadros number (6.022 x 1023) using grains of pollen. I never understood what Avogadros number was, but I enjoyed picturing the wild-haired genius with his loupe and tweezers painstakingly dissecting the sex organs of flowers.

The Letter she wrote to a young female physician is about what to expect in a male-dominated medical world, with many challenges from sexism, some infuriating, some merely annoying, serious and damaging discrimination, imposter syndrome and ends with recognition of a mature state of humility, and self-reflection for the benefit of her younger colleagues.

She quotes Sir William Osler: There are three classes of human beings: men, women, and women physicians.

Koven admits her complicity in a system that had so little regard for me, and states perhaps the reason I didnt rebel against the culture of my medical training was that I loved it.

Dr. Koven writes about her father who was an orthopedic surgeon with whom she spent time in the office after school.

What I wanted, I think, during those afternoons when I dipped x-rays into vats of sharp-smelling chemicals and held down limbs as the circular saw screeched through plaster casts, was to be close to my father, about whom I was endlessly curious.

On why she didnt become a psychiatrist, which she considered at one time, she mentioned a joke her father, the surgeon, told her The internist knows everything and does nothing, the surgeon knows nothing and does everything, the psychiatrist knows nothing and does nothing, and the pathologist knows everything and does everything a day too late.

She writes in a chapter entitled Things shameful to be spoken about: Ive always been a talker. Mrs. Sylvia Krensky wrote on my otherwise unblemished first-grade report card: Suzanne must learn to let the other children speak. I never did. To this day Im a chronic interrupter and conversation hog.

In her book, Dr. Koven shares much about her personal life through various transitions and some of what she went through, with wisdom, knowledge and poetry interspersed.

In her own words, she shares her tribulations, the idea that Id misdiagnosed my mother due to my incompetence was too painful for me to dwell on for too long. I quickly moved on to another theory: that my mothers diagnosis had eluded me for the same reason it had eluded her internist in Florida during the many months shed complained to him about fatigue and left-shoulder pain; she was a woman.

Dr. Koven recounts meeting a patient with leukemia during her clinical skills training as a medical student at Johns Hopkins. Her interview at that point captures when the patients illness became apparent, during an afternoon when he was coaching his grandsons baseball team and suddenly became light-headed.

He held on to the chain-link fence to keep from falling and as he looked at his fingers, wrapped tightly through the metal wire, he noticed how pale they were.

Months later, on an inpatient rotation when the patient was much sicker when she reviewed the notes from her earlier encounter I tossed my old note back in the folder with my essays on Black House and Mrs. Dalloway, having concluded that it was, like they were, useless.

Then, she wrote this sentence that resonates a bit in the modern era of sometimes fragmented and impersonal medicine (although probably not the intended takeaway): Then I wrote my new note as if Id never met Mr. Blake before, as if Id never heard his story.

Dr. Koven wrote a chapter about Mnemonics, that every medical student will appreciate. She tells her friend, another English major she had met at Yale: The pancreas! I cried. I dont understand the pancreas!

In a chapter entitled We Have a Body, Dr. Koven describes an experience with a patient with terminal ovarian cancer on a rotation at the old Baltimore City Hospital. Youll have to read the book, but Dr. Kovens compassion and the art of medicine come to mind as she looked into the patients social history (a good thing for any doctor to do to understand more about their patient as a person) and what she did to spend time at the bedside.

She reflects on her first experience with death. It seems preposterous to me now, as a mother and as a doctor, that any responsible adult thought it was a good idea for our AP biology class to take a field trip to the Medical Examiners Office of the City of New York to witness the autopsy of a nursing student from the Bronx whod been stabbed to death the night before by her boyfriend.

She says this, among other things about her experience in anatomy. At the end of the course there was no memorial service, there were no candles, no songs, and no prayers of gratitude, as there often are in medical schools today, to honor the people our bodies had once been.

Dr. Koven also addresses racism drawn from her experiences at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Taussig pointed to the blood bank and stated aloud what everyone knew: that the blood of Black people and the blood of white people were stored separately there. She then asked Henry (one of Dr. Kovens mentors who told her the story): Doesnt this strike you as very wrong?

Pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig invented the blue baby operation known as the Blalock-Taussig, shunt and which should really be called the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt in recognition of Blalocks lab technician, a black man named Vivien Thomas, the grandson of a slave, who played a key role in perfecting the procedure.

Reading further about Dr. Kovens experiences and reflections, I thought she would have made an exceptionally great oncologist incorporating extensive clinical expertise and perhaps her own special impact on the field of palliative care to help patients. Who knows, maybe there would have even been a Kovens syndrome.

In a chapter about Lineage, Dr. Koven says My true lineage, I now think, included Blackwell and Haseltinenot to mention Oprah, and my motherat least as much as Osler. The House of God comes up a few times, along with a novel called Woman Doctor written by Dr. Florence Haseltine with English professor Yvonne Yaw, at around the same time as Samuel Shems bestseller.

Unlike The House of God, though, no ones heard of Woman Doctor. Its out of print. My copy has a tacky 70s cover featuring a grainy photograph of a glamorous, dark-eyed, long-lashed woman in full surgical garb who looks nothing like Dr. Haseltine as she appears in her author photo.

I was able to find a copy of Woman Doctor that I bought on Amazon, $6.55 Hardcover (for some reason, the paperback is listed from $38.50 and Mass Market Paperback $902.81).

Dr. Kovens book has much more, and every medical student and doctor should read it. It recounts a history important for anyone interested in social justice in the medical field as well as addressing sexism in medicine. It is a classic by a masterful author who is a complex individual with very important messages and legacy. Her Letter to a Young Female Physician book is already a best seller.

On a personal note, by 1989, when Dr. Koven was my chief resident, she had encyclopedic knowledge of medicine, the poise and equanimity that the Osler Marines aspire to and never appeared as an imposter per personal observations.

It is hard to know why we remember certain things, but I do recall a scene one morning on our Osler rounds where our team had an admission on Halstead 5, the famous step-down cardiology floor at Johns Hopkins.

As we were outside a patients room discussing the case, the patients heart stopped and they needed immediate resuscitation. Dr. Koven, chief resident and medical attending of record, very calmly picked up the paddles, and then passed them on to another team member to perform the electrical cardioversion. This was when she was fairly late in her pregnancy but functioning very admirably as our leader. As she handed the paddles off she had a smile or more of a smirk that all who know her would recognize, and then she said perhaps someone else should do this.

This was an intense time during residency training in an era without work-hour rules, or balance between learning and service. There were other memories and even conflicts, mostly suppressed but not all forgotten.

My colleague, John Marshall, who leads the Division of Hematology-Oncology, is a leader in our field, articulate, and well-known for his sense of humor. He directs the Otto Ruesch Center for the Cure of GI Cancer along with his wife Liza, who is a survivor of breast cancer. In this book, published in 2021, John and Liza share personal storiesand we can be grateful they shared them.

John begins the first part of the book entitled Hail to the Queen (referring to breast cancer as the queen of all cancers) by giving his perspective early in his career I quickly came to see the ubiquitous pink ribbons as the enemy, a symbol of unfair focus in our field. Breast cancer comes first, and the rest of us get the leftoversI preached my gospel of resentment and jealousy of breast cancer to anyone who would listen.

He would say things in lectures such as what color is the colon cancer ribbon? Come on, you in front? Brown? God, I wish it were a brown ribbon (and the comments went downhill from there, not to be repeated here).

He reminds the readers about how the Department of Defense came to fund breast cancer research, and how politically incorrect it would be to cut it even though it doesnt kill most of those in the military. He felt an injustice towards the high mortality of some of the many patients he saw, including young people, with advanced GI cancers.

He says other funny things, like, hematologists are full of themselves, a bit like peacocks or GI oncologists are the Gryffindors of the cancer world. We are by far the best humans God ever created His resentment was not helped when Georgetown recruited Marc Lippman as Cancer Center Director, and where breast cancer ruled.

Some chapters are written by John, and others by Liza. Liza found out she had breast cancer when a colleague of Johns walked into his office to share results of Lizas breast tissue pathology that showed cancer cells in the lymph system, and Liza was on the phone speaking with him.

This was no joke. Lizas previous experience with a close friend Holly in her mid-40s had shown the aggressiveness and deadliness of breast cancer a few years earlier. For Liza, John intervened to help her get scans quickly and even chipped in by showing up to a school activity so she could get away.

John had a difficult time in his teenage years with his mothers cancer and familys financial downturn. As he excelled in school, he would often hear from his dad, If a boy like you doesnt succeed, who will?

He recounts his spiritual life as a Baptist, and how with singing in the choir and other public speaking opportunities, he discovered his love of an audience and entertaining others. He lost his mom from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma before she was 40, when he was 13.

His father remarried, he went to boarding school and then to Duke University. Without much structure, he faced a low point in his life until he met Liza, then went to med school while she went to law school.

Liza recounts the testing she had with scans and how she and John handled telling their family, especially their children and other friends about the breast cancer diagnosis. Liza had to deal with hearing the diagnosis of triple negative breast cancer, and that while cancer was seen in the lymphatic system in a core needle biopsy, the doctors didnt know where the primary tumor was and couldnt see it on her scans.

Liza would hear about the need for mastectomy surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, prosthetic breast, and the prospects of lymphedema. There were many options that were overwhelming, and some options that werent discussed with Liza that she wished were discussed. The existing friendships made the doctor-patient relationships more complicated. John recounts what he observed, knew, wished he could say but didnt, how he remembers telling Liza, and his transition from physician to caregiver for Liza.

He says other funny things, like, hematologists are full of themselves, a bit like peacocks or GI oncologists are the Gryffindors of the cancer world. We are by far the best humans God ever created

John lectures about cancer and how it develops. He included a lecture from 2010 where he spoke about cancer vaccines as an area of interest, including combining vaccines and how NIH grant reviewers rejected his grant three times suggesting nothing would come of the research. In his lecture he said Our microbiome is part of usit might actually be the location of our souls. Profound statement, and then he suggested in 2010 that if NCI wouldnt fund vaccine research, they certainly wouldnt fund research on poop. He discusses diet and cancer and the why me question in his lecture.

It is interesting to read what John says: Wherever two or more are gathered, I cannot keep my mouth shut. If an idea pops into my head, I express it. I have gotten better at not stepping in when others are talking, but Im not perfect even with significant effort.

Here, he was referring to experiences with Lizas doctors. For those of us who know and work with John in national oncology activities, he is actually a great leader and expert moderator of discussion; one of the best Ive seen (and not mansplaining despite what he says).

He says it is easier for him to make decisions about whats best for him than whats best for someone else. Maybe, although it is easier to be objective when trying to help others. In academia, Ive found it much easier to help others with their grants than to help myself.

For medical decisions, it can be very difficult in the middle of the storm to know whats best, and the input of others can be incredibly helpful. At the time Liza needed to make her decisions in 2006, less was known about triple negative breast cancer, and while a clinical trial of neoadjuvant therapy (chemotherapy before surgery, now standard of care for her case) was available, there was concern about waitingand so she went ahead with surgery because surgery would happen either way. Within the chapters, both John and Liza discuss issues of intimacy and sexuality in the setting of mastectomy and breast cancer.

Liza recounts her surgery, more revelations about her diagnosis, and the experience of being at a teaching hospital, her admiration of George Clooney, more about the post-op period and their life together.

John writes about some of what happens to people in real life as cancer gets diagnosed at inopportune moments. He goes into oncology healthcare delivery, successes as a physician, realities and disappointments in medicine, competitiveness and the business of medicine, among other topics.

John declined the special invitation to attend the breast tumor board when Lizas case was being discussed. He spoke about how he started looking at patients differently when he sees them in the hospital every day, and how the experiences have affected how he does his job.

Liza describes learning about the pathology from her surgery, what others knew it meant, and complicated options in clinical trials for what would happen next. She goes into how and why John, who certainly knew much more, didnt necessarily say much beyond answering all her questions.

John recounts his struggles and reactions to Lizas illness as he became caregiver. For reasons he couldnt explain, he found himself not looking into details of the SWOG trial, the scans and pathology reports, asking a lot of questions, or attending lectures on TNBC even if pizza was served!

John presented a lecture about finding value in cancer care, where he discussed healthcare economics and drug company profits from U.S. taxpayer funded research. He discussed red cell growth factors that he administered to Liza and information from trials that showed adverse outcomes.

He goes into dilemmas of being in the middle of an illness where you want to do everything no matter the cost, and value in healthcare, where ultimately, we as a society all pay the bills. The book goes into issues important for patients with breast cancer and their caregivers. The impact of a cancer diagnosis, especially one with a poor prognosis, and how it affects a family are discussed. Giving a shot of Neulasta even for an experienced physician is complicated if you dont let it warm to room temperature, dont give the shot slowly, and dont read the instructions.

One chapter I particularly appreciated was one John wrote about his perspective on funerals as an oncologist, and how he handles communications with family and caregivers after the death of a patient.

He tells a story at Hollys funeral, where an elderly U.S. senator passed out (how he dealt with it, and how the balance of power in the U.S. Senate was changed for a moment) and recounts his first experience with a cancer funeral at the age of 13 when his mother died.

He speaks about how he personally handles the loss when a patient dies. John writes about how oncologists maintain hope, spin their message, think about quality of life, statistics, and clinical trials. He speaks about his interactions with colleagues after going public. He goes into a cryptic message from Marc Lipmann (who had left Georgetown for the University of Michigan at that time) your wife needs a platinum, Marc, and other discourse with Neil Love.

This is followed by a chapter entitled Platinum, but not the pretty kind. Liza thinks Marc Lippmans message may have saved her life. There is more so take time to read, enjoy, and learn from this book.

I was excited to see this book about the CRISPR revolution written by Kevin Davies. I first heard of Kevin Davies in 1992 during my postdoctoral fellowship, as he was the founding editor of a new journal called Nature Genetics.

I will always be grateful to Kevin and that journal for accepting my first paper from the Vogelstein lab on defining the DNA-binding consensus sequence for the tumor suppressor protein p53. Nature Genetics published it on page 45 of that first issue, after Nature rejected it, and it has stood the test of time.

The book begins by describing Kevins arrival to Hong Kong on Monday November 18, 2018, to attend a conference on CRISPR when news broke on Twitter that babies genetically altered by CRISPR might have already been born#CRISPRbabies was trending, and news of YouTube videos made by 34 year old Chinese Scientist He Jiankiu described what he had done and that two beautiful little Chinese girls, named Lulu and Nana, came crying into this world a few weeks ago.

Kevin had a front row seat to He Jiankius presentation and questioning at the conference that was seen by many around the world. Unlike what someone said on social media that Jiankiu was being inappropriately celebrated, Kevin felt we were watching a dead man walking.

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Books that mattered to me this year - The Cancer Letter

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Politically-incorrect beach ball coming to campus The North Wind – North Wind Online

Posted: at 10:35 pm

The Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), NMU Chapter, is taking a unique approach to promoting freedom of speech on college campuses.

As part of its effort to engage more students in freely sharing and accepting opinions, the group plans to roll a giant beach ball around campus and students will be able to write anything they want on it. This free speech ball will not be the first of its kind as YAL chapters at Duke University last week and and Lock Haven University in March have conducted similar events on their campuses.

Even though not all forms of speech are favorable to hear by disadvantaged groups or campus administration, student members of YAL believe that by generating more outspokenness, regardless of sensitive language, students will gain more from their college experience, Jeremy Donohue, president of YAL said.

There might be a safe space in school where inflammatory statements or possibly offensive remarks arent tolerated but thats not how the real world is, Donohue said. We think it actually helps the students if they have to face offensive and inflammatory differences in opinion.

The free speech ball event is expected to be held on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 and will start at or near the buildings of Jamrich and the LRC, according to Donohue.

We think that it prepares students better to go into the world having to deal with differences in opinion as opposed to shielding them from differences in opinion, Donohue said.

Amidst the controversy surrounding the 2016 presidential election in regards to speech policy on college campuses, organizations like YAL are encouraging fellow students to limitlessly exercise their right to free speech. After incidences like the one at the University of IllinoisChicago where nearly 50,000 people signed a petition that didnt allow Trump to speak on their campus, issues with free speech zones on universities have become more prevalent.

Having a serious notion but also bringing humor to ease the tension, I feel thats kind of a huge thing that people are forgetting about, Mac Phelan, vice president of YAL, said in regards to the material of free speech that is permitted on campuses.

The YAL organization will also host a screening of the movie titled Can We Take a Joke? in correlation with its promotion of free speech. This 2015 documentary explores the very thin line between comedy and outrage and will be held at 7:30 p.m. on April 13 in 1318 Jamrich. The movie also touches on issues of hypersensitivity and political correctness in higher education.

Donohue said the idea for the large beach ball is to collect unpopular opinions and promote the idea of voicing ideas that arent politically correct. He also said the efforts by YAL are a part of a nationwide push going across 200 different college campuses for free speech.

This is just a reaction to the rise of politically correct safe-space culture on college campuses, he said.

Free-speech zones, formerly known as buffer zones, are areas that are designated for public speakers to talk void of protesters and rebuttal. These free speech zones have become even more common than they were prior to the 2016 election.

Donohue also said there are concerns and skepticism about the kinds of speech that will be allowed to go on the ball by many staff and students who already know about the event.

Were hoping its going to go pretty smoothly but were anticipating some backlash, said Donohue. We can definitely see students coming out, being against it, but were mostly fearing the administration stepping in and saying, this is too much.

The YAL organization has more than 600 chapter locations and 204,000 youth activists nationwide. The group first came to NMU in the spring of 2015 and the chapter is now made up of 12-15 members who meet regularly Wednesday nights on the first floor in the Learning Resource Center. Any student is free to stop in on one of the meetings regardless of their political affiliation, Donohue said.

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Politically-incorrect beach ball coming to campus The North Wind - North Wind Online

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Why low code/no code is on the rise – SDTimes.com

Posted: at 10:34 pm

This is a brief history of UI development within the broader topic of software development and reflects my personal journey to build a chessvariant application for fun. The UI matters a lot because it dominates the code in most professional/commercial applications.

Typically, the code that controls how you interact with your application takes up most of the program. It is often called plumbing and most programmers re-write this part repeatedly in every application, ideally with only small changes, whereas the part of the program concerned with the core application may be just 10% to 20% of the whole code.

Picking up the story just before the internet (pre-1994), it was quite simple then, Microsoft and its Windows OS dominated, and the user interface was for the PC. The World Wide Web brought in a major change in UI development. Post 1994, UIs had to contend with browsers and connecting to applications that were running on a remote server in the data center. Web applications had to deal with being offline and synchronizing when online.

My interest and frustration with the UI came with my pastime desire to code a chess variant with a multi-player interface. I programmed in Java and hence the UI came in the form of Java applets that could run on any browser. The problem was that soon after I developed this application, running applets was considered a security risk and they needed a security certificate, and then they were banned altogether. Back to the drawing board for me.

Then in 2007 Apple launched the first smart-phone, the iPhone, and gave developers another UI to build for. In the wake of Apples success sprang a smartphone industry of copycats and we all watched with keen interest the fragmented mobile OS wars. Eventually out of that war emerged two winners: Apples iOS and Googles Android.

By this point UI development could be done relatively painlessly if you stuck to one platform (i.e., one OS and device form factor) but with the fragmentation of platforms, wishing to cover more than one meant re-writing your application. Writing once and deploying multiple times became desirable if you wanted an application with the broadest reach. Enter the RIA evolution (circa 2010) that led to cross-browser/cross-platform UI engines targeting desktop and mobile, and there were three main contenders: Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Oracle JavaFX. However, Apple wanted a closed shop, and was against supporting any cross-platform engine. Security had a part to play in that policy; Flash was continually being updated with security patches. Oracle, the new owner of Java, was internally divided on whether to grow JavaFX or not, and eventually decided not to, giving it over to an open source community where it continues to have a life today.

Circa 2016-2017, I had not appreciated how powerful Apples position was, as the mobile space was still fragmented. After considering the options, I decided my next step with my chess variant was to opt for Adobe Flash. Many months passed and Adobe announced it was abandoning Flash. The mobile wars were over, and Apple was a winner. Microsoft also abandoned its cross-platform engine. And back to the chess drawing board for me.

Today we have JavaScript as the dominant browser UI scripting language with technology options such as node.js and Angular and others too many to mention. There is a separation today between programming core applications and programming the UI, as each has its own set of technologies.

This fragmentation has also played nicely for the low code/no code (LCNC) players. LCNC will release a pent-up demand to build applications that line-of-business departments desire and which many central IT departments often have no capacity to satisfy. LCNC today can play the role of a cross-platform UI builder, but solutions vary as to which platforms are supported.

UX has been the prime driver of change for the UI: the web browser gained adoption because it made navigating the internet easier, and the iPhone revolution was all about UX, it expanded the mobile phone into a handheld computer running multiple apps in an easy intuitive way. These technology waves made the UX better.

At the same time, they created new barriers for any programmer wanting to create a cross-channel UI-rich application. So, it is no surprise to me to see the rise of LCNC, taking the burden out of cross-platform UI development is a great opportunity, I think this sector of appdev will continue to grow.

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Why low code/no code is on the rise - SDTimes.com

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Middle Fork Complex fires nearly triple in size; road and camp closures ordered – The Register-Guard

Posted: at 10:34 pm

Fighting the Middle Fork Complex Fire

A firefighter looks looks back at the battle to defeat the fires near Oakridge

Chris Pietsch, The Register-Guard

The Middle Fork Complex fires nearOakridge grew more than 1,100 acres between Monday and Tuesday, reaching1,707 acres total in size, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The complex is at 5% containment.

The Gales Creek Fire, the largest of thecomplex's 12 fires, increased from 400 acres to 1,268 acres, with 0% containment as of Tuesday. It's located south of Big Fall Creek Road (Forest Road 18) near Forest Road 1835.

Seven of the Middle Fork Complex's smaller wildfires areat100% containment. The fires were ignited by lightning and range fromFall Creek, Hills Creek Reservoir and north of Huckleberry. There are463 personnel, fiveaircraft and 22 fire engines responding, according to a Tuesday morning Forest Service update.

MarkThibideau, a public information officer for the Middle Fork Complex,said Tuesday any increase in fire acreage is a concern, addingthat much of the Gales Creek Fire is on steep, rocky ground that is difficult for firefighters.

"It's super steep, there's lots of opportunity for an injury, so they're really taking their time and making sure they're making the right decisions," Thibideau said.

New rules: OSHA releases temporary rules on wildfire smoke; heat in agricultural labor housing

Heavy equipment will be used to remove vegetation along forest roads 1824 and 220in response.

Time lapse of the Middle Fork Complex

Time lapse video of the Middle Fork Complex Fire east of Oakridge on July 30, 2021.

Chris Pietsch, The Register-Guard

The main priorities, Thibideau said, are to keep firefighters safe, while also keeping fires as small as possible and making direct and indirect containment lines.

There has been one injury and no structures lost, he added.

Firefighters will focuson the Kwis Fire on Tuesday, Thibideau said, which has grownfrom 40 acres on Sunday to204 acres. It's located near Salmon Creek Road, roughly 5 miles east of Oakridge, the closest fire to the town.

"Fire crews are really honing in on that one today, and hope to make great progress there," Thibideau said. "That's based on the priorities or the values that would be at risk. It's kind of a chess match almost where you have to put the right people in the right place to protect the most that we can."

Of the other fires in the complex, firefighters are still battling the fire at Ninemile Creek, which is now 143 acres.Fire engines and crews will beworking to establish a containment line along Forest Road 1834, which ties inwith the Road 339.

The 6-acre Elephant Rock Fire, which is approximately 2 miles to the southeast of the Gales fire, has held at 6acres and is 0% contained.

The 78-acre Windfall Fire is now at 80% containment, located south of Cougar Reservoir, where crews will continue mop-up efforts.

The Devils Canyon, Packard, Way, Larison Cove, Warble, Journey and Symbol Rock firesrangefrom 0.1 to 3 acresand are 100% contained.

Lane County issued a Level 3 Go Nowevacuation notice Sunday for all people living, camping and recreating along Big Fall Creek Road (Forest Road 18), east of the intersection with Forest Road 1821. That evacuation area includes Pumaand Bedrock campgrounds. Evacuation information is available atwww.lanecountyor.gov/cms/one.aspx?pageId=15883712.

The Forest Service issued an emergency area closure Monday within the area ofthe Middle Fork Complex, meaningall "roads, trails, developed recreation sites, dispersed camping, and entering of National Forest System" land in the closure area is prohibited. Here are the roads and recreation sites closed to the public:

Campfires are still prohibited on the entire Willamette National Forest due to very high fire danger and ongoing active fires.

Louis Krauss covers breaking news for The Register-Guard. Contact him at lkrauss@registerguard.com or 541-521-2498, and follow him on Twitter @LouisKraussNews.

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Middle Fork Complex fires nearly triple in size; road and camp closures ordered - The Register-Guard

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Drivers hit the dirt as Tuff Truck events return to Clark County fairgrounds – The Columbian

Posted: at 10:34 pm

RIDGEFIELD Junkers, clunkers and beaters bashed their way around the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds track on Friday.

Then on Saturday, WGAS Motorsports Tuff Truck races returned for another round, with Monster Trucks tearing up the track Sunday.

These events are regulars at the Clark County Fair, which was canceled for two years in a row due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds is offering the Family Fun Series as a substitute this summer, with Tuff Trucks and a handful of other fan favorites continuing through mid-August.

Tuff Truck competitions have two racing classes: street and open. The street class allows only street-legal vehicles to complete usually trucks or SUVs while the open class allows for more heavily modified vehicles.

Each racer gets two attempts per day to come up with the fastest time around the track, which features several jumps, moguls and a mud pit. If racers go off the track and hit a safety cone, five seconds gets added to their time. The open-class grand prize was $1,000 each night, with trophies for all classes.

Chess Archibald of Vancouver said hes been racing in Clark County on and off for 15 years. His entry this year was a fairly standard street-class 2005 Jeep Cherokee with one special addition: an inflatable dinosaur riding an inflatable camo-colored rubber duck strapped to the roof for the kids, he said.

Friday wasnt the first time Archibald ran his Jeep through the race.

I got it from Bend, Ore., about three years ago for Tuff Trucks, he said before his first lap. Ran it here, had a blast with it. I rebuilt the front end and ran it again two years ago.

Archibald said he then replaced the front struts and lifted the jeep in preparation for this years race. He said he was sad the event was canceled last year but was happy with the extra time it gave him to prepare for the 2021 run.

Drivers lined up their cars in a parking lot across the street from the grandstand two hours before the race. Most spent the downtime doing last-minute tuneups or spray-painting designs on their vehicles.

Chris Holt of Castle Rock had his front airbag removed by a mechanic before the race. His vehicle of choice was a 1996 Jeep.

Rusty, crusty and crappy, Holt said. It has no resale value. But itll be fun.

As Fridays 7 p.m. race approached, fans began filing into the stadium, buying food from the Lions Club grill and drinks from the bar. Signs around the arena encouraged social distancing and noted that masks were required for the unvaccinated. Most attendees were maskless. Hand sanitizer stations were placed throughout the grandstands.

More than 40 racers drove their rigs onto the track for introductions and descriptions of the cars. Sponsors for some vehicles included Precision Wheel Repair, Affordable Auto and, simply, your mom.

After intros and a short countdown, the racers revved their engines to ear-splitting volumes, sending the small but eager crowd into a frenzy.

Finally, it was race time.

Lap times varied from just under 24 seconds for Fridays open-class leader, Jason Smolarek, to 90 seconds or more for those who had mechanical breakdowns at some point on the brutal track.

Bumpers went flying, engines sputtered and Archibalds rubber duck and T-rex decoration nearly flew off as the announcers encouraged the crowd to cheer for every racer.

Alisha Taylor and her family sat at the top of the northern end of the grandstands. She said they usually come to see Tuff Trucks every year, and her kids love it.

We wish the fair would have happened this year, too, but well take what we can get, Taylor said. This is definitely one of the highlights.

Between laps, the other racers waited in line and repaired what they could on their vehicles.

Archibald, who slammed into the mud pit hard in his first run but otherwise had no issues, took the time to re-inflate his rubber duck.

Its a new course this year, he said between laps. It was a lot of fun. I loved it. The water (from the mud pit) somehow missed me for the most part.

Its a blast out here, man, he added.

Unfortunately, the nights races ended prematurely because the track became too dark at around 9:30 p.m. The final few street-class racers completed their laps, but the open-class racers werent able to have their second run of the day.

Josh Johnson led Fridays street class with a time of 27.873 seconds.

Once the event was called, fans slowly trickled back to their cars. Some waited in line to ride around the track on the back of a real Monster Truck a few times before the grounds closed.

Woodland residents Steve Schimmel; his wife, Jamie; and their daughters Ashlyn, 4, and Ellie, 2 still full of energy chased each other around the nearly empty parking lot on their way back to their car.

It was a great event as a comeback from COVID and the shutdowns, Steve Schimmel said, with Ashlyn on his shoulders. A lot of family fun.

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Drivers hit the dirt as Tuff Truck events return to Clark County fairgrounds - The Columbian

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The changing art of the subeditor: You had to read the type upside down – The Guardian

Posted: at 10:34 pm

The internet may have revolutionised the media in the 21 years since I joined the Guardian, but my role as a subeditor has stayed essentially the same. We check facts, write headlines and cut stories to the right length, with a final spellcheck before moving it to its next stage.

But until late last century, subediting looked completely different. Chris Dodd started work on the features desk, then based in Manchester, in 1965, after an interview in a pub (he didnt know whether to drink or abstain, or buy a round), while Barry Johnson and Jay Sivell joined the London office in Farringdon Road in 1986. Shifts then started at various points in the afternoon, and subs (as they are called) enjoyed a leisurely start. People used to take in chess sets and books, or do the crossword. You could sit for hours with nothing, says Johnson, who retired in December.

As news shifts progressed, subs sketched out page designs on paper and awaited the stories, or copy, which arrived in a wire basket as numbered pages, each containing one or two paragraphs. Subs were given story lengths, measured as inches down a single column of type, and had to estimate how many words to cut. Once the story was approximately the right length, it went to a revise sub to be deemed fit for publication before being placed in another basket to be collected by a messenger and sent by pneumatic tube to the compositing room in the basement. Subs were banned from touching the tubes as this task was controlled by a different union; all three fondly remember that Peter Preston, features editor and later editor, was the only journalist who dared break this rule.

Writing headlines often two or three hours after editing the story also involved calculations. Subs got a headline size say three lines of 36-point type over two columns and used a table to assess how many characters would fit. Wide letters such as M counted as 1.5 characters and spaces counted as a half. If it bust by half a character, you might send it down and hope for the best, says Johnson. If it didnt work and the comps [compositors] were feeling helpful, they could squeeze it a bit. Unless your headline was sent back to you in a tube because it bust, that was usually the last you saw of your work until the morning.

When we started, the revise sub was slightly frightening, says Johnson. Hed been in Bomber Command in the war and was rather abrupt, though kindly, and hed sit there smoking his pipe. Hed glare at his travelling alarm clock and glare at the copy, puffing at his pipe more as the evening went on. If he didnt like a headline, hed literally throw it back at you.

Fact-checking could be laborious. Without search engines, having vast general knowledge was crucial, as was frequent use of the desks gazetteer and Whos Who. In office hours, subs could call the library with questions, with answers typically provided in about half an hour. But, says Johnson, in the evening you had to go up to the library yourself. It consisted of some obsolete textbooks and shelves of cuttings, so you needed a feel for how the minds worked of the people who took the cuttings and what they might have filed things under. Some reporters, as now, needed more checking than others: Dodd recalls one spelling the name of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko 13 different ways in one story.

A senior member of the team known as the stone sub would go down to the basement a cathedral-like space filled with Linotype machines at 5pm, when the comps would start work. The stories were handed out to Linotype operators, who set them in molten metal in single lines, known as slugs. Comps would assemble the page, guided by the sketched layout, using the cooled metal type, before it was secured in a frame; dropping it was a disaster known as printers pie.

There were strict rules for the stone sub. The comp (always male) stood on one side, and the sub was opposite. That line could not be crossed. The comp would tell the sub how many lines a story was over, and the sub made cuts on paper and handed them back to the comp, who took out the equivalent bits in the metal type. On deadline, subs had to be able to read the lead over-matter laid out on the side upside down as well as back to front.

Sivell says: It was a responsible shift and I felt pleased to do it, even though it was hard work. I was a very young female journalist and they did know my business better than I did, probably, but they tended to be more helpful to the men.

Dodd recalls that although most interactions in the comp room were good-natured, it was a difficult relationship: youre working [for your editor] on a page with a comp whos working for the master printer.

Diversity was not a priority. When Sivell arrived she was one of two female home news subs, and the Guardian was such a masculine environment that she and her colleague Celia Locks were invited to lunch at the home of Mary Stott, the womens editor, to discuss their experiences. Improved diversity now, in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, age and sexuality, is reflected in more thoughtful language. We are more aware of reflecting changes in vocabulary for the readership, and that the very white male vocabulary that used to be part of the job has gone, says Sivell, who still does freelance shifts for the paper. We have a style guide that is constantly being reviewed and challenged. Prostitute or sex worker, the use of pronouns such as they this is how language evolves, and that is in the hands of the subs.

The biggest change in my time has been the focus on the website. From a sideline in an annex, with mostly junior staff, it has become a round-the-clock global operation, with subs in London, Sydney and New York.

These days, many of us in London work across web and print. Some prefer prints daily rush for the 9pm deadline. Others like the flexibility of web subbing, as well as its speed and reach. Whichever desk we work on, and whichever period we come from, we can all recall the electric atmosphere when working on a big breaking story from Watergate (Dodd), to the death of Diana (Johnson), the night Portillo lost his seat (Sivell) or the UK voting for Brexit (me).

New technology first arrived for print in the mid-1980s, in the form of Tandys powered by four AA batteries and with a memory of about 1,000 words. Computers were introduced gradually, and eventually only the news pages used hot metal, until it too was noisily banged out (a traditional farewell in journalism) in 1987.

The moment when journalists were on machines dealing with type themselves was a huge step, Sivell says. It was a ropey period for subbing when new tech came in, admits Dodd.

So were the days before all the technology the era of proper subbing? No, says Sivell: You can focus on the words now; youre not fiddling about counting how wide a letter is.

This article was amended on 2 August 2021 to clarify details about the orientation of the page during the stone sub/comp editing process.

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The changing art of the subeditor: You had to read the type upside down - The Guardian

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IBM’s Quantum Computing Compromisea Road to Scale? – IEEE Spectrum

Posted: at 10:34 pm

Looking to such specialized nervous systems as a model for artificial intelligence may prove just as valuable, if not more so, than studying the human brain. Consider the brains of those ants in your pantry. Each has some 250,000 neurons. Larger insects have closer to 1 million. In my research at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, I study the brains of one of these larger insects, the dragonfly. I and my colleagues at Sandia, a national-security laboratory, hope to take advantage of these insects' specializations to design computing systems optimized for tasks like intercepting an incoming missile or following an odor plume. By harnessing the speed, simplicity, and efficiency of the dragonfly nervous system, we aim to design computers that perform these functions faster and at a fraction of the power that conventional systems consume.

Looking to a dragonfly as a harbinger of future computer systems may seem counterintuitive. The developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning that make news are typically algorithms that mimic human intelligence or even surpass people's abilities. Neural networks can already perform as wellif not betterthan people at some specific tasks, such as detecting cancer in medical scans. And the potential of these neural networks stretches far beyond visual processing. The computer program AlphaZero, trained by self-play, is the best Go player in the world. Its sibling AI, AlphaStar, ranks among the best Starcraft II players.

Such feats, however, come at a cost. Developing these sophisticated systems requires massive amounts of processing power, generally available only to select institutions with the fastest supercomputers and the resources to support them. And the energy cost is off-putting. Recent estimates suggest that the carbon emissions resulting from developing and training a natural-language processing algorithm are greater than those produced by four cars over their lifetimes.

It takes the dragonfly only about 50 milliseconds to begin to respond to a prey's maneuver. If we assume 10 ms for cells in the eye to detect and transmit information about the prey, and another 5 ms for muscles to start producing force, this leaves only 35 ms for the neural circuitry to make its calculations. Given that it typically takes a single neuron at least 10 ms to integrate inputs, the underlying neural network can be at least three layers deep.

But does an artificial neural network really need to be large and complex to be useful? I believe it doesn't. To reap the benefits of neural-inspired computers in the near term, we must strike a balance between simplicity and sophistication.

Which brings me back to the dragonfly, an animal with a brain that may provide precisely the right balance for certain applications.

If you have ever encountered a dragonfly, you already know how fast these beautiful creatures can zoom, and you've seen their incredible agility in the air. Maybe less obvious from casual observation is their excellent hunting ability: Dragonflies successfully capture up to 95 percent of the prey they pursue, eating hundreds of mosquitoes in a day.

The physical prowess of the dragonfly has certainly not gone unnoticed. For decades, U.S. agencies have experimented with using dragonfly-inspired designs for surveillance drones. Now it is time to turn our attention to the brain that controls this tiny hunting machine.

While dragonflies may not be able to play strategic games like Go, a dragonfly does demonstrate a form of strategy in the way it aims ahead of its prey's current location to intercept its dinner. This takes calculations performed extremely fastit typically takes a dragonfly just 50 milliseconds to start turning in response to a prey's maneuver. It does this while tracking the angle between its head and its body, so that it knows which wings to flap faster to turn ahead of the prey. And it also tracks its own movements, because as the dragonfly turns, the prey will also appear to move.

The model dragonfly reorients in response to the prey's turning. The smaller black circle is the dragonfly's head, held at its initial position. The solid black line indicates the direction of the dragonfly's flight; the dotted blue lines are the plane of the model dragonfly's eye. The red star is the prey's position relative to the dragonfly, with the dotted red line indicating the dragonfly's line of sight.

So the dragonfly's brain is performing a remarkable feat, given that the time needed for a single neuron to add up all its inputscalled its membrane time constantexceeds 10 milliseconds. If you factor in time for the eye to process visual information and for the muscles to produce the force needed to move, there's really only time for three, maybe four, layers of neurons, in sequence, to add up their inputs and pass on information

Could I build a neural network that works like the dragonfly interception system? I also wondered about uses for such a neural-inspired interception system. Being at Sandia, I immediately considered defense applications, such as missile defense, imagining missiles of the future with onboard systems designed to rapidly calculate interception trajectories without affecting a missile's weight or power consumption. But there are civilian applications as well.

For example, the algorithms that control self-driving cars might be made more efficient, no longer requiring a trunkful of computing equipment. If a dragonfly-inspired system can perform the calculations to plot an interception trajectory, perhaps autonomous drones could use it to avoid collisions. And if a computer could be made the same size as a dragonfly brain (about 6 cubic millimeters), perhaps insect repellent and mosquito netting will one day become a thing of the past, replaced by tiny insect-zapping drones!

To begin to answer these questions, I created a simple neural network to stand in for the dragonfly's nervous system and used it to calculate the turns that a dragonfly makes to capture prey. My three-layer neural network exists as a software simulation. Initially, I worked in Matlab simply because that was the coding environment I was already using. I have since ported the model to Python.

Because dragonflies have to see their prey to capture it, I started by simulating a simplified version of the dragonfly's eyes, capturing the minimum detail required for tracking prey. Although dragonflies have two eyes, it's generally accepted that they do not use stereoscopic depth perception to estimate distance to their prey. In my model, I did not model both eyes. Nor did I try to match the resolution of a dragonfly eye. Instead, the first layer of the neural network includes 441 neurons that represent input from the eyes, each describing a specific region of the visual fieldthese regions are tiled to form a 21-by-21-neuron array that covers the dragonfly's field of view. As the dragonfly turns, the location of the prey's image in the dragonfly's field of view changes. The dragonfly calculates turns required to align the prey's image with one (or a few, if the prey is large enough) of these "eye" neurons. A second set of 441 neurons, also in the first layer of the network, tells the dragonfly which eye neurons should be aligned with the prey's image, that is, where the prey should be within its field of view.

The model dragonfly engages its prey.

Processingthe calculations that take input describing the movement of an object across the field of vision and turn it into instructions about which direction the dragonfly needs to turnhappens between the first and third layers of my artificial neural network. In this second layer, I used an array of 194,481 (214) neurons, likely much larger than the number of neurons used by a dragonfly for this task. I precalculated the weights of the connections between all the neurons into the network. While these weights could be learned with enough time, there is an advantage to "learning" through evolution and preprogrammed neural network architectures. Once it comes out of its nymph stage as a winged adult (technically referred to as a teneral), the dragonfly does not have a parent to feed it or show it how to hunt. The dragonfly is in a vulnerable state and getting used to a new bodyit would be disadvantageous to have to figure out a hunting strategy at the same time. I set the weights of the network to allow the model dragonfly to calculate the correct turns to intercept its prey from incoming visual information. What turns are those? Well, if a dragonfly wants to catch a mosquito that's crossing its path, it can't just aim at the mosquito. To borrow from what hockey player Wayne Gretsky once said about pucks, the dragonfly has to aim for where the mosquito is going to be. You might think that following Gretsky's advice would require a complex algorithm, but in fact the strategy is quite simple: All the dragonfly needs to do is to maintain a constant angle between its line of sight with its lunch and a fixed reference direction.

Readers who have any experience piloting boats will understand why that is. They know to get worried when the angle between the line of sight to another boat and a reference direction (for example due north) remains constant, because they are on a collision course. Mariners have long avoided steering such a course, known as parallel navigation, to avoid collisions

Translated to dragonflies, which want to collide with their prey, the prescription is simple: keep the line of sight to your prey constant relative to some external reference. However, this task is not necessarily trivial for a dragonfly as it swoops and turns, collecting its meals. The dragonfly does not have an internal gyroscope (that we know of) that will maintain a constant orientation and provide a reference regardless of how the dragonfly turns. Nor does it have a magnetic compass that will always point north. In my simplified simulation of dragonfly hunting, the dragonfly turns to align the prey's image with a specific location on its eye, but it needs to calculate what that location should be.

The third and final layer of my simulated neural network is the motor-command layer. The outputs of the neurons in this layer are high-level instructions for the dragonfly's muscles, telling the dragonfly in which direction to turn. The dragonfly also uses the output of this layer to predict the effect of its own maneuvers on the location of the prey's image in its field of view and updates that projected location accordingly. This updating allows the dragonfly to hold the line of sight to its prey steady, relative to the external world, as it approaches.

It is possible that biological dragonflies have evolved additional tools to help with the calculations needed for this prediction. For example, dragonflies have specialized sensors that measure body rotations during flight as well as head rotations relative to the bodyif these sensors are fast enough, the dragonfly could calculate the effect of its movements on the prey's image directly from the sensor outputs or use one method to cross-check the other. I did not consider this possibility in my simulation.

To test this three-layer neural network, I simulated a dragonfly and its prey, moving at the same speed through three-dimensional space. As they do so my modeled neural-network brain "sees" the prey, calculates where to point to keep the image of the prey at a constant angle, and sends the appropriate instructions to the muscles. I was able to show that this simple model of a dragonfly's brain can indeed successfully intercept other bugs, even prey traveling along curved or semi-random trajectories. The simulated dragonfly does not quite achieve the success rate of the biological dragonfly, but it also does not have all the advantages (for example, impressive flying speed) for which dragonflies are known.

More work is needed to determine whether this neural network is really incorporating all the secrets of the dragonfly's brain. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, in Virginia, have developed tiny backpacks for dragonflies that can measure electrical signals from a dragonfly's nervous system while it is in flight and transmit these data for analysis. The backpacks are small enough not to distract the dragonfly from the hunt. Similarly, neuroscientists can also record signals from individual neurons in the dragonfly's brain while the insect is held motionless but made to think it's moving by presenting it with the appropriate visual cues, creating a dragonfly-scale virtual reality.

Data from these systems allows neuroscientists to validate dragonfly-brain models by comparing their activity with activity patterns of biological neurons in an active dragonfly. While we cannot yet directly measure individual connections between neurons in the dragonfly brain, I and my collaborators will be able to infer whether the dragonfly's nervous system is making calculations similar to those predicted by my artificial neural network. That will help determine whether connections in the dragonfly brain resemble my precalculated weights in the neural network. We will inevitably find ways in which our model differs from the actual dragonfly brain. Perhaps these differences will provide clues to the shortcuts that the dragonfly brain takes to speed up its calculations.

This backpack that captures signals from electrodes inserted in a dragonfly's brain was created by Anthony Leonardo, a group leader at Janelia Research Campus.Anthony Leonardo/Janelia Research Campus/HHMI

Dragonflies could also teach us how to implement "attention" on a computer. You likely know what it feels like when your brain is at full attention, completely in the zone, focused on one task to the point that other distractions seem to fade away. A dragonfly can likewise focus its attention. Its nervous system turns up the volume on responses to particular, presumably selected, targets, even when other potential prey are visible in the same field of view. It makes sense that once a dragonfly has decided to pursue a particular prey, it should change targets only if it has failed to capture its first choice. (In other words, using parallel navigation to catch a meal is not useful if you are easily distracted.)

Even if we end up discovering that the dragonfly mechanisms for directing attention are less sophisticated than those people use to focus in the middle of a crowded coffee shop, it's possible that a simpler but lower-power mechanism will prove advantageous for next-generation algorithms and computer systems by offering efficient ways to discard irrelevant inputs

The advantages of studying the dragonfly brain do not end with new algorithms; they also can affect systems design. Dragonfly eyes are fast, operating at the equivalent of 200 frames per second: That's several times the speed of human vision. But their spatial resolution is relatively poor, perhaps just a hundredth of that of the human eye. Understanding how the dragonfly hunts so effectively, despite its limited sensing abilities, can suggest ways of designing more efficient systems. Using the missile-defense problem, the dragonfly example suggests that our antimissile systems with fast optical sensing could require less spatial resolution to hit a target.

The dragonfly isn't the only insect that could inform neural-inspired computer design today. Monarch butterflies migrate incredibly long distances, using some innate instinct to begin their journeys at the appropriate time of year and to head in the right direction. We know that monarchs rely on the position of the sun, but navigating by the sun requires keeping track of the time of day. If you are a butterfly heading south, you would want the sun on your left in the morning but on your right in the afternoon. So, to set its course, the butterfly brain must therefore read its own circadian rhythm and combine that information with what it is observing.

Other insects, like the Sahara desert ant, must forage for relatively long distances. Once a source of sustenance is found, this ant does not simply retrace its steps back to the nest, likely a circuitous path. Instead it calculates a direct route back. Because the location of an ant's food source changes from day to day, it must be able to remember the path it took on its foraging journey, combining visual information with some internal measure of distance traveled, and then calculate its return route from those memories.

While nobody knows what neural circuits in the desert ant perform this task, researchers at the Janelia Research Campus have identified neural circuits that allow the fruit fly to self-orient using visual landmarks. The desert ant and monarch butterfly likely use similar mechanisms. Such neural circuits might one day prove useful in, say, low-power drones.

And what if the efficiency of insect-inspired computation is such that millions of instances of these specialized components can be run in parallel to support more powerful data processing or machine learning? Could the next AlphaZero incorporate millions of antlike foraging architectures to refine its game playing? Perhaps insects will inspire a new generation of computers that look very different from what we have today. A small army of dragonfly-interception-like algorithms could be used to control moving pieces of an amusement park ride, ensuring that individual cars do not collide (much like pilots steering their boats) even in the midst of a complicated but thrilling dance.

No one knows what the next generation of computers will look like, whether they will be part-cyborg companions or centralized resources much like Isaac Asimov's Multivac. Likewise, no one can tell what the best path to developing these platforms will entail. While researchers developed early neural networks drawing inspiration from the human brain, today's artificial neural networks often rely on decidedly unbrainlike calculations. Studying the calculations of individual neurons in biological neural circuitscurrently only directly possible in nonhuman systemsmay have more to teach us. Insects, apparently simple but often astonishing in what they can do, have much to contribute to the development of next-generation computers, especially as neuroscience research continues to drive toward a deeper understanding of how biological neural circuits work.

So next time you see an insect doing something clever, imagine the impact on your everyday life if you could have the brilliant efficiency of a small army of tiny dragonfly, butterfly, or ant brains at your disposal. Maybe computers of the future will give new meaning to the term "hive mind," with swarms of highly specialized but extremely efficient minuscule processors, able to be reconfigured and deployed depending on the task at hand. With the advances being made in neuroscience today, this seeming fantasy may be closer to reality than you think.

This article appears in the August 2021 print issue as "Lessons From a Dragonfly's Brain."

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IBM's Quantum Computing Compromisea Road to Scale? - IEEE Spectrum

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Google says it has created a time crystal in a quantum computer, and it’s weirder than you can imagine – ZDNet

Posted: at 10:34 pm

Google's scientists now rather excitingly say that their results establish a "scalable approach" to study time crystals on current quantum processors.

In a new research paper, Google scientists claim to have used a quantum processor for a useful scientific application: to observe a genuine time crystal.

If 'time crystal' sounds pretty sci-fi that's because they are. Time crystals are no less than a new "phase of matter", as researchers put it, which has been theorized for some years now as a new state that could potentially join the ranks of solids, liquids, gases, crystals and so on. Thepaper remains in pre-print and still requires peer review.

Time crystals are also hard to find. But Google's scientists now rather excitingly say that their results establish a "scalable approach" to study time crystals on current quantum processors.

SEE: What is quantum computing? Everything you need to know about the strange world of quantum computers

Understanding why time crystals are interesting requires a little bit of background in physics particularly, knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems naturally tend to settle in a state known as "maximum entropy".

To take an example: if you pour some milk into a coffee cup, the milk will eventually dissolve throughout the coffee, instead of sitting on the top, enabling the overall system to come to an equilibrium. This is because there are many more ways for the coffee to randomly spread throughout the coffee than there are for it to sit, in a more orderly fashion, at the top of the cup.

This irresistible drive towards thermal equilibrium, as described in the second law of thermodynamics, is reflective of the fact that all things tend to move towards less useful, random states. As time goes on, systems inevitably degenerate into chaos and disorder that is, entropy.

Time crystals, on the other hand, fail to settle in thermal equilibrium. Instead of slowly degenerating towards randomness, they get stuck in two high-energy configurations that they switch between and this back-and-forth process can go on forever.

To explain this better, Curt von Keyserlingk, lecturer at the school of physics and astronomy at the University of Birmingham, who did not participate in Google's latest experiment, pulls out some slides from an introductory talk to prospective undergraduate students. "They usually pretend to understand, so it might be useful," von Keyserlingk warns ZDNet.

It starts with a thought experiment: take a box in a closed system that is isolated from the rest of the universe, load it with a couple of dozens of coins and shake it a million times. As the coins flip, tumble and bounce off each other, they randomly move positions and increasingly become more chaotic. Upon opening the box, the expectation is that you will be faced with roughly half the coins on their heads side, and half on their tails.

It doesn't matter if the experiment started with more coins on their tails or more coins on their heads: the system forgets what the initial configuration was, and it becomes increasingly random and chaotic as it is shaken.

This closed system, when it is translated into the quantum domain, is the perfect setting to try and find time crystals, and the only one known to date. "The only stable time crystals that we've envisioned in closed systems are quantum mechanical," says von Keyserlingk.

Enter Google's quantum processor, Sycamore,which is well known for having achieved quantum supremacyand is now looking for some kind of useful application for quantum computing.

A quantum processor, by definition, is a perfect tool to replicate a quantum mechanical system. In this scenario, Google's team represented the coins in the box with qubits spinning upwards and downwards in a closed system; and instead of shaking the box, they applied a set of specific quantum operations that can change the state of the qubits, which they repeated many times.

This is where time crystals defy all expectations. Looking at the system after a certain number of operations, or shakes, reveals a configuration of qubits that is not random, but instead looks rather similar to the original set up.

"The first ingredient that makes up a time crystal is that it remembers what it was doing initially. It doesn't forget," says von Keyserlingk. "The coins-in-a-box system forgets, but a time crystal system doesn't."

It doesn't stop here. Shake the system an even number of times, and you'll get a similar configuration to the original one but shake it an odd number of times, and you'll get another set up, in which tails have been flipped to heads and vice-versa.

And no matter how many operations are carried out on the system, it will always flip-flop, going regularly back-and-forth between those two states.

Scientists call this a break in the symmetry of time which is why time crystals are called so. This is because the operation carried out to stimulate the system is always the same, and yet the response only comes every other shake.

"In the Google experiment, they do a set of operations on this chain of spins, then they do exactly the same thing again, and again. They do the same thing at the hundredth step that they do at the millionth step, if they go that far," says von Keyserlingk.

"So they subject the system to a set of conditions that have symmetry, and yet the system responds in a manner that breaks that symmetry. It's the same every two periods instead of every period. That's what makes it literally a time crystal."

SEE:Bigger quantum computers, faster: This new idea could be the quickest route to real world apps

The behavior of time crystals, from a scientific perspective, is fascinating: contrary to every other known system, they don't tend towards disorder and chaos. Unlike the coins in the box, which get all muddled up and settle at roughly half heads and half tails, they buck the entropy law by getting stuck in a special, time-crystal state.

In other words, they defy the second law of thermodynamics, which essentially defines the direction that all natural events take. Ponder that for a moment.

Such special systems are not easy to observe. Time crystals have been a topic of interest since 2012, when Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor Frank Wilczek started thinking about them; and the theory has been refuted, debated and contradicted many times since then.

Several attempts have been made to create and observe time crystals to date, with varying degrees of success. Only last month, a team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlandspublished a pre-print showing that they had built a time crystal in a diamond processor, although a smaller system than the one claimed by Google.

The search giant's researchers used a chip with 20 qubits to serve as the time crystal many more, according to von Keyserlingk, than has been achieved until now, and than could be achieved with a classical computer.

Using a laptop, it is fairly easy to simulate around 10 qubits, explains von Keyserlingk. Add more than that, and the limits of current hardware are soon reached: every extra qubit requires exponential amounts of memory.

The scientist stops short of stating that this new experiment is a show of quantum supremacy. "They're not quite far enough for me to be able to say it's impossible to do with a classical computer, because there might be a clever way of putting it on a classical computer that I haven't thought of," says von Keyserlingk.

"But I think this is by far the most convincing experimental demonstration of a time crystal to date."

SEE: Quantum computing just took on another big challenge, one that could be as tough as steel

The scope and control of Google's experiment means that it is possible to look at time crystals for longer, do detailed sets of measurements, vary the size of the system, and so on. In other words, it is a useful demonstration that could genuinely advance science and as such, it could be key in showing the central role that quantum simulators will play in enabling discoveries in physics.

There are, of course, some caveats. Like all quantum computers, Google's processor still suffers from decoherence, which can cause a decay in the qubits' quantum states, and means that time crystals' oscillations inevitably die out as the environment interferes with the system.

The pre-print, however, argues that as the processor becomes more effectively isolated, this issue could be mitigated.

One thing is certain: time crystals won't be sitting in our living rooms any time soon, because scientists are yet to find a definitive useful application for them. It is unlikely, therefore, that Google's experiment was about exploring the business value of time crystals; rather, it shows what could potentially be another early application of quantum computing, and yet another demonstration of the company's technological prowess in a hotly contested new area of development.

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Google says it has created a time crystal in a quantum computer, and it's weirder than you can imagine - ZDNet

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From theory to reality: Google claims to created physics-defying ‘time crystal’ inside its quantum computer – Silicon Canals

Posted: at 10:34 pm

Image credits: Google Quantum AI

As the Quantum computing race is heating up, many companies across countries are spending billions on different qubit technologies to stabilise and commercialise the technology. While it is too early to declare a winner in quantum computing, Googles quantum computing lab may have created something truly remarkable.

In the latest development, researchers at Google, in collaboration with physicists at Princeton, Stanford, and other universities, have created the worlds first Time Crystal inside a quantum computer.

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Time crystals developed by Google could be the biggest scientific accomplishment for fundamental physics and quantum physics. Dreamt up by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek in 2012, the notion of time crystals is now moving from theory to reality.

In a recently published study, Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor, the researchers claim that Time Crystal is a new phase of matter that violates Newtons law of Thermodynamics.

Well, a time crystal sounds like a complicated component of a time machine, but it is not. So, what exactly are Time Crystals? As per researchers, a time crystal is a new phase of matter that alternates between two shapes, never losing any energy during the process.

To make it simple, regular crystals are an arrangement of molecules or atoms that form a regular repeated pattern in space. A time crystal, on the other hand, is an arrangement of molecules or atoms that form a regular, repeated pattern but in time. Meaning, theyll sit in one pattern for a while, then flip to another, and repeat back and forth.

Explaining about Time Crystal in layman terms to Silicon Canals, Loc Henriet, head of Applications and Quantum Software, Pasqal, explains, Some phases of matter are known to spontaneously break symmetries. A crystal breaks spatial translation: one finds atoms only at well-defined positions. Magnets break discrete spin symmetry: the magnetisation points to a well-defined direction. However, no known physical system was known to break one of the simplest symmetries: translation in time. Googles DTC result is the most convincing experimental evidence of the existence of non-equilibrium states of matter that break time-translation symmetry.

Further, Time crystals can withstand energy processes without entropy and transform endlessly within an isolated system without expending any fuel or energy.

Our work employs a time-reversal protocol that discriminates external decoherence from intrinsic thermalisation, and leverages quantum typicality to circumvent the exponential cost of densely sampling the eigenspectrum, says researchers. In addition, we locate the phase transition out of the DTC with experimental finite-size analysis. These results establish a scalable approach to study non-equilibrium phases of matter on current quantum processors.

For the demonstration, the researchers used a chip with 20 qubits to serve as the time crystal. Its worth mentioning that researchers performed the experiments on Googles Sycamore device, which solved a task in 200 seconds that would take a conventional computer 10,000 years.

According to the researchers, their experiment offers preliminary evidence that their system could create time crystals. This discovery could have profound implications in the world of quantum computing if its proven.

Henriet shares, This result is most interesting from a fundamental physics standpoint, as an identification of a novel quantum phase of matter. In itself, it will not directly impact our day-to-day life but it illustrates the richness of many-body quantum physics out-of-equilibrium. It also proves that quantum processors are now powerful enough to discover new interesting regimes for quantum matter with disruptive properties.

The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics, says Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper.

This is just this completely new and exciting space that were working in now, says Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase, while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team.

In 2012, Frank Wilczek came up with the idea of time crystals while teaching a class about ordinary (spatial) crystals.

If you think about crystals in space, its very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behaviour in time, he told Quanta.

Googles quantum computer has certainly achieved what many thought was impossible. Having said that, the experiment is in the preliminary stage and requires a lot of work. Moreover, the pre-print version of the research awaits validation from the scientists community and has to be reviewed by peers as well.

There are good reasons to think that none of those experiments completely succeeded, and a quantum computer like [Googles] would be particularly well placed to do much better than those earlier experiments, University of Oxford physicist John Chalker, who wasnt involved in the research, told Quanta.

How partnering up with Salesforce helped him succeed!

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Will there be enough quantum engineers in APAC? – Tech Wire Asia

Posted: at 10:34 pm

The National University of Singapore and AWS are collaborating to boost the development of quantum communication and computing technologies(Photo by ROSLAN RAHMAN / AFP)

With quantum computing gaining traction in the Asia Pacific, quantum engineers are now being highly sought after by companies looking to leverage the technology. From Japan launching its most powerful quantum computer last month to China developing its quantum computers, quantum engineers are a key ingredient in the quantum computing workforce.

Compared to other analytical tools, quantum computing has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of normal computers. Harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics, developing quantum algorithms, and designing useful quantum applications require skills and approaches.

The quantum computing market is expected to grow to US$ 1.76 billion by 2026 with early adoption in the banking and finance sector expecting to fuel the growth of the market globally. QuantumComputing-as-a-Service (QcaaS) is now also being offered by some tech giants to companies looking to experiment with the technology.

As such, most use cases for quantum computing are still limited but growing globally. To ensure the development of the technology keeps going, big tech vendors are working with universities to develop next-generation quantum engineers with the hope of having sufficient talent available once the technology becomes mainstream.

Japans most powerful quantum computer with IBM is used specifically for research and development while Chinas own quantum computer supercomputer can solve problems faster than some of the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

In Southeast Asia, the skills shortage gap is still a big concern. While the region has one of the fastest tech adoptions in the world, the skills shortage is still hindering most companies from going all out in their digital transformation.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) report released earlier this year stated that between666 million and 819 million workers in the Asia Pacificwill use digital skills by 2025, up from just 149 million today, with the average employee requiring seven new digital skills to meet the growing demands in the industry.

Despite that, quantum computing is gaining traction in the region. Higher learning institutions in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia are offering more courses on the subject and are hoping to develop more quantum engineers in the near future.

The National University of Singapore and AWS are collaborating to boost the development of quantum communication and computing technologies, as well as explore potential applications of quantum capabilities.

As part of the Quantum Engineering Program (QEP), AWS will support QEP in the development of quantum computing research and projects and connect to the National Quantum-Safe Network for quantum communications. Both areas include the identification of use cases and the development of applications to support the future commercialization of Singapore-designed quantum computing and communication technologies.

(Photo by Roslan RAHMAN / AFP)

QEP has supported eight major research projects to further the development of quantum technologies. They include exploring more powerful hardware and software solutions for quantum computers for commercial tasks like optimizing delivery routes for goods, simulating chemicals to help design drugs, or making manufacturing more efficient.

According to Professor Chen Tsuhan, NUS Deputy President (Research & Technology), Singapores journey to becoming a knowledge-based economy requires a right mix of world-class talent, cutting-edge infrastructure, and a well-established knowledge transfer ecosystem.

A cornerstone of this vision is the QEP hosted at NUS, which brings together expertise in quantum science and engineering and aims to translate radical innovations into commercial sable solutions. This collaboration between QEP and AWS is a crucial enabler for the nations full digital transformation and opens the door to a quantum-ready future.

Amazon Braket, a fully managed quantum computing service, provides access to three types of quantum hardware, including quantum annealers and gate-based systems built on superconducting qubits and on trapped ions, as well as tools to run hybrid quantum and classical algorithms.

Its cross-platform developer tools provide a consistent experience, reduces the need for multiple development environments, and make it easy to explore which quantum computing technology is the best fit for an application.

With NUS looking to develop more use cases and skilled professionals in quantum engineering and other tech-related fields, Singapore can become a hub for quantum computing in the region in the years to come.

Will there be enough quantum engineers in APAC? - Tech Wire Asia

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Daily Archives: August 6, 2021

Books that mattered to me this year – The Cancer Letter

Politically-incorrect beach ball coming to campus The North Wind – North Wind Online

Why low code/no code is on the rise – SDTimes.com

Middle Fork Complex fires nearly triple in size; road and camp closures ordered – The Register-Guard

Drivers hit the dirt as Tuff Truck events return to Clark County fairgrounds – The Columbian

The changing art of the subeditor: You had to read the type upside down – The Guardian

IBM’s Quantum Computing Compromisea Road to Scale? – IEEE Spectrum

Google says it has created a time crystal in a quantum computer, and it’s weirder than you can imagine – ZDNet

From theory to reality: Google claims to created physics-defying ‘time crystal’ inside its quantum computer – Silicon Canals

Will there be enough quantum engineers in APAC? – Tech Wire Asia

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