Category: Behind The Black

TMT leadership looks at alternatives to Hawaii

9:01 am

Though they have refused to comment publicly, the Facebook page for the Thirty Meter Telescope on Monday showed the telescope’s management visiting the Canary Islands, a potential alternative site to Hawaii.

Their Facebook post serves two purposes. It shows that they mean business when they say they must start considering abandoning Hawaii. It also might force the Hawaiian state government to stop dragging its feet in the permitting process that protesters have forced TMT to go through, a second time.

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Court again rules against IRS and Justice Department

11:13 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: A federal appeals court has condemned the behavior of IRS and Department of Justice lawyers for a misuse of the law and demanded they begin cooperating with the court.

Tea party groups have been trying for years to get a full list of nonprofit groups that were targeted by the IRS, but the IRS had refused, saying that even the names of those who applied or were approved are considered secret taxpayer information. The IRS said section 6103 of the tax code prevented it from releasing that information.

Judge Kethledge, however, said that turned the law on its head. “Section 6103 was enacted to protect taxpayers from the IRS, not the IRS from taxpayers,” he wrote.

Edward Greim, a lawyer at Graves Garrett who is representing NorCal Patriots, said they should be able to get a better idea of the IRS‘ decision-making once they see the list of groups that was targeted. “What we’ll be able to see is how, starting in the spring of 2010, with the first one or two groups the IRS targeted, we’ll be able to see that number grow, and we’ll even be able to see at the tail end their possible covering up that conduct,” he said. He said they suspect the IRS, aware that the inspector general was looking into the tax agency’s behavior, began adding in other groups to try to muddle the perception that only conservatives were being targeted.

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Atlas 5 launches Cygnus

11:04 pm

The competition heats up: A ULA Atlas 5 rocket tonight successfully placed an Orbital ATK Cygnus freighter into orbit to resupply ISS.

This was the second time an Atlas 5 put Cygnus into orbit. The next Cygnus flight will mark the return of Orbital’s Antares rocket.

This Cygnus capsule contains probably one of the more interesting engineering experiments flown by NASA in years. When it leaves ISS in about two months they will ignite a fire inside it to study the way fires spread and burn in weightlessness.

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VA reinstates worker who committed armed robbery

10:11 pm

Our government at work: A VA worker has been reinstated with back pay after being fired for participating in an armed robbery.

It is worse than you think. The reason her union won her case was because the VA hadn’t fired other workers who had broken the law, so thus it was unfair to fire her as well.

A Department of Veterans Affairs employee in Puerto Rico was fired after being arrested for armed robbery, but her union quickly got her reinstated — despite a guilty plea — by pointing out that management’s labor relations negotiator is a registered sex offender, and the hospital’s director was once arrested and found with painkiller drugs…

Employees said the union demanded her job back and pointed out that Tito Santiago Martinez, the management-side labor relations specialist in Puerto Rico, who is in charge of dealing with the union and employee discipline, is a convicted sex offender. Martinez reportedly disclosed his conviction to the hospital and VA hired him anyway, reasoning that “there’s no children in [the hospital], so they figure I could not harm anyone here.”

The union’s position — that another employee committed a crime and got away with it, so this one should, too — has been upheld by the highest civil service rules arbiters, and has created a vicious Catch-22 where the department’s prior indefensible inaction against bad employees has handcuffed it from taking action now against other scofflaws.

And the intellectual elites in Washington wonder why people are angry and want to throw the bums out. In fact, that they remain clueless about this anger and continue to do nothing about this kind of obscene corruption in the government departments that they control is only more reason to throw them out. Maybe we should even consider bringing back that old American custom: to tar and feather them and ride them out of town on a rail.

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Near disaster for ExoMars

6:22 pm

The Russian jinx for going to Mars might not be over yet: New data suggests that the Briz-M upper stage to the Proton rocket exploded shortly after it has propelled ExoMars on its way to Mars and then separated from it.

There appears to be a cloud of debris near the probe, thought to have been caused when the Briz-M stage was to fire its rockets one last time to take it away from ExoMars as well as prevent it from following it to Mars. Instead, it is thought (though not confirmed) that the stage blew up at that moment.

Though so far ExoMars appears to be functioning properly, but they have not yet activated all of its most sensitive instruments. Only when they turn them on in April will we find out if they were damaged in any way by the Briz-M failure.

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Emory University takes action to stop free speech

4:26 pm

The coming dark age: Students at Emory University are protesting the horror of having to see the words “Vote Trump” and “Trump 2016” written in chalk throughout the campus last week, and the university president, in total sympathy with these horrified students, has agreed to take quick action to prevent such horrors in the future.

The letter the university president wrote is worth reading in its entirety, as it illustrates forcefully the uselessness of today’s academic elite and the worthlessness of a liberal arts education at most of today’s colleges. Here is just one quote:

Yesterday I received a visit from 40 to 50 student protesters upset by the unexpected chalkings on campus sidewalks and some buildings yesterday morning, in this case referencing Donald Trump. The students shared with me their concern that these messages were meant to intimidate rather than merely to advocate for a particular candidate, having appeared outside of the context of a Georgia election or campus campaign activity. During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.

After meeting with our students, I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity. Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.

In other words, these poor students might have to admit that there is at least one person on their campus who disagrees with them and supports Donald Trump. We can’t have that! The president then goes on to outline some vague actions he is going to take to prevent such dissent from happening again. These students mustn’t be subjected to a free and open debate. It might cause them to think!

In related news, a Hispanic businesswoman who expressed Latino support for Donald Trump at one of his rallies is now being threatened and harassed at her business.

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New close-up of Occator Crater’s spots

1:57 pm

Occator Crater central spot

The Dawn science team have released new images taken from the spacecraft’s low orbit observations, including a close-up of the central white spot at Occator Crater, the brightest spot on Ceres.

The image on the right is a cropped though full resolution version of the full image. I have reduced it only slightly. As they note,

Occator Crater, measuring 57 miles (92 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) deep, contains the brightest area on Ceres, the dwarf planet that Dawn has explored since early 2015. The latest images, taken from 240 miles (385 kilometers) above the surface of Ceres, reveal a dome in a smooth-walled pit in the bright center of the crater. Numerous linear features and fractures crisscross the top and flanks of this dome. Prominent fractures also surround the dome and run through smaller, bright regions found within the crater.

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“We don’t need another lecture about Islamophobia.”

9:45 am

Mohammad the bomber

The religion of peace strikes again: Thirty-four are dead and almost 200 injured in suicide attacks in Belgium today.

ISIS has claimed credit for the attacks.

I think the reactions of our politicians here is of some significance, as by contrasting them we can learn a bit about each. Obama inserted a short pro-forma statement of sympathy during his prepared remarks at the start of a press conference in Cuba, then appeared to forget about the entire horrific attack. Donald Trump called for greater border security and a renewed consideration of the use of waterboarding to obtain information from captured terrorists. Hillary Clinton (at the previous link) expressed some incoherent blather about following “our values”.

Ted Cruz possibly spoke with the most clarity.

“Today’s attacks in Brussels underscores this is a war,” Cruz said. “This is not a lone war. ISIS has declared jihad. It is way past time we have a president who will acknowledge this evil and will call it by it’s name and use the full force and fury to defeat ISIS,” he continued. “Until they are defeated, these attacks will continue. Their target is each and every one of us.”

Cruz, one of five remaining presidential candidates, urged America needs a leader who is not afraid to speak about terrorism in bold terms. “We need a president who sets aside political correctness,” Cruz insisted. “We don’t need another lecture about Islamophobia.”

Cruz also criticized Trump’s proposal yesterday that we pull back from NATO.

I leave it to you to decide who appears to have the greatest grasp of the situation. And if you think I am spinning this to favor Cruz, go to the links and get a closer look at the other reactions. Note for example that, other than a twitter comment, I could not even find a story that specifically discussed Hillary Clinton’s reaction.

Update: I have added the cartoon showing Mohammad with a bomb in his turban because I think the response to these thugs has to be to defy them as blatantly as possible. I need to remember to do this more often.

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Does captivity hurt or help killer whales? Scientists disagree

9:21 am

The uncertainty of science: Two different science research teams strongly disagree about the positive or negative effects of living in captivity for killer whales.

In a decision hailed by animal-rights groups, the US marine-park company SeaWorld Entertainment announced last week that it will no longer breed killer whales. But whether captivity harms the planet’s biggest predator is an area of active scientific debate.

The latest arguments centre on two 2015 studies that drew dramatically different conclusions about the lifespans of captive killer whales (Orcinus orca), relative to those of wild populations. Although many factors affect well-being, an apparent discrepancy between the survival of captive and wild animals has long been cited by activists as evidence of the poor welfare of captive killer whales.

One of the studies is authored by a team largely made up of researchers at SeaWorld, which is headquartered in Orlando, Florida, and owns several animal parks that keep killer whales; the other is by two former killer-whale trainers at the company who feature in the 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which is critical of SeaWorld. In letters published last week, authors from each paper accuse the others of cherry-picking data to support positions on whether the animals should be captive — charges that each team in turn rejects.

Obviously, each science team has its own agendas. The result unfortunately is that the science is cloudy and unclear.

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Fuel for Russia’s nuclear space engine

9:14 am

The competition heats up: According to Russian press sources, the first fuel for that country’s nuclear space engine project has now been delivered to Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear energy corporation.

The article is very unclear whether this space engine is a nuclear power plant similar to those used by NASA’s deep space Voyager, Pioneer, and Cassini probes, or whether it is a real nuclear-powered engine designed to provide thrust. Russia has never launched a probe with the former, so that would be an advancement for them, but it would not be a game-changer in the exploration of the solar system. If the latter, however, it will give them the capability no one else has to travel quickly and more efficiently to other worlds.

Based on a careful rereading of the article, I suspect the former.

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A new gravity map of Mars

9:06 am

Using data from three orbiting NASA spacecraft scientists have created a new gravity map of Mars, showing the subtle variations in its gravitational field due to density differences within the planet.

The improved resolution of the new gravity map suggests a new explanation for how some features formed across the boundary that divides the relatively smooth northern lowlands from heavily cratered southern highlands. Also, the team confirmed that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock by analyzing tides in the Martian crust and mantle caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the two moons of Mars. Finally, by observing how Mars’ gravity changed over 11 years – the period of an entire cycle of solar activity — the team inferred the massive amount of carbon dioxide that freezes out of the atmosphere onto a Martian polar ice cap when it experiences winter. They also observed how that mass moves between the south pole and the north pole with the change of season in each hemisphere.

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Vostochny begins practicing launch procedures

8:59 am

The competition heats up: Dress rehearsals have begun for the first Soyuz rocket launch at Russia’s new spaceport Vostochny, scheduled sometime this spring.

They have not announced an official launch date yet.

If all tests go as scheduled, the launch vehicle will be removed from the launch pad on March 25 and returned to its processing facility for the final assembly with its payloads, including Lomonosov, Aist-2D and Kontakt-Nanosputnik satellites, which will be delivered into orbit during the first mission from Vostochny. The State Commission overseeing the launch will be making decision on the date of the first liftoff based on the results of the tests, the readiness of the launch facilities and the completion of safety measures for the launch personnel, Roskosmos said.

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United Arab Emirates teams up with Japan

8:49 am

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) has signed a cooperative agreement with Japan’s space agency JAXA.

The details are slim, but I suspect it is similar to the recent UAE/India deal and involves the UAE providing some of its oil money in exchange for getting some of Japan’s technical help.

Update: My suspicions were correct. UAESA has purchased launch services from Japan Mitsubishi for its Mars mission, dubbed Hope, scheduled for launch in 2020.

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New supersonic passenger plane coming?

8:43 am

Boom! A new aviation company thinks it can develop a new supersonic passenger plane with ticket prices far less than the Concorde’s.

If you’re ever stuck on a plane pining for the glory days of air travel, hop on YouTube and search for “the Concorde.” Among the results are a bunch of firsthand accounts of people sipping Champagne and scarfing down caviar on one of the bygone supersonic jets while they travel at 1,300 miles an hour. Try to appreciate the joy on their faces, or at least remember that they paid as much as $20,000 round trip, while you’re crammed into a middle seat with nothing but a dollop of hummus and a few overpriced crackers to get you through the next few hours.

Or perhaps find some solace in this: A Denver startup called Boom Technology plans to bring supersonic passenger travel back, and to bring it to the masses … ish. While the finished product is years away, on March 23, Boom will unveil its design for a 40-seat plane that can fly 1,451 mph (Mach 2.2). At that speed, a New York-to-London flight would take about 3 hours and 24 minutes. Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and chief executive officer, says round-trip tickets will cost $5,000. “The idea is for a plane that goes faster than any other passenger plane built before, but for the same price as business class,” he says.

The project is barely past the PowerPoint stage, so color me skeptical. Nonetheless, I also believe it is possible, especially when I noticed in reading the article the similarities between between this company’s founder and that of SpaceX’s.

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China shuts down its first space station

3:52 pm

Though still in orbit, China has turned off Tiangong-1, its first space station, launched in 2011 and since visited by three manned crews.

The news story, from the state-run Chinese news organization, notes that the module’s orbit will slowly decay and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. It does not say how the Chinese intend to control that re-entry, since Tiangong-1 is likely large enough for some parts of it to survive and hit the ground.

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Getting real close to Comet 67P/C-G

9:47 am

Close-up of Comet 67P/C-G

Cool image time! As Comet 67P/C-G moves away from the sun and cools down, the Rosetta science team has been able to move the spacecraft back in close to the comet. The image on the right was taken on March 5 from only 12.6 miles above the comet’s surface, and has a resolution of 14 inches per pixel.

I have brightened the image and cropped it to show it here. At this scale, if they managed to photograph the location where Philae sits we would see it with no problem at all. As it is, the detail is remarkable. For example, look at the slope below the cliff in the lower right. You can see what look like a very faint series of terraces, suggesting the existence of onion-like layers below the surface.

Go to the link. There is a second high resolution image there that is as amazing.

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The Irish not of Celtic origin?

9:06 am

The uncertainty of science: The discovery of a burial site in Ireland has thrown into doubt all theories concerning the Celtic origins of the Irish.

“The DNA evidence based on those bones completely upends the traditional view,” said Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford who has written books on the origins of the people of Ireland. DNA research indicates that the three skeletons found behind McCuaig’s are the ancestors of the modern Irish and they predate the Celts and their purported arrival by 1,000 years or more. The genetic roots of today’s Irish, in other words, existed in Ireland before the Celts arrived.

The article is quite detailed and outlines the overall scientific problem of the Celts, which is now quite unclear about who they were, where they came from, and where they went.

In related news: Scientists have found new evidence of a human presence in Ireland as far back as 12,500 years ago.

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Exoplanet with cometlike orbit

8:57 am

Worlds without end: Astronomers detect an exoplanet with an orbit so eccentric that the orbit is more like a comet’s.

The eccentricity of a planet’s orbit is measured on a scale of 0 to 1, with 0 representing a perfectly circular orbit, and figures closer to one indicative of increasingly elliptical orbits. Earth’s orbital eccentricity, for example, is 0.017, and the most eccentric planet in our solar system – Mercury, assuming that we no longer class Pluto a planet – has an eccentricity of 0.205.

Our new friend, HD 20782, on the other hand, has an orbital eccentricity of 0.96, meaning its ellipse as it travels to and from its star is almost flat; and when it does finally return to its sun, after a 597-day orbital journey, it careers furiously round the star to slingshot back into space. “It’s around the mass of Jupiter, but it’s swinging around its star like it’s a comet,” said Dr. Kane.

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SpaceX sets date for next Dragon launch

8:41 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX has scheduled April 8 for the next Falcon 9 launch, set to carry its first Dragon capsule since the launch failure last year.

Though this is the most important news contained by the article, its focus is instead on the various preparations that SpaceX is doing at its Texas test facility to prepare for this launch as well as the increased launch rate required for the company to catch up on its schedule.

Note that the Dragon launch will also be significant in that it will be carrying Bigelow’s inflatable test module for ISS, built for only $17 million in less than 2 years. NASA, ESA, or JAXA would have required at least half a billion and several years to have accomplished the same.

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Russia finally approves 10-year space plan

9:31 am

The announcement yesterday that Russia is trimming its space budget by 30% was actually part of the final approval of their ten-year space plan, under discussion and planning for the past two years.

Interestingly, the 30% cut was only the last reduction of many in the budget plan since it was first announced. Initially, they hoped to budget 3.4 trillion rubles for their aerospace industry over the next decade. The final budget approved yesterday is for 1.4 trillion. That’s a 59% reduction.

Considering that the reductions have forced them to abandon any plans for building a re-usable rocket, they will be increasingly hard-pressed in the next decade to successfully compete for business in the commercial market. While Russia stands still with its older designs, others will be developing new less costly ways to launch rockets. The business will go elsewhere, and they will actually have even less money to work with.

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Injected stem cells cure osteoporosis in mice

9:22 am

Scientists have discovered that an injection of stem cells into mice with osteoporosis was able to completely cure them of the bone disease.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and The Ottawa Hospital had previously found a causal effect between mice developing age-related osteoporosis and a deficiency in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). One of the promising attributes of MSCs is that, while they can grow into different cells in the body just like other stem cells, they can be transplanted without the need for a match. “We reasoned that if defective MSCs are responsible for osteoporosis, transplantation of healthy MSCs should be able to prevent or treat osteoporosis,” says William Stanford, senior scientist at The Ottawa Hospital and Professor at the University of Ottawa.

To put this reasoning to the test, the scientists injected MSCs into mice with the condition. Six months later, which is one quarter of the life span of the animal, they observed a healthy functional bone in place of the damaged one. “We had hoped for a general increase in bone health,” says John E. Davies, co-author of the study. “But the huge surprise was to find that the exquisite inner ‘coral-like’ architecture of the bone structure of the injected animals – which is severely compromised in osteoporosis – was restored to normal.”

The importance of this discovery for space travel is that it might eventually allow scientists to use it to somehow prevent the loss of bone density during weightlessness.

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Russians use wooden matches to ignite rocket engines

9:15 am

The March 12th launch abort of a Soyuz rocket occurred because the Russians use the equivalent of a giant wooden match to ignite their Soyuz rocket engines.

Essentially, prior to launch engineers insert large wooden matches into each engine, and these are ignited using an electric spark prior to allowing fuel into the combustion chamber. When mission control sensors all matches are burning, they open the valves and fuel enters the chamber, igniting and incinerating the matches.

This setup is not as simple as a regular match, but it is surprisingly reliable and has worked for six decades on hundreds of rockets. Yet on March 12, during the first attempt to launch the new Russian satellite for Earth observation, one of the “matches” failed to fire after the ignition command was issued. It was enough of a problem for the launch control system, which detected the lack of signal from the failed igniter, to call off the propellant injection into combustion chambers. The launch was aborted just a moment before liftoff, and the fully fueled rocket remained safely on the pad.

To launch the next day, they simply replaced the matches and tried again, quite successfully.

The article makes me wonder how other rockets ignite their engines.

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First step in producing silicon-based life

9:04 am

The Horta live! Scientists have succeeded in creating a bacteria that can produce hydrocarbon compounds that incorporate silicon into their make-up.

To get biology to adopt silicon, Frances Arnold, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, along with postdoctoral assistant Jennifer Kan and graduate student Rusty Lewis, started by isolating a so-called thermophilic bacterium, which grows in hot springs. Like many organisms, the bacterium contains an enzyme called cytochrome c, which shuttles electrons to other proteins, making it widely useful in biochemistry. In some cases, however, enzymes in thermophilic bacteria expand their roles to carry out other reactions on the side. So the Caltech researchers tested their microbe and found that in rare cases its cytochrome c also added silicon to hydrocarbons.

In nature, Arnold notes, cytochrome c’s silicon-adding ability is so feeble that it’s probably just a byproduct of the enzyme’s function—not even close to its primary role. To try to beef it up, the team incubated the bacteria with silicon and carbon compounds and selected the organisms that produced the most hydrocarbons that incorporated silicon. After only three rounds of this artificial selection, the enzymes had evolved to churn out silicon-containing hydrocarbons 2000 times as readily as natural cytochrome c. “The power of evolution really shows up when a new function appears and then is forced to adapt via directed evolution,” Arnold says.

For now, the silicon-spiked hydrocarbon compounds, called organosilanes, probably aren’t useful either to the bacteria or to industry. They’re short and stubby, unlike the long chainlike versions that chemical companies make for uses such as adhesives, caulks, and sealants.

As the article notes, they really are very far from creating a silicon-based life. Still, to get silicon incorporated into carbon-based organic chemistry is a significant first step, as it demonstrates that the theory of silicon-based life might very well have merit.

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South Korea commits almost a billion dollars to AI research

8:56 am

In reaction to the recent Go victory by a computer program over a human, the government of South Korea has quickly accelerated its plans to back research into the field of artificial intelligence with a commitment of $863 million and the establishment of public/private institute.

Scrambling to respond to the success of Google DeepMind’s world-beating Go program AlphaGo, South Korea announced on 17 March that it would invest $863 million (1 trillion won) in artificial-intelligence (AI) research over the next five years. It is not immediately clear whether the cash represents new funding, or had been previously allocated to AI efforts. But it does include the founding of a high-profile, public–private research centre with participation from several Korean conglomerates, including Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor, as well as the technology firm Naver, based near Seoul.

The timing of the announcement indicates the impact in South Korea of AlphaGo, which two days earlier wrapped up a 4–1 victory over grandmaster Lee Sedol in an exhibition match in Seoul. The feat was hailed as a milestone for AI research. But it also shocked the Korean public, stoking widespread concern over the capabilities of AI, as well as a spate of newspaper headlines worrying that South Korea was falling behind in a crucial growth industry.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye has also announced the formation of a council that will provide recommendations to overhaul the nation’s research and development process to enhance productivity. In her 17 March speech, she emphasized that “artificial intelligence can be a blessing for human society” and called it “the fourth industrial revolution”. She added, “Above all, Korean society is ironically lucky, that thanks to the ‘AlphaGo shock’, we have learned the importance of AI before it is too late.”

Not surprisingly, some academics are complaining that the money is going to industry rather than the universities. For myself, I wonder if this crony capitalistic approach will produce any real development, or whether it will instead end up to be a pork-laden jobs program for South Korean politicians.

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