#a part of that prediction process is analyzing the mechanics BEHIND the powers

[ariapmdeol]

Oh, that makes sense. So the original game was a standalone game, you're just predicting future games? I was wondering because it sounded like you were talking about the plot of a currently existing game & mentioning you had to reference sources outside the game to even understand what the plot & the game itself was going for, since the game hadn't gotten to it in canon yet.

The YT Eng TL specifically hasn't uploaded those parts yet! However, I played ahead of the YT translation (completing everything that's out so far), so I wanted to specify in case that someone had seen the YT part, but not played the rest!

The plot is perfectly understandable on it's own! You will understand it without any outside resources. We're just insane and are trying to predict things for CoM before the game is out, using the hints/foreshadowing we have so far!

[ludoai]

Game With Best AI: Unlocking Creativity with AI Idea Generators and Brainstorming Games

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized many industries, and the world of gaming is no exception. From creating complex, lifelike characters to enhancing player experiences, AI has been a game-changer. But how does AI contribute to the creativity behind game development? In this blog, we'll explore games with the best AI, delve into how AI idea generators work, and discuss the benefits of brainstorming games for developers and players alike.

Games With Best AI: Redefining the Player Experience When we talk about games with the best AI, we're referring to titles where AI isn't just a backdrop but an integral part of the gameplay. The best AI in games is not about predictable moves; it's about creating dynamic, challenging, and sometimes unpredictable interactions that keep players engaged.

One notable example is "The Last of Us Part II". This game showcases advanced AI through its enemy behavior. Enemies communicate, strategize, and adapt to the player's tactics in real-time, making every encounter unique and challenging. Another great example is "Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor", which introduced the Nemesis System. This AI-driven system allows enemies to remember past interactions with the player, evolving and responding differently in future encounters, which makes the gameplay feel personal and engaging.

AI has also been used to create realistic non-playable characters (NPCs) that react to player actions in a believable way. "Red Dead Redemption 2" is a standout in this regard, where every NPC has a daily routine, reacts to the player’s actions, and even remembers past interactions. Such games showcase how AI can elevate gaming experiences by making worlds feel alive and responsive.

AI Idea Generators: A New Tool for Game Development Creating a game is a complex process that requires a lot of creativity and brainstorming. This is where AI idea generators come into play. An AI idea generator uses algorithms to create new concepts, themes, and even full game ideas, helping developers overcome creative blocks and explore new possibilities. These tools can generate everything from character names and storylines to entire game mechanics, acting as a virtual brainstorming partner.

For example, AI idea generators can analyze popular gaming trends, player preferences, and other data to suggest ideas that are more likely to succeed. This approach not only saves time but also opens up avenues for innovation by presenting unexpected combinations that a human might not consider. These tools are particularly useful for indie developers or small teams that may lack the resources to conduct extensive brainstorming sessions.

Using an AI idea generator can be as simple as inputting a few keywords related to your game's theme or genre. The AI then processes this input, cross-references it with a vast database of existing ideas and trends, and outputs a list of suggestions that can kickstart the creative process. By incorporating AI into the ideation phase, developers can enhance their creativity, ensuring they are always a step ahead in the competitive world of game development.

The Power of Brainstorming Games: Enhancing Creativity and Collaboration Brainstorming games are not just for developers; they can also be a fun way for players to engage their creativity. These games often involve solving puzzles, crafting stories, or designing solutions under certain constraints, making them ideal for flexing one's creative muscles. For game developers, brainstorming games can be a valuable tool for team-building and idea generation, allowing team members to collaborate in a low-pressure, fun environment.

Games like "Minecraft" or "The Sims" encourage players to think creatively and explore endless possibilities within the game world. For developers, these brainstorming games can also be used as inspiration for creating new mechanics or exploring different ways to engage players.

Moreover, brainstorming games can help identify strengths and areas of interest within a team, making it easier to delegate tasks based on individual skills and passions. When used effectively, these games can foster a more collaborative and innovative development process.

Conclusion In the ever-evolving landscape of game development, AI plays a crucial role in pushing the boundaries of what's possible. From the games with the best AI that provide immersive and dynamic experiences to AI idea generators that unlock new levels of creativity, the potential of AI in gaming is vast. By embracing these tools, developers can streamline their creative processes, overcome challenges, and ultimately create games that resonate deeply with players.

[roggerdalton-blog]

How Motor Current Signature Analysis Can Prevent Unexpected Equipment Failures

In today's industrial landscape, unexpected equipment failures can lead to significant downtime, financial loss, and even safety hazards. For companies relying on heavy machinery and electric motors, the need for proactive maintenance strategies has never been more critical. One of the most effective techniques for preventing unexpected equipment failures is Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA). This powerful diagnostic tool allows for the early detection of mechanical and electrical issues in motors, helping industries maintain continuous operations and avoid costly disruptions.

Understanding Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA)

Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA) is a non-invasive technique used to monitor and analyze the electrical signals within a motor. By examining the current signature, which is the electrical waveform generated by the motor during operation, MCSA can identify abnormalities that indicate the presence of mechanical or electrical faults. These faults could include bearing defects, rotor bar issues, stator winding problems, or even misalignment and imbalance in the motor.

The key advantage of MCSA lies in its ability to detect these faults early, often long before they manifest as noticeable symptoms or lead to catastrophic failures. By identifying problems in their early stages, maintenance teams can schedule repairs or replacements at convenient times, minimizing the impact on production and reducing the risk of unplanned downtime.

The Science Behind MCSA

The principle behind MCSA is relatively straightforward. When a motor operates, it generates a unique electrical signal based on the interaction between the motor's electrical and mechanical components. This signal, or current signature, contains valuable information about the motor's health. Any changes in the motor's condition—such as the development of a fault—will cause subtle changes in the current signature.

MCSA systems use advanced sensors and data analysis algorithms to capture and interpret these changes. The data collected from the motor is compared against baseline measurements or expected patterns to identify anomalies. For instance, a broken rotor bar might cause specific harmonics to appear in the current signature, which can be detected and flagged for further investigation.

Benefits of MCSA for Predictive Maintenance

Early Fault Detection: MCSA's ability to detect faults early is one of its most significant benefits. Mechanical issues like bearing wear or rotor defects often develop gradually, and MCSA can identify these problems long before they cause noticeable performance degradation or failure. Early detection allows maintenance teams to address issues before they escalate, preventing costly damage and extending the life of the equipment.

Non-Invasive Monitoring: MCSA is a non-invasive diagnostic technique, meaning it doesn't require disassembling the motor or interrupting operations. The analysis can be performed while the motor is running, making it a convenient and efficient tool for regular monitoring. This non-intrusive nature also reduces the risk of introducing new issues during the inspection process.

Reduced Downtime: By catching potential failures before they occur, MCSA helps prevent unplanned downtime, which can be extremely costly in industrial settings. Scheduled maintenance based on MCSA data ensures that repairs are conducted during planned shutdowns, minimizing disruption to production.

Cost Savings: Unexpected equipment failures often result in emergency repairs, expedited part replacements, and lost production time—all of which can be expensive. MCSA helps avoid these costs by providing actionable insights that enable proactive maintenance. Additionally, the extended lifespan of equipment due to timely repairs can lead to significant cost savings over time.

Improved Safety: Faulty equipment can pose serious safety risks, especially in industries where heavy machinery is involved. MCSA helps mitigate these risks by ensuring that potential issues are addressed before they become hazardous. This contributes to a safer working environment for employees and reduces the likelihood of accidents.

MCSA in Action: Real-World Applications

Motor Current Signature Analysis is widely used across various industries, from manufacturing and energy production to transportation and mining. In each of these sectors, MCSA plays a crucial role in maintaining the reliability and efficiency of motor-driven systems.

For example, in the manufacturing industry, MCSA is often used to monitor critical motors that drive conveyor belts, pumps, and other essential equipment. By continuously analyzing the current signature, maintenance teams can detect issues such as bearing wear or electrical imbalances early, preventing production slowdowns or stoppages.

In the energy sector, where reliability is paramount, MCSA helps ensure the smooth operation of turbines, generators, and other motor-driven systems. Any unplanned downtime in this industry can lead to significant financial losses, making MCSA an invaluable tool for predictive maintenance.

Conclusion: Partnering with the Best

Motor Current Signature Analysis is a proven method for preventing unexpected equipment failures, reducing downtime, and saving costs across various industries. By providing early detection of faults, it allows maintenance teams to take proactive measures, ensuring the continuous and efficient operation of critical equipment.

When it comes to implementing MCSA, partnering with a trusted service provider is crucial. Vibrotech is one of the best in the industry, offering cutting-edge MCSA services that help companies stay ahead of potential issues. With their expertise and commitment to excellence, Vibrotech ensures that your equipment remains in peak condition, minimizing the risk of unexpected failures and maximizing productivity. In a world where uptime is critical, and equipment reliability is paramount, investing in Motor Current Signature Analysis is not just a smart decision—it's a necessity. And with Vibrotech by your side, you can rest assured that your operations are in the best possible hands.

[mitcenter]

What is Finite Element Analysis? Applications and Benefits

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is a powerful computational tool used to simulate and analyze the behavior of structures and systems under various conditions. By breaking down complex physical systems into smaller, simpler components called "finite elements," FEA allows engineers and scientists to predict how these systems will react to different forces, stresses, and environmental factors. This blog explores the basics of what is Finite Element Analysis (FEA), its applications, and the benefits it offers in various industries.

Understanding Finite Element Analysis

Finite Element Analysis is a numerical technique used to solve complex problems in engineering and physical sciences. The fundamental idea behind FEA is to divide a complex object or system into a mesh of smaller, simpler elements. Each element is then analyzed individually, and the results are combined to predict the overall behavior of the system.

The FEA process involves several key steps:

Discretization: The physical structure or system is divided into a finite number of elements, creating a mesh. Each element is represented by nodes, which are points where the elements connect.

Selection of the Element Type: Depending on the problem, different types of elements (such as 1D, 2D, or 3D) are chosen to represent the structure. Common elements include beams, shells, and solid elements.

Application of Boundary Conditions and Loads: Conditions and loads are applied to the model to simulate real-world scenarios. Boundary conditions define how the model is constrained or supported, while loads represent forces or other external influences.

Solution of the System of Equations: The FEA software solves the system of equations generated by the finite element model to determine the response of each element.

Post-Processing: The results are analyzed and visualized to understand how the structure behaves under different conditions. This can include stress distribution, deformation patterns, and temperature variations.

Applications of Finite Element Analysis

FEA has a wide range of applications across various industries. Here are some notable examples:

Structural Engineering: In civil and structural engineering, FEA is used to analyze the strength and stability of buildings, bridges, and other structures. Engineers can assess how these structures will perform under different loads, including wind, seismic activity, and temperature changes.

Automotive Industry: FEA helps in designing safer and more efficient vehicles. It is used to simulate crash tests, optimize component designs, and improve overall vehicle performance. This helps manufacturers to create vehicles that are both durable and lightweight.

Aerospace Engineering: In the aerospace industry, FEA is crucial for designing aircraft and spacecraft. It is used to analyze structural components, predict flight performance, and ensure the safety and reliability of aerospace systems.

Mechanical Engineering: Mechanical engineers use FEA to design and optimize machinery and mechanical components. This includes analyzing the stress and strain on parts such as gears, bearings, and frames.

Biomedical Engineering: FEA is applied in the design of medical implants and prosthetics. It helps to predict how these devices will interact with the human body and ensure their functionality and safety.

Energy Sector: In the energy industry, FEA is used to analyze components of power generation systems, including turbines and reactors. It helps to ensure that these components operate efficiently and safely under various conditions.

Benefits of Finite Element Analysis

Finite Element Analysis offers several advantages that make it an indispensable tool in modern engineering and design:

Accuracy and Precision: FEA provides accurate predictions of how structures and systems will behave under various conditions. This helps in identifying potential problems and making necessary adjustments before physical testing or production.

Cost-Effective: By simulating real-world scenarios, FEA reduces the need for expensive physical prototypes and testing. This leads to cost savings and faster development cycles.

Optimization: FEA allows engineers to optimize designs by evaluating different materials, geometries, and load conditions. This leads to more efficient and effective solutions.

Complex Problem Solving: FEA can handle complex geometries and loading conditions that are difficult or impossible to analyze using traditional methods. This enables engineers to tackle more challenging problems and innovate new solutions.

Enhanced Safety: By predicting how structures and components will perform under stress, FEA helps to ensure safety and reliability. This is especially important in industries where failure can have catastrophic consequences.

Design Flexibility: FEA allows for iterative testing and modification of designs, providing flexibility to refine and improve products based on simulation results.

Conclusion

Finite Element Analysis is a vital tool in engineering and design, offering a detailed and accurate understanding of how structures and systems will perform under various conditions. Its applications span multiple industries, from aerospace to biomedical engineering, and its benefits include cost savings, design optimization, and enhanced safety. As technology continues to advance, FEA will remain an essential part of the engineering toolkit, enabling innovation and precision in the creation of complex systems.

[smvexperts7]

The Power of Storytelling in Website Design

Introduction: In the current digital era, where websites act as the virtual face of companies, the significance of well-crafted website design is paramount. Web design goes beyond appearances; it aims to craft an interactive and user-friendly experience that boosts sales and nurtures customer allegiance. One powerful way to achieve this is by incorporating storytelling into website design. By weaving narratives into the fabric of their websites, businesses can captivate audiences, evoke emotions, and forge meaningful connections with their visitors. In this article, we'll explore the benefits of storytelling in website design and how companies like SMV Experts, a leading Web design and Development Company in California, are leveraging this approach to create compelling online experiences.

The Psychology Behind Storytelling:

Humans are naturally drawn to stories. From childhood bedtime tales to blockbuster movies, storytelling has been an integral part of human culture for millennia.

Stories have the power to evoke emotions, stimulate the imagination, and create a sense of empathy and connection.

By tapping into these psychological mechanisms, businesses can engage their audience on a deeper level, making their brand more memorable and relatable.

Understanding User Experience (UX) Design:

UX design focuses on creating a seamless and enjoyable experience for website visitors.

Key elements of UX design, such as intuitive navigation, clear messaging, and engaging visuals, can all be enhanced through storytelling.

By understanding the needs and preferences of their target audience, businesses can tailor their storytelling approach to create a more personalized and impactful user experience.

Incorporating Storytelling Elements into Website Design:

Choosing the right narrative for the target audience is crucial. Whether it's showcasing the company's origin story, highlighting customer success stories, or conveying brand values, the story should resonate with the intended audience.

Visual storytelling techniques, such as compelling imagery, videos, and interactive elements, can further enhance the storytelling experience and capture the audience's attention.

Integrating storytelling into website navigation and user interactions can create a cohesive and immersive experience that guides visitors through the site while reinforcing the brand's narrative.

Practical Tips for Implementing Storytelling in Website Design:

Conduct audience research to understand preferences and interests: Before crafting a narrative, it's essential to know your audience. Conducting surveys, interviews, and usability tests can provide valuable insights into what resonates with your target audience.

Craft compelling narratives that align with brand values and goals: Your story should authentically reflect your brand's identity and mission. Whether it's through testimonials, testimonials, or visual storytelling, ensure that your narrative reinforces your brand's core values and goals.

Test and iterate storytelling elements for optimal results: Website design is an iterative process. Continuously monitor and analyze user feedback, engagement metrics, and conversion rates to refine your storytelling approach and optimize the user experience.

Future Trends and Considerations:

Predictions for the future of storytelling in website design: As technology continues to evolve, so too will how we tell stories online. Emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have the potential to revolutionize storytelling, offering immersive and interactive experiences that blur the lines between the digital and physical worlds.

Emerging technologies and their potential impact on storytelling: AR and VR have the potential to revolutionize storytelling by offering immersive and interactive experiences that blur the lines between the digital and physical worlds. Additionally, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are enabling more personalized and dynamic storytelling experiences tailored to individual users' preferences and behaviors.

Advice for staying ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving digital landscape: To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must embrace innovation and adapt to changing consumer preferences and technological advancements. By continuously experimenting with new storytelling techniques and technologies, companies can create more compelling and impactful online experiences that resonate with their audience.

Conclusion: 

Incorporating storytelling into website design is not just a trend; it's a strategic approach to creating memorable and engaging online experiences. By tapping into the power of storytelling, businesses can captivate their audience, forge meaningful connections, and drive tangible results. As demonstrated by SMV Experts, a leading company of Web design and Development in California, storytelling is not only an effective way to differentiate your brand in a crowded marketplace but also a powerful tool for building trust, loyalty, and advocacy among your audience. As we look to the future of website design, one thing is clear: storytelling will continue to play a central role in shaping the digital landscape, offering new opportunities for businesses to connect with their audience in meaningful and impactful ways.

FAQs:

How can storytelling enhance user engagement on a website?

Storytelling creates a more memorable and immersive user experience, allowing businesses to connect with their audience on a deeper level. By crafting compelling narratives that resonate with their target audience, businesses can capture attention, evoke emotions, and drive meaningful interactions.

Can storytelling be effective for all types of businesses?

Yes, storytelling can be effective for businesses of all sizes and industries. Whether you're a B2B software company, a non-profit organization, or a consumer brand, storytelling can help you differentiate your brand, engage your audience, and drive desired outcomes, such as lead generation, sales, or social impact.

How can businesses measure the effectiveness of storytelling in website design?

Businesses can measure the effectiveness of storytelling in website design through various metrics, such as user engagement metrics (e.g., time on site, bounce rate, pages per session), conversion rates (e.g., form submissions, purchases), and qualitative feedback (e.g., user surveys, usability testing). By tracking these metrics over time, businesses can assess the impact of storytelling on their website performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their storytelling approach.

What are some common pitfalls to avoid when incorporating storytelling into website design?

One common pitfall is focusing too much on the brand's story and not enough on the audience's needs and interests. It's essential to strike a balance between telling your brand's story and addressing your audience's pain points and aspirations. Additionally, businesses should avoid clichés and generic storytelling tropes and strive to create authentic and compelling narratives that resonate with their audience on a personal level. Finally, businesses should ensure that their storytelling is consistent across all touchpoints and aligns with their brand identity and values to avoid confusing or alienating their audience.

[yourmechaniconline1]

The Technology Behind Modern Car Service Centers: Exploring Innovations

In today's fast-paced world, the automotive industry is evolving at an unprecedented rate. The rapid advancements in technology have significantly transformed the way car service centers operate, making them more efficient, reliable, and customer-friendly. In this blog post, we will delve into the cutting-edge innovations that power modern car service centers, shedding light on the intricate processes that ensure your vehicle receives the best care possible.

Advanced Diagnostic Tools

Gone are the days when mechanics relied solely on their intuition and experience to diagnose car issues. Modern car service centers now employ sophisticated diagnostic tools that can pinpoint problems with remarkable accuracy. These tools utilize complex algorithms and sensors to detect even the slightest abnormalities in a vehicle's performance, enabling mechanics to identify issues swiftly and accurately.

Robotics and Automation

Automation has become a cornerstone of modern car service centers. Robotics are used extensively in tasks that require precision and repetition, such as assembling components and conducting routine inspections. These machines work seamlessly alongside experienced technicians, enhancing the efficiency of the entire service process. By automating repetitive tasks, car service centers can allocate their skilled workforce to more complex and challenging problems, ensuring a higher quality of service.

Data-Driven Maintenance

Car service centers now leverage big data and analytics to optimize vehicle maintenance schedules. By collecting and analyzing data from various sensors and diagnostic tools, service centers can predict potential issues before they escalate. This proactive approach not only prevents breakdowns but also saves customers from costly repairs in the long run. Predictive maintenance ensures that vehicles remain in peak condition, enhancing their longevity and reliability.

Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Expertise

With the rise of electric and hybrid vehicles, car service centers have adapted their expertise to cater to these eco-friendly alternatives. Technicians undergo specialized training to understand the unique components and systems of electric vehicles. These experts can diagnose and repair electric and hybrid vehicles effectively, providing owners with the assurance that their environmentally conscious choice is well-supported by skilled professionals.

Environmental Responsibility

Modern car service centers are increasingly adopting eco-friendly practices. From recycling used parts to responsibly disposing of hazardous materials, these centers are committed to reducing their environmental impact. Additionally, many service centers are transitioning to energy-efficient technologies and renewable energy sources, further contributing to a sustainable future.

In Pune, discerning car owners seek top-notch services from experienced professionals. Your Mechanic Online, renowned for its exceptional team of car mechanics in Pune, stands out as a beacon of trust and expertise. With a commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, Your Mechanic Online has earned its reputation as the best car service center in Pune.

Conclusion

In the rapidly evolving landscape of car service centers, staying informed about the latest technologies and innovations is crucial for both customers and service providers. As a car owner, understanding these advancements empowers you to make informed decisions about your vehicle's maintenance. When it comes to reliable and expert car service in Pune, Your Mechanic Online is the ultimate destination. Experience unparalleled service from the best team of car mechanics in Pune, and ensure your vehicle receives the care it deserves. Contact us today for a service experience that exceeds your expectations, making us the go-to choice for the best garage in Pune and the leading car service center in Pune. Trust Your Mechanic Online for all your automotive needs, and let us keep your vehicle running at its peak performance.

[razorblade180]

Twin Snowflakes Pt11: Expedited Exam pt2

“ LET’S GO!”

All three dash at the same time. Valerie straight ahead, Summer to the far left end, and Nicholas around to the right. It only took a second before the Paladin awoke; it’s top right shoulder opens a hatch to reveal a minigun that has its laser sight on Summer. She raises her hand in glyph preparation but the Paladin immediately starts to fire the rubber bullets.

Quietly she sighed in minor annoyance. “No hesitation huh? This is gonna be fun” Summer starts running and raises her sword up before stabbing the tip against the track and erecting an ice wall. ‘No time to lose’ a wave of her left hand makes a trail of normal glyphs leading to one end of a track. Summer closed her eyes and took a slow breath in order to calm her nerves for a second before hoping in the first glyph and began sprinting at high speed. The minigun continued to follow her.

Valerie cracked a smile of excitement as she began advancing closer. ‘Looks like one of their measurements is on point so far. Time to test the others!’ Both her hands went up and passed her head to pull out both her tomahawks. The Paladin’s top left shoulder revealed a gun much like Atlas mechs use but bigger. A blue light gradually builds near the end of the chamber.

“Uh oh…” Valerie crosses both weapons to block as the stun laser fires directly at her. The beam bounces off of them and towards the sky but not before the beam sent an intense shock that made every muscle come to a screeching halt momentarily. A circular whole below the cockpit opened up to unleash a cannon that shot a single concussion grenade; exploding by her feet and pushing out a shockwave that sent Valerie flying several feet back.

“Val!!” Nick screamed as he continued to circle around the back. Attracting the attention of laser gun “Are you ok!?”

“Agh! That’s set to stun!?” She shook her body out then picked up her weapon to advance again.

Harriet can’t help but chuckle a little. “Goliaths take a lot of volts. Trust me, that’s the lowest setting but try not to get shot?”

“Well that sucks…”

The Paladin fires another grenade but Val points the left tomahawk straight at it. “You’re not the only one with hidden hatches. Val’s finger ran across the bottom near the middle of the handle and slid in between a trigger guard. A single pull of the trigger revealed an opening at the edge and a bullet flew out of the hollowed out handle then hit the grenade. Exploding it midair. Professor Port would’ve been proud. A second one gets fired and Val sidestep it then hurls it at the Paladin’s legs. The blade connects with both of them as it spins like a wild buzzsaw and then back into her hand. Not a scratch was made.

“I guess I need more force!” Val dug her feet into the dirt then pushed off with tremendous force. The mechanical right arm reeled back and swung forward. Both axes collided with a thunderous clang. The power behind the two attacks stalemating into a power struggle. Sparks come off of the clashing metal as Valerie refuses to budge. Val’s stomach drops as the left robot arm In her peripheral vision reels back. “Guys!?”

A white glyph forms under her feet and raises her into the sky just as the rest swings by. Valerie sees Nick on the other side of mech with his left hand casting the platform. “I got ya.” A volley of lasers fire rapidly his way but each one was dodged side to side at the last second. The gun pivoted along with him in an attempt to keep up; sparking an idea for Val. “Nick! Jump up high then drop fast!”

He doesn’t even question the command and leaps straight up into the air several feet; the gun still trained on him and ready to fire but that had been the point. “Summer!”

“I know.” She spun her barrel to gravity dust and made a black glyph that she moved to where he stood.

Nick’s entire body jerked back to the ground right as the laser fired right into the air. The base of the rotating joint was completely exposed and Nick understood what to do next. He lunged forward to it and wedged his blade underneath it. Valerie jumped off the platform and followed suit. The backside of both her axes were connected together to form a dual sided battle axe and she swung it like a baseball bat to wedge it in from the other side. The two pushed down their weight onto their weapon in an attempt to pop the gun out. Gritting their teeth and putting their all into

“Come….on…!!!” His arms started to burn.

“Budge you hunk of metal.”Her entire body finally limbering up and getting into it.

Summer continued to draw the minigun fire her way until it suddenly stopped. The entire Paladin stopped. A disturbing silence came over everyone as they also went still. Harriet slowly covered her eyes and tensed up. ‘This part always sucks.’ Her mind already thinking about the incident reports she was about to write.

The ground began to rumble violently at the Paladin’s feet. “Initiating thrusters”

Valerie’s face dropped. “Did it just say-”

The entire make blasted forward faster than anyone expected. A massive force of wind nearly knocked Nick and Valerie off of it. Both of their heads spinning are trying to process what had happened. As for Summer, one minute she’s supporting them from across the track. The next, she’s staring down the barrel of a canon a few feet away. “S..so fast.” A spell of panic came over her and she raised her sword across her body to block a grenade but it was a pointless move. The explosion knocked her on her back and myrtenaster 2.0 out of her hands. The shock knocked some wind out of her lungs but she has felt worse; taken worse.

Another grenade launched at her but she wasn’t about to get hit a second time. Summer quickly got up and dove out of the way towards her sword. ‘Come on, think damnit!’ She casted another gravity glyph on the side of the minigun and made it over turn so it wouldn’t shoot her. Ice dust remained faintly in the sword’s chamber; the technical advantage from its predecessor. Summer channeled it with gravity dust to form a dense orb of ice at the tip of her blade.

‘Keep it from reacting!’ She shot the orb into the canon to lodge the chamber then switched back to actual ice dust in a split second. ‘Keep it from moving!’ Summer stabbed the ground and unleashed a sheet of ice that trapped its feet.

“Way to go Summer!” Both her friends cheered at the split second decisions. Summer pulled her sword from the ground and platformed leaped up to them. Adding her blade as another wedge and attempting to pry the laser gun off with what strength she could offer. Which wasn’t much as the other two from the start. “Agh! This thing is creaking but not popping!”

“Let’s change that! You two ready!!?” Val shouted and glowed faintly

The twins smiled as they began glowing as well. “Yeah!”

“Then let my words reach you! We got this! We’re tougher than a bunch of tech so put your back into it!”

The three of them pushed down at the pushed down on their weapons in unison. Their body and spirits invigorated as they let out a yell. “AAAAAAHHHH! POP….OUT!!!!”

The joint finally gave out and popped out of the socket. Harriet couldn’t believe what she was watching. The sudden release of tension caught them off guard and all three fell off with it; undoing any active glyphs due to lack of concentration. The Paladin used its thrusters to break free then sped backward.

It pulled the ice orb out of the canon chamber and analyzed the area. While all three finally hit the ground. “Targets locked” six arching grenade shots went into the air Valerie and Summer were still dazed but Nick bounced back quickly.

“Oh no you don’t!”even glyphs formed over the leftover ice and molded into replicas of his sword. He grabbed one while the other six shot off into the air and countered the incoming attack while he charged forward. Moving out of the direction of his friends. “All eyes on me Wall-E I got a bone to pick with ya!” The gun turned to lock on him and unleashed a hail of bullets. ‘Rubber bullets are still rubber.’ He ran straight at it while spinning Mort Froide in front of him to deflect them. The ground started rumbling again and the Paladin rushed at him. Fortunately it’s movement’s were very straight forward and predictable. Nicholas slid underneath and slashed the bottom of it as it passed over.

The ice blade shattered on contact. ‘Sturdy down below too. The joints maybe? No, can’t budge those on my own. It's automatic so attacking the cockpit is almost pointless. Looks like I gotta make an opening.’ His eyes narrow in on where the laser gun was. ‘Or….’ he pressed his thumb against the hilt of his sword and it opened up a singular slot in it to place dust. Nick pulled out a vial of lightning dust and placed it inside, then closed it. “I refuse to fail.”

Val staggered to her feet along with Summer. Their ears rang and Summer’s head throbbed from the fall to the point she undid her ponytail to release tension.

Summer:You okay?

Valerie:A little dizzy but no sweat. We’re ready to go.

A wave of relief soothes the pain a little as their aura glowed again.Summer directed her attention across the field to see Nick invading fists and grenades exploding the ground. How long has he been fighting him? How was he still going? “We need to help. What’s he thinking going at it alone?”

“When did we get an audience?” Valerie said winded. People had filled the bleachers to half capacity. Summer looked at Harriet who simply shrugged. The girl was slightly unnerved by the new development but now was no time to focus on other people. She had a test to pass. “Val let’s-”

The crowd suddenly gasped, cutting her off and directing her attention back on Nick. The Paladin slammed it's hand to the ground and Nick dove threw the fingers then rolled up the arm. His hands gripped his blade brightly and engulfed it in a lightning glyph. He raised it over his head as he jumped and drove it down into the area where the laser gun was. The attack got an immediate reaction. Causing the Paladin to stutter and glitch. The minigun gun shot off random rounds with every pulse of electricity that went through it. Soon after, the robot itself began bucking in every direction like a wild Ursa; stomping its feet and shaking violently. Nicholas could only hold on for dear life.

‘We made the left arm vulnerable.’ Summer realized quickly and got to planning on how to capitalize on it. “Val, help Nick and keep that thing in one place. I have an idea. I just hope I can pull it off. Summer closed her eyes and bent down on one knee. ‘Concentrate…’ a giant white glyph with a sword sigil inside started spinning in front of her.

Val watched the girl start to sweat and tremble. She was pouring all aura she could into this next move.Val wasn’t about to make it go to waste. ‘Keep it still, gain it’s attention, Save Nick. Easy right?’ Her head swiveled back and forth until spotting the detached gun that had managed to land halfway across the track. ‘Let’s see if this thing can handle what it dishes out.’ Valerie took running. Hoping her idea wasn’t dead in the water by faulty wiring. The ground rumbled and rattled as the Paladin continued to thrash around to free itself from Nicholas. He could lose his grip any moment.She had to pick up the pace.

Finally she reached it after a few more minutes of sprinting. Valerie’s chest felt like fire and the crisp air made her throat feel like she had swallowed glass. Sports were her thing but sprinting a mile and a half? She’d rather bench five of herself. “Track huff... sucks huff… ” she grabbed a hold of the gun and tried to lift it. Slowly it started to budge as she took quick breaths to power through getting it waist level. “A one and a two and a-” she rocked her body back and used the momentum of it going forward again to swing her arms up and over her shoulder with the gun. The weight came down heavier than expected and made her knees buckled. It became too much and brought her down to one knee. If this was already extremely heavy then the thought of the recoil made Valerie shudder. “I swear if I don’t get an A….”

“NICK, YOU MIGHT WANT TO JUMP!”

“Huh?” The boy had completely focused on his own situation that the sight of Valerie with a bright, glowing gun pointed his way made him freeze up for a moment until his brain realized the insanity that was going on. Summer remained in the back. Long messy hair fell across her face and her exhaustion was clearly visible as her aura flickered; her eyes staring right at him that screamed “Move!”

“Oh crap!” He pulled his sword out and jumped off right as Valerie fired a shot. The single shot jerked the gun back violently and slammed against her shoulder. Forcing a scream of pure pain out of her lungs. Val’s right arm went limp as she grabbed it. The recoil popped her shoulder out of place but it might’ve been worth it. The beam flew right into the Paladin and caused electricity to crackle all over it. The minigun whipped around sporadically before going limp as well and burn marks ran over it. It’s right foot raised over Nick who wasn’t fast enough to dodge it. Harriet gasped and was about to reach the Paladin control but stopped herself as Nick made a platform above him for the foot to step on instead. Not just that, it kept it off balance. Valerie came sprinting towards him with her axe in one hand. A fierce look in her eyes as Harriet saw the girl reel it back and jump to the left leg. ‘Wait, don’t tell me she’s gonna-’

“FALL!! Valkyrie Drop!” Valerie swung downward with all her might and slammed her battle axe right next to its foot. The entire ground crumbled and cracked on impact. The weight of the Paladin caved the ground in; rendering it completely off-balance and a landslide of dirt to bury its foot. Rubble flew into the air then fell down like hail. Sizable dents were finally made on the media exterior; including cracks on the cockpit casing. Harriet felt her very soul leave her body. Never has anyone ruined the track area this much. Her only saving grace was hopefully Nick’s family would pay for some of the damage. Her job might depend on it! The boy in question rolled out from under the metal death machine and ran the opposite direction of Valerie to escape getting caught in the trap. Finally, it was one place. But not for long…

The heat of the thrusters on the right leg roared loudly as the Paladin tried to break free.

“Summer!!!” The two called her name in a state of adrenaline and panic.

Her summoning glyph glowed an intense white before disappearing, then reappearing right behind the Paladin. “Right...on time.” An Arma gigas sword forces its way into existence with its sword in hand. In one swipe the gigas slashes right through the damaged arm; making crash to the ground and creating a gaping hole to attack. “One more slash!” Summer screamed as the Gigas swung at the new weak. This was it. This was going to be the final blow. Was….

The Paladin was more adaptable than she expected. Than anyone expected. As if by command, it reached for its broken arm and used it to block the sword. A massive gust of wind came off the clash. The force of the impact was too great for the gigas arm. Causing it to crack slowly before fading away entirely. Summer’s face ran colder than the sweat running down it. Her heart nearly stopped at the sight of her failure. Then it only got worse. The Paladin ignored Nicholas and Valerie completely and threw its severed arm across the field towards her exact location.

“W-What?” She could barely speak, let alone move her body. That move took almost everything that was in her. All her strength, and most of her aura; yet it met nothing. Time seemed to slow down. The sound of the world growing silent. Summer could see a terrified look on her brother and friend’s face. They looked to be screaming something she was too tired and scared to even start comprehending. To her left was Harriet already halfway down the bleachers; racing to what was about to be on hell of a nasty hit. Yet it was unavoidable. Even Summer knew Harriet wasn’t fast enough to save her from this blow. That was fine though. It’s the consequence of being weak. You can’t expect to be saved all the time and Summer was tired constantly getting away with failure.

Her body trembled in frustration and fear. If she was alone then she’d probably be crying right now but instead she choked back her tears and quietly chastised herself for coming up short yet again. ‘After all that training, Nick’s talk about me being a cornerstone, this is all I could do again? Fall behind and let them down. Why…? Why am I so fucking weak all the time!?’ Her arms raised in front of her in a useless attempt to block some damage. Summer closed her eyes and braces for impact.

Don’t you dare sit there like an idiot! If you wanna save yourself then do it!!!!

The command resonated with Summer and her body moved like if she had just gotten out of bed; refreshed and limber. Both her hair and eyes lit up for a moment as she slammed her hands on the ground and formed a thick wall of ice in front of her in the blink of an eye. The mechanicals arm slammed into the wall and it came to a dead stop. The wall crumbled and Summer went back to normal before her aura finally broke. All fatigue and pain rushed back instantly. Along with blurring her vision. She stared at her reflection through one of the pieces of ice to see a version of herself with a familiar condescending smile. “Shi...va….”

Sigh, you’re such a lightweight it’s embarrassing. Don’t say I never did anything for you darling.

Exhaustion finally took Summer. She collapsed right as Harriet came over; blacking out in her arms. But not before giving a message for Harriet to tell her beloved team. Harriet looked at both of them and screamed. “Keep going! She’ll be fine!”

The two were uncertain at first before giving a nod and facing the robot which has completely freed itself and rescanned the area. “One of three combatants immobilized. Continuing examination for two and three.” The machine grabbed a piece of debris the size of a car at Nick while firing grenades faster than before at Valerie. Both took off running towards each other then straight down the middle of the field.

“You hanging in there Val?” The boy asked even the sight of her clenching her right shoulder and breathing heavily was giving him a pretty good answer.

“We’ve come too far to stop now. We’ll knock it off balance again and go for the opening. I’ll-”

“Look out!” Nick shoved Valerie out the way as a grenade landed where she stood and blew both of them apart. Nick tumbled back onto his feet with his sword ready. A wise decision since the Paladin rushed right at him again and swung a massive right hook. Nick jumped over then made a glyph midair to block an incoming grenade. The fist started coming back for a second attack at Nick but he made a second platform to jump over it again. This time he back stepped to get out of melee range ‘It’s gotten more aggressive. I need to...’ “Huh?”

There was no time for a well thought strategy in the heat of combat. Especially when the unexpected keeps happening. The Paladin was truly leaving nothing to the imagination. It grabbed the malfunctioning minigun on its shoulder and yanked it off. Throwing it at Nicholas to close the distance.

“No!” He screamed in panic as he tried making another glyph but was too slow. He put his sword up to reduce the blow but the gun still slammed against him; a piece of it crashed right into his ribs. Air left his body as pain shot through it while he fell to the ground hunched over and clenching his left side. Anyone near would’ve heard a few swear words slip out. He managed to look up to see the next attack but was surprised to see it heading towards Valerie. “Is it...agh, prioritizing most important threats as the fight goes on?” That had to be it. Without all it’s weapons it has to play carefully. It explained its attack patterns even from the start. Distance wasn’t the only factor. Whoever could or was causing the most damage was the main target; and right now the most threatening person right now had a wounded arm with no chance to recover.

Valerie groaned in exhaustion and frustration. She didn’t want to show it but she was even more tired than she let on. Between her arm and getting shocked, moving her body was becoming a chore. Not to mention how many times she has fallen to the ground hard. Valerie was in dire need of a break that would not come. She separated her battle axe back into two tomahawks and crouched at the ready. “I can do this. I can do this. I...can do this!” Her body glowed for a third time. Pain dulled and her mind became clear. “Come on!!!”

The canon launched a barrage of thirty grenades; the biggest one yet. She shot one and five exploded which dispersed the others in midair. Four fell to the ground away from her and she jumped in the air to hit one back. Two landed near her and blew her back but she recovered quickly. Above her head was six falling fast. ‘Shit..’ Valerie flung one axe into the air and detonated them with a chain reaction. She shot for more before the Paladin rushed at but Val dodged roll underneath it. One more fell right out of her line of sight and made her jump towards the middle when it exploded. The final five were falling right towards and she once again pulled the trigger on her axe to hear a click. Followed by no bullets.

“Tsk, I’m not done yet!” She threw this axe to detonate four of them. This time she put an extra hard spin on her axe that made it bounce back towards her to catch. The last got blasted of course and over her head. She faced the Paladin with a satisfied smirk and started aiming for the weak spot. “Time to fin-”

“Val, behind you!” Nick tried to shout with what air he recovered.

Valerie spun around and her smirk vanished into dread. The grenade was inches away from the laser gun She had dropped. Before she could move to safety it exploded. The shockwave blew up the gun into a mass electrical pulse that expanded almost instantly and hit Valerie. The excess energy ran through Valerie like a thousand tasers in water. She could barely get out an auditable noise as she stood stiff; her axe falling out her hand and the Paladin moving towards her.

Nick’s fingers gripped the ground as he tries to force his body to move. Pushing down the pain and refusing to let help another teammate in need. ‘Come on Nick! Forget the pain….just move man, move!!!! You’re a Schnee and an Arc so move!” A giant glyph formed underneath him….

Valerie continued to try moving but to no avail. She stood in agonizing pain as the Paladin stood over her and reeled it's fist back. Valerie would’ve been more unnerved if the shock to her system didn’t make her vision blurry and her body increasingly go numb from the pain . All Valerie saw was a gray blob getting bigger before the sensation of something caused her head to feel like it was spinning. Everything got really bright and fuzzy as she faintly felt pressure around her arms and legs. Then….she blacked out.

Nick placed her just outside the track near Harriet before walking back in bounds. His sword gripped tightly in his right hand. While his left hand gripped an Arma Gigas blade; Harriet watched the boy encased in armor take a breath and take a wide stance. “M..maybe we should stop? You’ve gotten farther than most. All of your skills are worth passing”

Nick turned around and shook his head. The only thing visible was his icy blue eyes behind the helmet. No, I’ll make sure we pass this right. That, and I’m really in the mood to scrap that thing now more than ever. His voice was low and almost like he couldn’t care less. Harriet could feel how pissed he was. No chance he was backing down now. “Heh, I’m rooting for ya.”

“Thanks.” He continued walking. Taking note of his surroundings. The severed robot arm and behind him where Summer got knocked out on the end of the track. The Paladin that was back in the middle of the field. Last but not least, the far end of the track that was now a rocky terrain of rocks and dirt. Then there’s him. Stepping back into the field in between the bot and arm. His entire body ached to the point that moving should be the hardest thing imaginable. It kinda was, but he endured. The Gigas moved his body. All he needed to do was endure a few more minutes. Or rather, that’s all he had left in him. ‘Can’t afford to waste a single movement. All or nothing. Just dig deep…’

The Paladin scanned the area one final time. “Two of three co-”

Nick didn’t care to listen and pointed Mort Froide to the ground. A blue glyph went over it and ten blades of ice came out the ground. He then pointed his blade at the Paladin and the ice ones homed in on it. “Let’s see what takes priority.” It shot one at each blade which caused another shock wave that dissipated any dust particles.This time he threw his real sword at it and it responded with a single grenade. “Bad move.” The same glyph ran over it right after the Paladin reacted. Ten more ice blades formed from the remaining dust left in the sword and flew ahead of it.. The Paladin tried to counter against the new numbers and in doing so missed Nicholas throw the Arma blade at a speed faster than the rest. It caught on a second later then turned to prioritize it. As it did, Nick summoned it back into his hand. Throwing off the counter. “I knew you’d go after the blade that actually cut you. Now look at ya.”

The machine went back to aiming at the ice swords. It only managed to shoot one grenade but it had gotten too close. The shock wave shattered the other swords but pushed the Paladin back with not only that blast, but the nine other grenades at the ready as well. The concentrated blast blew the canon and cracked the ground even more. Mort Froide landed straight into the dirt, blade downwards. “All out of bombs.” He raced towards it while grabbing his sword along the way. Once again the ground rumbled before the Paladin took off towards him as well.

Nick quickly slid between its legs and kept running in the same direction before it had a chance to turn around. The moment he made it to the edge of the ruined field he drove his blade deep into the ground and charged towards the Paladin again with only the Arma blade. The Paladin stuck its hand in the ground and turned itself around for another tackle. Harriet almost couldn’t watch out of fear that she’d see her student get flattened but fortunately, dodged to the side with no arm. Avoiding the extremely dangerous attack. It was like he was one of those bull fighters. However, this time was different. Nick spun around and extended his arm as he passed by it. Her eyes followed Nick’s line of sight back to Mort Froide that had a black glyph spinning underneath. He must’ve put gravity dust in during the first charge. She wondered why until a sinking feeling hit her stomach.

“Oh no…” The Paladin used the same turning technique but it uncalculated consequences. Nick wasn’t expecting the move but added to his plan. The weight of it along with the extra gravity was so too great and more of the ground collapsed; momentarily as Nick made his way to the severed arm. His body and aura reach their limits quickly. “Just a little more. Almost...finished!”

One final glyph appeared underneath the arm and spun rapidly. He looked behind him to see the Paladin getting up and perusing him once more. It quickly dashed across the feel while having its arm raised. Nick couldn’t help smile. “Catch!” The glyph burst and launched the arm up the Arma Gigas body came off of Nick while leaving the sword. It leaped into the air and rammed the limb hard enough to send it at the Paladin, disappearing as well. The Paladin used it’s only arm to catch the other instead of attacking;now it couldn’t swing down with how close it was. No more guns, distance was closed, and there was no room to dash forward. Checkmate. Nick willed his body to stand up and lunged upward at it. Driving his sword through one of cracks. “It’s Over!!!” He screamed with all his might as he poured whatever aura he had left into the blade and watched it grow bigger and until it was the size it was supposed to be; until the blade pierced through the other side.

Nobody made a sound. They didn’t even seem to breathe as Nick and the robot stopped completely. Slowly his grip loosened and he fell. Harriet quickly ran and caught him in her arms before he could land. Nick could only smile weakly before closing his eyes and passing out. Harriet looked backup as the sword faded away and the Paladin fell backwards, completely wrecked. Without warning, the crowd of students on the bleachers erupted in cheers and applause. It had been quite the spectacle. Yet Harriet could still only manage to look at him and his friends who were still resting on the sidelines. They actually did it. They passed.

Part 10

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Weird “Rhythem”

What if humans were the only ones who could FEEL a beat like in music? 

The Journal of Mechanics and Biology 

Take a moment to consider a level one death world, take a moment to wonder what it would take to survive and adapt on a planet where literally everything is out to kill you. Imagine doing all of that without carapace, infrared, or particularly impressive short distance running speed. Yet the humans did it. They did it and then took their survival to an extreme. How is it that, relative to other predators, such a weak, slow, and helpless species survived on such a death world. * I take a moment here to point out that this is only a comparison of humans to their own planetary species well aware that they are considered a level A-1 predictor in the rest of the galaxy.

To answer this question, I draw your attention to he human brain. It is a fascinating organ of feedback loops complexities and redundant systems. Not to mention the human brain loves patterns. Not to say that there are other species who aren’t just as adept at noticing patters, however the difference remains that humans brain’s delight in predicting patterns within their environment. While a Glarian may be able to see a pattern faster than a human, the prediction power of the human brain on short notice is absolutely astonishing.

Anyone who has ever attempted to fight a human knows this. Humans are almost impossible to hit as they analyze and predict on the fly in a way that other species cannot. As it turns out this may have been the key to their survival.  

The ability to predict future behavior from past and present stimuli is common among higher sentient species, however a human is a fast predictor on the fly. A human and another species may come to the same conclusion though it may take their counterpart seconds or minutes to do what a human can do almost unconsciously and immediately.

The human brain loves patterns and predictions so much, that certain patterns can even elicit a dopamine response in the human brain giving rise to feelings of pleasure. Clearly an evolutionary advantage to enjoy patterns and predicting them.

Krill had only been aboard the human ship for about a week when he first heard the noise. It was distant and throbbed on the air with a certain alarming regularity. First, he thought it might be an alarm of some sort, but the rise and fall of the pulses made him think twice. The noise wasn’t a radio frequency which he could pick up, but the universal translator he wore continuously interpreted the sounds on the air allowing him to hear just like the humans did, or at least similarly to how they did. He found this ability to be critical on a ship where atmospheric vibration was a large part of human culture.

He stood up from where he sat and wandered his way down the hall listening to the sound and it’s throbbing pulse. As it turned out  the human auditory system processed sound in similar ways to how he processed radio transmission, in fact, humans often used the radio to send messages with transduction equipment to interpret the signals. In a similar way, that is what his translator did for him, turning sounds into appropriate frequency radio signals.

These signals were getting stronger as he made his way upwards and onto the bridge. The noise was close now, and he had to brace himself as he  opened the door walking in to find the group of humans lounging around at their stations in various states of relaxation.

But it wasn’t the humans that caught his attention, but the pulsing beat that swelled up around him throbbing in his chest and throughout all six limbs.  The experience was so exquisitely intoxicating that he staggered to the side with a wave of sudden overwhelming emotion.

The beat pulsed inside him with impossible regularity and complexity. So complex was the pattern that he could hardly keep up and his cortical systems struggled to keep all of him functioning as he listened.

Somewhere, someone must have noticed him, and the music was abruptly discontinued.

He became vaguely aware of bodies around him as he finally gained control of his senses.

Captain Vir was the first person he saw standing above him with a concerned look on his face.

“Uh, KRill? You alright.”

He couldn’t answer for a long moment before shaking his head one last time to clear his mind, “I... wow.... why did you stop. That was the most.... amazing thing I have ever heard.”

The captain sat back on his heels and the humans looked on in perplexity, “Have you.... Never heard music before?” The captain wondered

Krill shook his head, “No, I have but.... never.... like that.... so many patterns.... how do you keep up.”

The captain scratched the back of his head in confusion, “I uh.... well it’s not really all that big of a deal....”

Krill’s eyes widened in shock and he shook his head, “Not a big deal..... Human.... it takes years an an advanced mathematical degree to make sounds like that. The ability to create a beat with that regularity requires computerized algorithms or the ability to do mathematics in microseconds. I would have to count every beat and then some if I wished to come close to what you just did.” He shook his head in amazement, “And adding EXTRA sounds on top of that which match the beats is.... well its nigh on impossible without a computer do do it, and to make it sound good when all is said and done....” He trailed off in confusion.

Of course there was music on his planet, but it was very difficult to make, and even harder to make sound good. Generally speaking only two sounds were used in any really good piece of music, and they generally had to follow the same beat line, but the humans.... well what they did was astonishing.

As far as he understood from that once piece, it had a general background beat with very deep frequencies which would be low and deep, it then there was higher frequencies on top of that and at a faster beat, which was at almost exactly twice the speed of first.

The captain gave a grin as a look of understanding spread over his face, “You mean you can’t feel that?”

“Feel what?” Krill asked in confusion

“The beat?” He asked 

Krill shook his head, “You don’t feel a beat.”

That comet created an immediate uproar in the humans who disagreed with his analysis vehemently.

The captain shook his head in amazement. Yes you can, its like... a pulsing, and you just.... well you just KNOW something needs to be there. Makes you want to tap your foot, bounce your knee, or start dancing.”

Krill stared at the human who must have gone completely daft, “You FEEL sound.”

The captain frowned, “No... not exactly, its just a feeling. It builds up in your body, and its hard to keep yourself still.”

Krill had his head another shake, “It’s impossible.”

The human gave a frown of annoyance and stood up, “You know what then.... bet you I can make a beat right now, and I bet everyone else in this room can follow with me.”

Krill disagreed, “To coordinate over twenty crew members is impossible.”

“Yeah, you bet, bet I can do that and get a background beat to go with it too. Bet we could make up a song right now if we really tried.”

“I would very much like to see you do that, human.” 

The man gave a grin, “You know what, I’d turn this into a bet, but winning will be to easy.”

Krill very much doubted the human’s statement, but he let the man think what he would and watched him as he returned to the center of the room. All the humans had taken to their feet interested in what was about to happen.

The captain stood thinking for a moment, and Krill watched sure that he would give up any second, but then 

The captain stomped his foot on the metal deck.

Thud...Thud-Clap (his hands struck each other with a loud sudden pulse. That sure didn’t sound like a beat to him.

But then

Thud...thud-clap.... thud....thud-clap-clap... thud... thud-clap....

Krill blinked in shock, as slowly, one by one all the other humans joined mimicking the beat the captain had created out of thin air. But it wasn’t just a simple beat, it was a cycle of slow to fast, and as far as krill could tell it was almost the same every time.

Behind him someone started knocking their hand against a control panel every so often in a completely different beat that both contrasted and matched the first.

With a hand, the captain motioned to the first lieutenant who then placed his hands over his mouth and began to weave another cycle of beats through the first two.. He wasn’t using any language that Krill could  identify. Krill had never heard a human voice box used in that way before.

“Alright, someone wanna give me some lyrics.” The captain called somehow still maintaining the complex under-beat as he spoke to the crew. Krill couldn’t understand it. He could hardly follow the beat as it was much less talk to anyone while doing it.

Somewhere in the back a noise rose up to weave through the three beats around. HIs translator caught a few words, but the sound was so different... so unexpected that he couldn’t have comprehended it if he tried. The human was.... doing something. Something that opened her throat and allowed the air to rush through in controlled bursts between breaths. It was like speaking but drawn out to send vibrations through the air. A few of the humans whooped their approval joining to add their voices to the first.

Halfway through another crew member added his voice. Krill could hear it this time, but the human was speaking almost to quickly for the translator to comprehend, and he was pacing it WITH the beat. He was speaking with a rhythm.

 Impossibly all twenty humans on the bridge crew had joined in. Some used their voices some their hands some their feet, and more than one mixed them in combination.

He had never seen anything like it.

He would later learn about the human brain’s enjoyment of predictable patterns. Their brain enjoyed patterns and predictions so much that a musical beat was almost second nature to a human. This enjoyment was so profound that the humans received an almost intoxicated reaction to the complex auditory patterns.

Not only that, but the humans could increase their factual memory tenfold by creating a song that incorporated the information. Ask a human and they find it easier to recall the lyrics to their favorite song than it is to recall mathematical equations. That is until you add a rhythm to a mathematical equation and then the human might end up with the equation stuck in their head on repeat as their brain replays the beat over and over.

Want a human to remember something.... make a song about it.

If human musicians had been popular on their home world, it was multiplied tenfold once their music reached the galaxy/ They were actually beginning to have a problem with humans retiring and buying the odd moon here and there. 

[autumnwoodsdreamer]

Gather Up Your Jackets and Move It to the Exits

Characters: Tony Stark, Jarvis (AI), Natasha Romanov

Rating: General

Words: 4, 195

Disclaimer: I don’t own these characters and I’m not getting paid a cent for this

Summary: A moment after the Battle of New York but before shawarma.

...

Once in the elevator and out of direct line of sight of spies and soldiers, Tony slumped against the wall and let his breath out in a rush.

The last ounce of adrenaline his body had scraped together to meet the day’s outrageous demands had actually fizzled out a few hours ago; he’d been running on the fumes of stoicism since just to keep himself appearing steady because shaking like an over-caffeinated chihuahua like he was now was just plain undignified.

Plenty of competition vied for the title of “Strangest Day Ever” (without the tacked on concession of “So Far”) but he suspected this particular day would hold the honour for the longest time to come. Now that it was mostly over, he just wanted to take a shower, to wash every trace of the horrible day off, to rid himself of the astringent stench of sweat and scorched metal and other... stuff.

Before he could do that, of course, he would have to shuck the armour. He’d already lost the faceplate somewhere on the street below and he’d discarded the helmet somewhere in the living room. The rest of the armour was badly damaged, weighing too heavy on his fatigued bones with some parts twisted and crushed just so as to dig painfully into his already battered and bruised body. With every second inching past, his desperation to be free of this mangled metal shell deepened.

The elevator doors eventually slid open and he lumbered into the sanctuary of his workshop, his armoured footsteps clanking heavily and metallically, the cavernous space amplifying the distinct ringing of the echoes.

The whole saga with the portal had messed with the Tower’s arc reactor in ways Tony didn’t yet understand; Jarvis—wonderful, efficient Jarvis—had, with what control he managed to commandeer, automatically shut down inessential systems and rerouted power to the necessities, so the ventilation worked perfectly, but the elevators were slow and the lights were all on half-strength. The Tower’s armoury was already a new and unfamiliar space, but it acquired an eerily alien quality with the drastically dimmed lighting.

The assembly line awoke lazily, whirring and moaning like a mechanical creature that wasn’t happy with its sleep being disturbed. Silver arms unfurled from the ceiling like clunky vines, reaching for him with pincers and claws and robotic fingers. Tony stepped up onto the platform and stood still, having learned long ago that fidgeting resulted in unpleasant pinching.

He was never a fan of the dismantling process, so he approached the design of the MK VII specifically with the hopes of putting the rig out of service: the plates were designed to spread apart and knit back together by themselves, and, to boot, he had improved the manual release system so, should he lose power, he could quickly and easily free himself by a series of cleverly concealed catches. But the aliens (and even the Hulk with his stunning but no less indelicate rescue) had damaged the armour just enough that the only way he was getting out of it tonight was if he let the rig help.

It was a good couple of minutes of borderline unbearable noise as the machines tugged, pulled, twisted, yanked, and even sawed to get the armour off. The process seemed to be excruciatingly eked out and Tony teetered precariously on the edge of freaking out throughout.

The last crumpled plate clattered to the floor and he finally let himself breathe. But searing pain all too quickly eclipsed the relief; when the robotic arms pried away the last section of the abdominal armour, they unwittingly removed the last bit of pressure disguising his injuries.

He shouldn’t have been surprised: between haphazardly repairing a Helicarrier engine, going toe-to-toe with incomprehensibly strong aliens, and being tackled by the Hulk, he’d been hit, slammed, and pummeled from every possible angle these past two days.

Nonetheless, he was caught unaware by the severity of the pain. To keep himself from crumbling to the floor where he wouldn’t be able to help himself, he clamped his arms around his middle and forced his legs to hold him. About as steady as a newborn giraffe, he stumbled away from the rig over to the cluster of desks a few feet away, unceremoniously collapsing into his chair and clumsily skittering back against the table.

“Jarvis?” he bit out through gritted teeth, folding over himself and remaining rigid, too scared to move.

“I detect nothing more sinister than superficial cuts, bruises, and minor fractures in three ribs,” the artificial intelligence promptly told him. “I would have informed you sooner, but you explicitly requested I not continue reading out your injuries.”

There was a note of disapproval in the disembodied voice. Tony remembered snapping out the order that the AI focus on the aliens pouring out the hole in the sky and the civilians struggling to escape danger below rather than cataloging his bumps and scrapes; Jarvis, whose main objective was the care and preservation of his creator, was not pleased, but he complied without argument.

“No internal bleeding or ruptured organs?” Tony pressed.

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“So I’m gonna live?”

“Once again, in spite of your best efforts, yes.” Beneath the tongue in cheek, Jarvis sounded genuinely pleased.

Tentatively armed with that assurance, Tony turned to face his reflection in the dormant computer screens and lifted his shirt, wincing as he beheld the massive splotch of deep indigo dominating his midsection.

He didn’t have to poke to know it would hurt, but, like a dim-witted chimpanzee, he poked anyway; a sharp hiss slipped between his teeth when the light touch predictably stung.

“While I understand your aversion to pain medication, I do wish you would consider a mild dose to relieve the discomfort,” Jarvis said, his artificial tone remarkably tender.

“I’ll see about it.” Translation: Not on your digital hard-drive.

“Then may I advise the use of the brace at least?”

Tony let out a childish whine. “I hate that thing.”

“I know, Sir.”

“It pinches.”

“As you have stated before. However, you might find upright positions less torturous with its support.”

“Do I even still have it?”

“You packed it in with your spare flight-suit.”

Tony calmed down then; if Jarvis was willing to prescribe over-the-counter pain relief and a brace over finding loopholes in his instructions and programming to get immediate aid to his creator, then he would be fine.

A wave of drowsiness overtook him and he let it, deciding that he had rightfully earned a moment to decompress. He pulled himself closer to the desk, folded his arms on the cool surface, bent forward cautiously, shifted until he found an angle that took the weight off the majority of his injuries, and rested his head on his arms.

He wasn’t going to sleep. No. This was just a quick breather then he’d get to his feet, paste on his patented nonchalance, saunter upstairs, round up the mob in his living room, and they would all go celebrate their victory with food he’d never heard of before.

In a minute, he would definitely do that.

His shoulders drooped.

His eyes slipped closed.

The low hum of the building’s systems gradually hushed and grew distant, as if they’d been submerged in thick water.

Something blurred across his vision like the headlights of a speeding car at night. Then came another and another. His eyes darted unseeingly behind closed lids to track the insubstantial entities zipping across his vision.

The backdrop shifted: light then dark, clouds then stars, fire then smoke.

His muscles were tensing, straining, burning; thoughts racing, stalling, faltering.

Something hit him in the back, something kicked his legs out from under him, then something hit him in the stomach.

He fell back -

With a jolt that wasn’t much more than a spasm of fatigued muscles, Tony woke up. A glance at the desk clock told him he hadn’t been out for even a full minute.

He let out a long, controlled breath. This wasn’t an unfamiliar ailment: a phantom replay of the day’s action would haunt him for another day or so; he would see it all so vividly and feel it so intensely, but it would eventually fade to blurs and echoes that sometimes reappeared as distorted elements in his deepest dreams—just like the cave, just like the factory rooftop, just like Monaco, just like the expo.

That’s not to say it wasn’t unsettling or that he was used to it...

“Sir?” Jarvis’ voice unobtrusively reached through the silence.

“Just dozed off, J; I’m fine,” Tony assured in a mumble, drawing his arms closer together—the Tower’s climate control must’ve been another system relegated to the realms of minimal priority.

“Sir...” the AI trailed off, as if apprehensive.

“Something on your mind, buddy?”

“I... have some concerns.”

“Do share.”

There came another pause, too well-timed to be anything but calculated. “I have collected and analyzed fragments of data from the MK VII.”

“You get any substantial readings from the wormhole?” Exhausted beyond belief but the scientist in him still wanted to play.

“A fair amount, though the majority of the armour’s systems including its scanners were corrupted and disengaged upon entering the portal; you did, after all, fly through an anomaly that bent space itself in a suit not designed with such an environment in mind.”

“You make me sound like the most extreme adrenaline junkie in history.”

“I’m not convinced you aren’t, Sir. However, your health, as always, is my main concern, and it has come to my attention that your heart stopped before the armour went offline.”

Tony lifted his head. “Before?”

As confirmation, the computer screen nearest him awoke and played the final moments before he shot through the doorway to another galaxy.

A bar beneath the disturbingly clear video tracked his vitals—he watched both simultaneously. Like Jarvis pointed out, as he rapidly approached the portal and the edges of the video flickered with static, his heart—which had been beating obscenely fast—unceremoniously flatlined.

A foreign system of stars filled the screen for all of two seconds before the video died, leaving Tony staring at a man with wide, horrified eyes—it took him another minute to recognize himself.

He shut his eyes and swallowed hard; his mouth and throat were as dry as sand but he feared even a sip of water wouldn’t treat him well right now. “So... it wasn’t... it wasn’t actually going through the portal that stopped my heart?”

“It would appear not, Sir.”

“So, what then? Did one of those aliens hit me with something? Was it that—that glow-stick thingy?”

“I believe it traces back to an underlying problem with your heart.”

“I don’t have a problem with my heart, J,” Tony said, suddenly irrationally defensive. “I have shrapnel around my heart, but my heart itself is perfectly fine. Remember? Pepper had that Doctor What’s-His-Name check me out after the Expo. He ran those tests and said I was fine. And—and you just said I was... fine.”

He ran out of breath and had to halt his argument. It was probably just as well: “fine” no longer sounded like a real word, anyway.

“Sir, to be fair, Dr Santini did admit he’d never seen a case such as yours and that he couldn’t quite predict the ultimate effect the shrapnel, the arc reactor, and the poisoning would have on your health. The sheer exertion of the past 48 hours has put enough strain on your heart to bring the problem to the surface.”

Tony rubbed his eyes. This day just wasn’t going to end. “Okay, so what is the problem?”

“I am afraid I am unable to determine the extent of the damage to your heart. I strongly recommend you seek professional medical advice.”

“C’mon, J, I didn’t give you all the bells and whistles so you could just refer me to some monkey,” he said, weariness coming off as petulance.

“Sir, I am not equipped to assess and manage serious medical conditions,” Jarvis sternly insisted.

Tony let out a frustrated sigh. “Well, then, can I deal with this later? I really do feel fine.”

“Sir, please -”

“Just tell me: Will I drop dead in the next two hours?”

“Sir -”

“Will I?” he repeated, sharper than necessary.

“Presumably, no.”

“Then let’s leave it for now and I’ll see to it later. Okay? Good.” With finality, he clapped a hand on the desk. “I’m starving. Are the others done scrubbing up yet?”

Jarvis paused, unhappy with his creator’s intent diversion. Again, though, he complied. “Dr Banner has dressed and is currently helping treat Captain Rogers’ injuries; Agent Barton is still in the bathroom; and Agent Romanov appears to be making her way here.”

A smile twitched on Tony’s lips at the last bit. It occurred to him then that he hadn’t spoken face-to-face with the spy once throughout this whole fiasco (barring hacking into her jet’s PA system and exchanging a handful of snappy quips in the heat of battle). While he wouldn’t exactly label them “friends”, she was the only familiar face around him at present.

“Grant her access when she arrives. And tell the Hawk shawarma’s for people who don’t leave messes in their host’s bathrooms.”

“Yes, Sir.” The AI sounded resigned but he didn’t press any further now—he knew how to pick his battles.

The wall separating the workshop from the hallway turned transparent and, hardly a minute later, Natasha appeared. She was still in her SHIELD uniform, still covered in dust and grime, her fiery curls falling not quite symmetrically, but her face was clean and she walked with an even pace and regal posture despite her limp.

The door opened as if by a breeze just as she reached it; she halted and blinked, her only visible concession to surprise.

“Looking for something, Romanov?” Tony called, negotiating with his bruised and broken ribs to try ease his posture into something resembling casual.

She stepped over the threshold, glancing over her shoulder at the door as if she didn’t believe it had meant to open for her. “I came to check on you,” she said, simply.

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Rogers told me to.”

The eyebrow fell. “Oh.”

“He says you promised dinner.”

“Right. I sorta did.” Tony nudged at the ground with his foot to push his chair closer to the desk; the pain was starting to make him dizzy. He intended to get to his feet soon, but he didn’t want to attempt so in front of an audience. “How is the Good Captain otherwise?” he asked, conversationally, occupying his fidgety hands with the pen cup.

Natasha folded her arms and coolly shifted to rest her weight on her good leg. “Took a blast to the stomach; Banner tried to take a look at it but he’s already started healing.”

“Lucky him. You can call off that eyebrow, Romanov; I meant it. What about your friend—Barton—how’s he?”

She shrugged. “Alive, I guess. I don’t know; he locked himself in the bathroom.”

It struck Tony that neither her tone nor her expression changed shade and yet her concern for the archer rang as clear as a bell.

“And you?” she prompted.

His head snapped up. “Me what?”

She let the slightest edge of something crease the corners of her expression; it looked like a cross between inquisitiveness and concern but, whatever it was, it read as genuine. “How are you holding up? You almost died today.”

“Never felt better,” he answered without missing a beat but the blasé smirk was purely automatic by this point and it tasted awful.

Choppy curls spilled onto her shoulder as she tilted her head and her lips quirked with what looked awfully like mischief. “Oh, really?”

He nearly thanked her for the beat change; he really didn’t have the stomach for sympathy tonight, but banter... he could manage banter. “Of course; I’m invincible, remember?”

“How are those cracked ribs treating you, Mr Invincible?”

“Hey, how did you -? Do you have X-ray vision?”

She very nearly laughed as she had the audacity to look pleased with herself. “You do what you do; I do what I do.”

“Well, you can tell Rogers I’m accounted for; Jarvis checked me over and gave me the all clear.”

“Did he?”

“What do you think I keep him around for? Tap dancing lessons?”

Tony held his breath, waiting for her to believe him while praying that Jarvis didn’t decide to play lie detector and contradict him now of all times.

The spy looked him up and down, slowly, methodically, her brow set low in suspicion. She gave a shrug when she seemed convinced; he entertained no disillusions that he had fooled her but there wasn’t enough gushing blood and protruding bones to validate her fighting him.

To his surprise, she didn’t turn and leave then, even though, ostensibly, her task was accomplished. She remained standing there, her gaze sweeping over the poorly lit workshop, the hall of armours, the assembly line, and finally falling to the bits of mangled armour haphazardly littering the floor. “This is a mess,” she commented as she toed at a crumpled shin guard.

“Eh, I can fix it,” Tony said, flippantly.

“You can?”

“Sure. It’ll be good as new. Probably better. But, for now, I’m just going to mash together whatever’s salvageable from that -” he pointed with a pen to the scrap at her feet, “- with whatever’s salvageable of that -” he whirled the pen around to indicate the battered MK VI standing wonkily in its allotted niche in the wall alongside the other armours, “- and hopefully end up with something that’s at least flight capable,” he concluded.

Natasha nodded, clearly impressed by the idea. “And you can have that up and running by, what, next week?”

“Tomorrow,” he clarified without flair.

Her eyes noticeably widened. “That soon?”

“It... might be necessary.”

“Why?”

Tony opened his mouth but caution kicked in and he closed it without making a sound in between. He was tired and sore and in desperate want of a confidante, but he hadn’t for a moment forgotten that this was the same woman who slipped past his guard just a year earlier. He had to bear in mind that whatever he said stood a fair chance of ending up in a report of some kind.

But the lady had asked a question and it would be rude not to answer it.

He pushed away from the desk and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. Mindlessly, he twirled the pen in his hands and watched it as if it were the most fascinating thing in the room. “New York just got hit by the biggest terrorist attack in history,” he said, his voice low and stripped of all show as he attempted to steer the topic. “The portal’s closed, sure, but we’re not in the clear yet. The cleanup from this will be... colossal.”

“Damage Control crews are already setting up,” Natasha pointed out. “They’ll have the streets cleaned up by morning.”

“That’s... not really what I meant. I think a better word is ‘fallout.’ The buildings can be fixed and the markets can recover, but people... people are scared. They’ll be scared for a long time. That’s where we come in. We... heroes,” he clarified and flippantly spun his hand in the air. “Even if we can’t do anything tangible, we could at least put on a brave face and assure them that it’s gonna be okay.”

“Sounds noble.” She tilted her head again, her sculpted brows knitting, her eyes narrowing. “But you could do that without armour.”

He huffed a dry laugh and his ribs reminded him not to do that so suddenly. “Iron Man inspires a lot more hope than Tony Stark does.”

“But you have other suits.” Natasha nodded to the armours standing stoically in their niches. “Why can’t you just use an older model?”

“They’re not compatible with the new core.” Tony tapped the reactor in his chest. “Retro-fitting will take longer than just welding those two scrap-heaps together.”

“Don’t you think a banged-up Iron Man might be a poor publicity move?”

“It doesn’t matter what it looks like,” he countered and immediately recognized his mistake when a little spark of understanding ignited in her hazel eyes as they widened ever so subtly.

His guard had slipped yet again and he had let it. Even so, he found himself unashamed. The world had just almost ended and he had just almost died; candour seemed appropriate, even necessary.

He let his breath out in a sigh that dragged his shoulders down. “I need a suit,” he confessed, quietly, wishing they could go back to that brief spell of lighthearted banter. “I don’t think even Cap sees it yet, but another attack—from out there or our own backyard—is imminent. If I were going to try bring the world to its knees, I’d strike now when people are distracted and defenceless. It would be perfect; no one would see it coming, no one could do anything. And if I can figure that out, how long do you think it will take for someone less charitable to put two and two together? How long until some maniac with a flashy gimmick and a half decent WMD pops up? I can’t afford to not be ready, Natasha; I need a suit.”

When he finished, he realized he had hunched in on himself. Instead of straightening up, he slowly wrapped his arms tighter around himself, hoping he was only imagining he was shaking.

Natasha, on the other hand, didn’t flinch, but he did glimpse her lips parting with a quick inhalation, her sharp eyes darting, instinctively snagging on the key areas of his expression, searching for his tells, reading his mind. He may as well have told her not to bother; there wasn’t much lost or mistranslated between what he thought and what he said anymore.

He waited for an empty reassurance or a thinly veiled lecture on crutches; he could already hear the “It’s someone else’s job to worry about that” or the “Your imagination’s getting away from you; it’s not that bad.” He didn’t care to hear whatever useless response she gave.

But when she spoke, her voice held no trace of callousness or carelessness; it was low and soft, reaching out to him like a hand in the dark. Without much written in her expression but with a subtle intensity in the glint of her eyes that read like a promise, she told him: “When the next big thing comes, you won’t have to face it alone. Not ever again.”

He gave a shallow huff of a laugh. “What? Because I’m part of a team now? You really think this thing is gonna last?” His cynicism was half-hearted at best, but his doubt was genuine.

She didn’t answer immediately and the beat of contemplation added gravity to her careful words. “I think... it will be if it needs to be.”

“How Shakespearean of you.”

“What? Don’t you want it to last?”

Tony gave a hollow shrug; frankly, he was tired of talking now. “I don’t know. It worked but it also almost didn’t work. I can’t argue: many hands make light work. But what if today was a complete fluke? What if we end up creating more problems than we solve? What if Bruce is right and we just end up blowing ourselves up?”

“But what if we make it work?” she countered.

“Well, that would be... fantastic. Probably impossible, but -” not bothering with a warning, he broke off and rubbed his eyes again; the edges of his vision were growing hazy—he blamed the poor lighting.

It was quite the task to focus on breathing without gasping or making a show of it and he unwittingly ushered in a strange, stiff silence as he tried to catch his breath; by the time he did, he had lost his will to talk further.

Natasha still didn’t leave. She wasn’t put off by his abruptly abandoning the conversation; whether it be from a discerning empathy or a well-honed patience, he wasn’t sure. She gave him a moment before closing the distance between them with catlike grace, waiting until she’d drawn his attention again before putting her slender hand on his shoulder.

It was a common gesture that he’d grown acutely uncomfortable with in recent years, but right now it felt like an anchor. The touch stilled his thoughts and he drew his gaze up to find she had on that little half smile that echoed the sincerity and sweetness of Natalie; he wondered if she brought that up on command or if it was actually her—whatever the case, it felt like the first rays of sunlight after a long, terrible storm and he just wanted to hold on to it forever.

“C’mon, it’s been a long day,” she said, “I want shawarma now.”

[rammdilsplays]

The New Machine Economy

“More than 90 percent of blockchain projects are weaving in other emerging technologies, especially the IoT and machine learning,” the HFS research report tells us. We are beginning to see some attempts to harness the potential of other emerging technologies like IoT (internet of things) and AI (artificial intelligence) together with blockchain. A combinatorial approach to these technologies ends up generating a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Internet of things (IoT) refers to the multitude of physical devices—”things”— that connect to the internet. All these smart devices—smart lightbulbs, connected thermostats, fitness trackers, sensors, etc.— are meant to collect data about their environment and communicate with the network without the need for any human intervention. IoT devices are rapidly proliferating our environment. Gartner, Inc., forecasts that the enterprise and automotive internet of things market will grow to 5.8 billion endpoints in 2020, a 21 percent increase from 2019. By the end of 2019, 4.8 billion endpoints are expected to be in use, up 21.5 percent from 2018.

Since these IoT devices’ job is to collect data and feed it to the network for other devices and systems, an immense amount of data is going to be collected. One of the primary concerns with IoT devices is their susceptibility to security vulnerabilities. This lack of security is concerning with the widespread use of IoT devices in smart homes and smart cars. Blockchain as a data-sharing mechanism for IoT devices can provide another level of security with available encryption and the tamper-evident nature of the technology. With its use in conjunction with IoT devices, blockchain can facilitate data distribution in a secure and trustworthy manner.

Another challenge with this expansion in IoT devices is the load that it puts on the infrastructure. The sheer growth in the number of IoT devices anticipated to be in operation will generate large quantities of machine data that will be uploaded and need to be processed. That will heavily stress the current cloud infrastructure. Instead, it would help to build infrastructure at the edge to handle all these devices sharing data among themselves without needing to go back to the cloud. This edge infrastructure would help reduce latency and power the machine economy.

Applications of AI are also getting ubiquitous. As you look to purchase something on your favorite website, you’ll find them acutely predicting what you are interested in buying. It then nudges you to look at a few more suggestions. That’s AI behind the scenes. When your voice assistant offers to recognize you by your voice, that is AI in action. When the social networking site automatically suggests names to be tagged in a photo, AI is at work.

IoT collects all the data, and AI consumes it to get insights and make intelligent decisions about how to act upon that data. Today, much of AI is like a black box. With a blockchain backbone, AI will be getting clean data that has not been tampered with. Inherent attributes of blockchain can help AI produce a report card showing how data was used. An audit trail can be created from the time data is ingested to train the AI models. It can also include the provenance of data on how AI came with the predictions. This increased visibility will help users get assurances that AI is operating within design parameters and increase trust in the AI models.

“Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined, it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc. to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.” Taking that line of thought leadership one step further if data is the new oil, then that data on a blockchain is cleaner and will require less processing. That makes the overall system more efficient.

Integrated solutions with a convergence approach using blockchain technology in conjunction with other emerging technologies like the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to open new doors for value creation. Some attempts are being made toward the convergence of these emerging technologies and the emergence of machine economy. Let’s take a look at one of them.

Bosch Global and the Economy of Things

Blockchain can provide the trust layer to help IoT devices move away from collecting and communicating the data to devices that can participate in transactions as independent entities in the economy and as economic citizens. “An economy with an Internet of Things”—that’s the push that Bosch industries are banking their efforts on. The economy of things is an evolution of the internet of things that enables devices to participate in an economic transaction by their own choice.

Raghavendra Kulkarni has been working at Bosch on incubating businesses using emerging technologies like blockchain to develop new revenue streams. As he puts it, ”Internet of things is all about the connecting of the physical and the digital world.”

The situation of connected devices has commoditized the role of hardware in the ecosystem. Devices have been relegated to the collection and transfer of data. And that’s it. With the economy of things, the devices can provide added value as economic participants in the network. Devices become an integral part of the value chain instead of the collector and communicator of information, and blockchain is the very technology enabling that development.

That participation starts with providing these devices with autonomy. Bosch, as a company, has done a lot with the use of sensors. They derive services from sensors and put the sensor information into the software. For now, IoT devices with these sensors help automate the physical world around us. But suppose we have to give these devices autonomy, i.e., enable them to make decisions on their own. In that case, components of blockchain have the role of a catalyst in achieving that. Blockchain will help us move from smart connected devices to economic devices.

This will help enable the economy of things, i.e., an autonomous device with a business model around them. And that gives “things” a choice in deciding whether it makes sense for them to participate in an economic transaction or not. The device can make decisions based on its resources and its availability by broadcasting whether it is open for business or not.

As Raghavendra put it, “Economy of things is not just about the technology of connected [devices] or the technology of blockchain. But once you make them participate in the transaction, participate in the business models, participate in settling of the business models is where the economic things would come into picture.”90

The Case of Data Marketplaces

All this data produced by IoT devices creates numerous possibilities beyond simply enabling the machine economy. We should keep in mind a few things for the data produced by all the IoT devices. The sheer quantity of data produced is a mix of structured and unstructured data. Due to this, a lot of that data ends up being noise. Data is also temporal in nature and has a short shelf life. Its usefulness slowly degrades if it is not promptly analyzed.

We need to have a clear data strategy to make good use of all that data. That means knowing what data you need and how much of it you need. The collected data needs to be stored privately with the proper access controls in place. With appropriate access controls, the rightful owners of the data can monetize it. Today, people are given charge of their data to some extent. Still, it is also being copied and used by the companies with which they interact. There is no genuine appreciation of that data’s value and how other actors are using it.

The creation of cleaner and more organized data using blockchain will allow for the emergence of new data marketplaces. Blockchain can enable individual entities to be custodians of their data because it is an immutable record that no one has to regulate. Envision people having a digital vault that contains their digital identity along with their behavior patterns: activity patterns collected by fitness trackers, media consumption patterns collected by content providers, driving behavior collected by cars, medical records collected with interaction with the health care system, etc.

We can be custodians of the data in a secure manner. We can then access this hyper-granular data and provide access as we choose. Now, if Rahul wants to go to a bar, the only needed data is this: Is Rahul over twenty-one? Yes or No. There is no need to produce the driver’s license revealing the date of birth, address, and organ donor status. All that information is not relevant to the transaction and does not need to be divulged. Not only people but objects, like IoT devices, can also have their vaults. With these vaults, data becomes an inherent part of every actor in the economy.

Bosch has implemented a data marketplace for the provenance of milk with TrueFood+. One aspect of the solution tackles milk production and the farmer ecosystem. The concept is dubbed “Crypto-cow.” With Crypto-cow, a farmer can record and advertise different data points for a cow’s entire life cycle in a blockchain-based data marketplace, e.g., amount of milk produced, milk production forecasting, etc.

All the farmer ecosystem participants who sell to the farmer, like veterinary doctors, insurance companies, cooperative societies, equipment manufacturers, seed manufacturers, etc., are the consumers of this data. Based on the information shared in the data marketplace, these participants can offer services to the farmer. For instance, the veterinarian can look at milk forecasting and advise on possible medical interventions or changes in feed needed for the herd to influence the As Raghavendra put it, “Economy of things is not just about the technology of connected [devices] or the technology of blockchain. But once you make them participate in the transaction, participate in the business models, participate in settling of the business models is where the economic things would come into picture.”90

The Case of Data Marketplaces

All this data produced by IoT devices creates numerous possibilities beyond simply enabling the machine economy. We should keep in mind a few things for the data produced by all the IoT devices. The sheer quantity of data produced is a mix of structured and unstructured data. Due to this, a lot of that data ends up being noise. Data is also temporal in nature and has a short shelf life. Its usefulness slowly degrades if it is not promptly analyzed.

We need to have a clear data strategy to make good use of all that data. That means knowing what data you need and how much of it you need. The collected data needs to be stored privately with the proper access controls in place. With appropriate access controls, the rightful owners of the data can monetize it. Today, people are given charge of their data to some extent. Still, it is also being copied and used by the companies with which they interact. There is no genuine appreciation of that data’s value and how other actors are using it.

The creation of cleaner and more organized data using blockchain will allow for the emergence of new data marketplaces. Blockchain can enable individual entities to be custodians of their data because it is an immutable record that no one has to regulate. Envision people having a digital vault that contains their digital identity along with their behavior patterns: activity patterns collected by fitness trackers, media consumption patterns collected by content providers, driving behavior collected by cars, medical records collected with interaction with the health care system, etc.

We can be custodians of the data in a secure manner. We can then access this hyper-granular data and provide access as we choose. Now, if Rahul wants to go to a bar, the only needed data is this: Is Rahul over twenty-one? Yes or No. There is no need to produce the driver’s license revealing the date of birth, address, and organ donor status. All that information is not relevant to the transaction and does not need to be divulged. Not only people but objects, like IoT devices, can also have their vaults. With these vaults, data becomes an inherent part of every actor in the economy.

Bosch has implemented a data marketplace for the provenance of milk with TrueFood+. One aspect of the solution tackles milk production and the farmer ecosystem. The concept is dubbed “Crypto-cow.” With Crypto-cow, a farmer can record and advertise different data points for a cow’s entire life cycle in a blockchain-based data marketplace, e.g., amount of milk produced, milk production forecasting, etc.

All the farmer ecosystem participants who sell to the farmer, like veterinary doctors, insurance companies, cooperative societies, equipment manufacturers, seed manufacturers, etc., are the consumers of this data. Based on the information shared in the data marketplace, these participants can offer services to the farmer. For instance, the veterinarian can look at milk forecasting and advise on possible medical interventions or changes in feed needed for the herd to influence the forecast. The financial ecosystem can look at various data points like the herd’s health, milk forecast, etc. Based on this data, they can offer alternative financial products. The farmer provides the data and, in turn, receives proactive input from advisors.

Besides being a data marketplace, TrueFood+ also helps the farmer showcase their sustainability practices by providing an immutable record of that data. This industry has a high focus on sustainable practices, e.g., water consumption, kinds of feed used, well-being of the herd, etc. The use of blockchain as a component of the overall solution helps the farmer provide legitimate records of livestock maintenance practices.

The second dimension addressed in the provenance of milk revolves around milk distribution: the point from which it is collected to being available in the retail store. Here, condition monitoring of the milk is the main focus. Bosch has sensors starting from the milk barn and throughout the distribution channel, measuring various milk characteristics. Bosch has taken the data collected by the sensors and put it on a blockchain ledger. Storage of all the data generated by these sensors on the blockchain provides provenance of various parameters like temperature, humidity, etc. This data can be collected for the milk from the barn until it gets dropped off for processing. TrueFood+ can also help monitor a batch of milk using dynamic QR codes through different storage points until it is available at retail points.91

A seamless combination of blockchain, AI, and the internet of things will enable the next generation of solutions and open new doors for value creation. As we look to accelerate the adoption of these technologies at scale, blockchain can help provide trust in the data used with these emerging technologies—from data to information to intelligence, generated by IoT, powered by blockchain and analyzed by AI.

[reportr]

Cost Of Manganese Market Share, Global Industry Size, In-Depth Qualitative Insights, Explosive Growth Opportunity, Regional Analysis, Revenue, Challenges and Forecast to 2027

Market Highlights

As per the latest report by Market Research Future (MRFR), the global manganese market is estimated to reach the valuation of USD 32,586.9 Million by 2023. The report also states that the market will be expanding at a CAGR of 5.02% during the forecast period (2018-2023).

In the recent past, automotive industry has observed advancements in technology, and also in production. Manganese is an important part of the automotive sector, as it is used for the manufacturing of steel, which in turn is utilized in the manufacturing of chassis as well as body structure. Manganese helps increase the strength and the flexibility of steel. As per reports, the overall total motor vehicle production has surged by 2.36% from 2016 to 2017, manufacturing almost 97,302,534 vehicles in the time period.

Within the infrastructure sector, steel is used for constructing tunnels, bridges, ports, rail tracks, airports and railway stations. In the wake of increasing infrastructural investments by governments of developing economies like India, Brazil and China, the demand for manganese has been noted to increase at a high rate. This factor is projected to be a major driving force behind the strong growth of the manganese market in the coming years.

Moreover, the construction sector is presumed to be the strongest contender amongst all the end-users in the global manganese market, with the fastest growth rate. Almost 50% of the world’s produced steel is utilized in the construction sector for numerous applications in energy generation, buildings, and transportation. In addition, speedy urbanization across the globe has elevated the need for new residential construction, buildings, railways and roads. In the construction sector, steel has widespread use on accounts of its easy availability, affordability, and a variety of properties like versatility, durability and strength. Moreover, steel (consisting of manganese) is used in bridges, offshore oilrigs, construction machines, civil engineering, power plants, hydroelectric plants and pressure vessels. Thus, with the high growth in the construction sector, the demand for manganese is predicted to surge at a striking rate. This will most likely create ample opportunities for the market growth in the near future.

 Global Manganese Market – Competitive Landscape

The top companies in the global manganese market profiled by MRFR in the report include Autlán (Mexico), Mizushima Ferroalloy Co., Ltd (Japan), Accura Weldrods Kovai Pvt Ltd (India), Eramet (France), MOIL Limited (India), OM Holdings Ltd (Singapore), Sakura Ferroalloys (Malaysia), Mesa Minerals Limited (Australia), Metals and Alloys Corporation (India), Nippon Denko Co., Ltd (Japan), African Rainbow Minerals Ltd (South Africa), Afarak Group Plc (Finland), Transalloys (South Africa), Translloy India Pvt Ltd (India), and Ferro Alloys Corporation Limited (FACOR) (India).

 Global Manganese Market – Segmental Analysis

MRFR’s report includes a thorough segmental analysis of the market based on type, and application.

The cost Of Maganese Market, based on the type, is segmented into high carbon ferromanganese, medium carbon ferromanganese, low carbon ferromanganese, silico-manganese, electrolytic manganese metal, and electrolytic manganese dioxide. Out of these, in the global market, silico-manganese held the largest share in 2018, and is poised to retain its dominant position during the review period.. As silico-manganese is used in the production of steel and other alloys, its demand is set to rise in the future with the expanding construction industry and its increasing applications in it. On the other hand, the high carbon ferromanganese segment showed lucrative growth with the second-largest share of the global market in 2018, at the value of USD 5,759.5 million. The segment is projected to surge at a CAGR of 4.52% from 2018 to 2023.

The application-based segments in the global manganese market are alloying additives, depolarizer, oxidizing agent, coloring agent, and others. Among these, alloying additives ruled the global market with the largest share of more than 85% in 2018, and is set to retain its lucrative growth rate throughout the forecast period with the value share of more than 90% by 2023. In aluminum alloys, adding manganese helps in augmenting its resistance against corrosion. Also, in copper alloys, adding even a small amount of manganese aids in deoxidizing the alloy, in addition to improving its mechanical strength as well as castability. Thus, the rising demand for steel will be the driving factor for the increasing demand for alloying additives in the review period. Whereas, the oxidizing agent segment held the second position in the global market with the second-largest share in 2018 at the value of USD 1,042.7 million. Furthermore, the segment is exhibited to surge at a CAGR of 4.29% from 2018 to 2023.

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 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/manganese-market-7724

Global Manganese Market – Regional Outlook

The MRFR report covers the key regions of Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, North America and the Middle East and Africa.

With more than 3/4th  in 2018, Asia Pacific is leading the global market at the value of USD 11,947.8 million. Also, the regional market in Asia Pacific will be growing at the highest CAGR during the review period. Europe had been at the second position in the global market with the second-largest share in 2018, reaching the valuation of over USD 2,000 million.

The report, after carefully analyzing the market in Asia Pacific, acknowledges China to be the major contributor backed by its position as one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the region. There was a surge in the automotive production in the country by 3.19% in 2017 from 2016, with the total production estimated at 29,015,434 vehicles. There has been a tremendous rise in the number of railways, airports, roads, energy, water, and rural programs in the region. Besides, Japan has also noted a growth of 5.31% in the automotive sector in 2017 from 2016, with the manufacture of a total of 9,693,746 vehicles. Plus, the country boasts of well-established infrastructure with rise in transportation and the construction sector. Therefore, with the accelerated demand from a variety of end-user industries, the demand for manganese market in the region is bound to observe a rapid growth from 2018 to 2023.

In Europe, the market for manganese in Russia ruled the region with highest share in 2018 , and is expected to race ahead at the highest CAGR of 3.34% during the conjectured time frame. Following Russia is Germany with the second-largest share of over 20% in 2018, with the predictions that the market will grow at a CAGR of 2.96% in the country in the forthcoming years.

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/7724

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MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.

In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.

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 Read More Related Article:

https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/02/16/2176518/0/en/Carbon-Nanotubes-Market-Size-to-Reach-USD-6-03-Billion-by-2027-at-20-CAGR-Market-Research-Future-MRFR.html

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[sciforce]

AI Demystification: On Human-Machine Cooperation

Sci-Fi writers, futurologists and IT researchers and practitioners sometimes conceptualize ‘human-level AI’ as the Holy Grail of AI research. The idea of symbiosis between humans and machines is also settled in mass conscience creating new hopes and new phobias. Will we have a war with machines and end up as their slaves — a slowly-thinking race unable to predict the future and make decisions properly? Or will we live as masters with an army of robotic helpers?

In 2014, a Japanese venture capital company, Knowledge Ventures, elected an AI system to its board of directors. Is it an example of the closest human-machine symbiosis or is it a sign that we are losing our battle with artificial intelligence?

Anthropomorphising intelligence

Since Alan Turing’s times, the major driving force behind AI research has been machine’s competition with human cognition. If we think of such examples as beating humans in chess or simply passing the Turing test — it is either machines proving themselves better than humans or humans outdoing computers in some areas.

This competition is prompted by the fact that the only model we have of anything close to general AI is the human brain. Researchers are inspired by the way our brain is built and how each neuron has thousands of synapses — we can see how it is mimicked in neural networks.

This approach in itself shows the limitations of AI that cannot (and probably will never be able to) fully reconstruct brain functioning. Just as an example, the human brain is very flexible; for instance, it filters information very effectively so that we learn without gigantic amounts of data, whilst AI systems are notorious for their hunger for data.

It goes without saying that Artificial intelligence differs from our brain:

Artificial intelligence is so far shallow and has limited capacity for transfer.

It has no natural way to deal with hierarchical structure.

AI cannot inherently distinguish causation from correlation.

Besides, the whole our world is shaped towards human cognition. We are smart because we are small modules in a big world; we feel part of the society and draw our intelligence and our understanding of the contextual environment from it. AI, on the contrary,

has not been well integrated with prior knowledge,

cannot draw open-ended inferences based on real world knowledge, and.

presumes a largely stable world.

From the psychological side, an essential part of human interaction is empathy and contextual awareness, and we are born with a great intuition for both. It is basically intuition that we are trying to introduce to AI. Currently, instead of brute-forcing its way through the dataset, successful AIs learn to do things by stapling multiple algorithms together. However, machines still fail to generalize much beyond already known data, such as a new pronunciation of a word or an unconventional image, and have trouble dealing with limited amounts of data.

At this point, the most important difference comes into the spotlight: humans have consciousness:

But are so irreparably different? Consciousness is a structure of thoughts, or, at a deeper level, it is just neurons. Consciousness is not binary; it’s a matter of degree. Humans and other animals have different levels of consciousness, and so do adults and children and even different adults. If we stop thinking of machines as continuation of humanity, we can benefit from cooperation with them without feeling threatened by the ghosts of misanthropic robots.

Collaborative intelligence

Lacking consciousness, computers remain task-driven, meaning that they do nothing unless they have a set goal. Humans are those who give the goal and meaning to what AI does for us and with us.

The root idea of collaboration between humans and machines is to enhance each other’s strengths: the leadership, teamwork, creativity, and social skills of the former, and the speed, scalability, and quantitative capabilities of the latter.

This collaboration envisages that every participant has their role, be it a domain specialist getting meaning out of scattered raw data or the selected AI algorithms.

Role of Humans

Training ML algorithms

In many cases, machine learning algorithms are trained with human supervision. Domain specialists collect huge datasets to be fed into algorithms from any field of human knowledge from idioms in multiple languages and disease courses to cultivation of different sorts of apples. Moreover, AI systems undergo training on how to interact with humans to develop just the right personality: confident, caring, and helpful but not bossy. For example, Apple’s Siri was created with the help of human trainers to simulate certain human-like traits.

Connecting AI with the world

As it was mentioned, AI systems have little knowledge of the context — the world surrounding them remains unnoticed and not taken into account. Probably, the most evident example is the emotional deficiency of machines. Humans are driven by emotions. And emotions are precisely the most complex issue to simulate in AI. Consequently, human experts are charged with giving artificial intelligence the correct perception of the factual and emotional surroundings.

Explaining AI behaviour

The famous black-box problem in AI refers to the fact that AI reaches conclusions and renders results through processes that are usually opaque. Since evidence-based industries, such as medicine, a practitioner needs to understand how the AI weighs input data, human experts in the relevant fields are required to explain the machine behavior to users. Such explanations services are becoming integral in regulated industries — the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for instance, gives consumers the right to receive an explanation for any algorithm-based decision, such as the rate offer on a credit card or mortgage.

Sustaining AI systems

AI systems should always function properly, safely, and responsibly, that is why they need human supervision to anticipate and prevent any potential harm by AIs. Besides, AI systems should be helped to uphold ethical norms and to protect data privacy.

Role of Machines

When guided by human experts, smart machines may help humans expand their abilities providing fast and well-calculated decisions and insights.

Amplifying human cognitive abilities

AI can boost human analytic and decision-making abilities by providing the right information at the right time. Machines calculate faster and more accurately; they can better categorize or even analyze things, so that human experts receive meaningful preprocessed data.

Interacting with colleagues and customers

AI systems can facilitate communications between people by performing routine tasks, such as by transcribing a meeting and distributing a voice-searchable version to those who couldn’t attend. Such applications are inherently scalable — a single chatbot, for instance, can provide customer service to many people simultaneously.

Embodying human skills

A number of AI-driven applications are embodied in a robot that augments human skills with the help of installed sensors, motors, and actuators. Such robots can now recognize objects and people. They work alongside humans in factories, warehouses, and laboratories to perform repetitive actions that require brute force, while humans carry out complementary tasks where human judgment is needed.

Human-machine cooperation is not always about enhancing our efficiency: it does not require sheer computational power, but relies on intuition, and pre-evolved dispositions toward cooperation, common-sense mechanisms that are difficult to encode in machines. If we could develop the same cooperative disposition in machines — would it be the right degree of consciousness to ensure cooperation?

So far, we see AI mainly as a tool to enhance our physical or cognitive capacities. But what if we find real partners in machines? Machines and humans are a perfect match because they are complementary, and we are here to decide which computer traits we need to develop and use.

References:

Marcus, G. (2018). Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal. arXiv.

Thiel, P., Masters, B.(2014) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Currency.

Urban, T. (2015). The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence. Part 1 and Part 2.

[fastforwardlabs]

Thomas Wiecki on Probabilistic Programming with PyMC3

A rolling regression with PyMC3: instead of the regression coefficients being constant over time (the points are daily stock prices of 2 stocks), this model assumes they follow a random-walk and can thus slowly adapt them over time to fit the data best. 

Probabilistic programming is coming of age. While normal programming languages denote procedures, probabilistic programming languages denote models and perform inference on these models. Users write code to specify a model for their data, and the languages run sampling algorithms across probability distributions to output answers with confidence rates and levels of uncertainty across a full distribution. These languages, in turn, open up a whole range of analytical possibilities that have historically been too hard to implement in commercial products.

One sector where probabilistic programming will likely have significant impact is financial services. Be it when predicting future market behavior or loan defaults, when analyzing individual credit patterns or anomalies that might indicate fraud, financial services organizations live and breathe risk. In that world, a tool that makes it easy and fast to predict future scenarios while quantifying uncertainty could have tremendous impact. That’s why Thomas Wiecki, Director of Data Science for the crowdsourced investment management firm Quantopian, is so excited about probabilistic programming and the new release of PyMC3 3.0.

We interviewed Dr. Wiecki to get his thoughts on why probabilistic programming is taking off now and why he thinks it’s important. Check out his blog, and keep reading for highlights!

A key benefit of probabilistic programming is that it makes it easier to construct and fit Bayesian inference models. You have a history working with Bayesian methods in your doctoral work on cognition and psychiatry. How did you use them?

One of the main problems in psychiatry today is that disorders like depression or schizophrenia are diagnosed based purely on subjective reporting of symptoms, not biological traits you can measure. By way of comparison, imagine if a cardiologist were to prescribe heart medication based on answers you gave in a questionnaire! Even the categories used to diagnose depression aren’t that valid, as two patients may have completely different symptoms, caused by different underlying biological mechanisms, but both fall under the broad category “depressed.” My thesis tried to change that by identifying differences in cognitive function -- rather than reported symptoms -- to diagnose psychiatric diseases. Towards that goal, we used computational models of the brain, estimated in a Bayesian framework, to try to measure cognitive function. Once we had accurate measures of cognitive function, we used machine learning to train classifiers to predict whether individuals were suffering from certain psychiatric or neurological disorders. The ultimate goal was to replace disease categories based on subjective descriptions of symptoms with objectively measurable cognitive function. This new field of research is generally known as computational psychiatry, and is starting to take root in industries like pharmaceuticals to test the efficacy of new drugs.

What exactly was Bayesian about your approach?

We mainly used it to get accurate fits of our models to behavior. Bayesian methods are especially powerful when there is hierarchical structure in data. In computational psychiatry, individual subjects either belong to a healthy group or a group with psychiatric disease. In terms of cognitive function, individuals are likely to share similarities with other members of their group. Including these groupings into a hierarchical model gave more powerful and informed estimates about individual subjects so we could make better and more confident predictions with less data.

Bayesian inference provides robust means to test hypotheses by estimating how different two different groups are from one another. 

How did you go from computational psychiatry to data science at Quantopian?

I started working part-time at Quantopian during my PhD and just loved the process of building an actual product and solving really difficult applied problems. After I finished my PhD, it was an easy decision to come on full-time and lead the data science efforts there. Quantopian is a community of over 100.000 scientists, developers, students, and finance professionals interested in algorithmic trading. We provide all the tools and data necessary to build state-of-the-art trading algorithms. As a company, we try to identify the most promising algorithms and work with the authors to license them for our upcoming fund, which will launch later this year.  The authors retain the IP of their strategy and get a share of the net profits.

What’s one challenging data science problem you face at Quantopian?

Identifying the best strategies is a really interesting data science problem because people often overfit their strategies to historical data. A lot of strategies thus often look great historically but falter when actually used to trade with real money. As such, we let strategies bake in the oven a bit and accumulate out-of-sample data that the author of the strategy did not have access to, simply because it hadn’t happened yet when the strategy was conceived. We want to wait long enough to gain confidence, but not so long that strategies lose their edge. Probabilistic programming allows us to track uncertainty over time, informing us when we’ve waited long enough to have confidence that the strategy is actually viable and what level of risk we take on when investing in it.

It’s tricky to understand probabilistic programming when you first encounter it. How would you define it?

Probabilistic programming allows you to flexibly construct and fit Bayesian models in computer code. These models are generative: they relate unobservable causes to observable data, to simulate how we believe data is created in the real world. This is actually a very intuitive way to express how you think about a dataset and formulate specific questions. We start by specifying a model, something like “this data fits into a normal distribution”. Then, we run flexible estimation algorithms, like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), to sample from the “posterior”, the distribution updated in light of our real-world data, which quantifies our belief into the most likely causes underlying the data. The key with probabilistic programming is that model construction and inference are almost completely independent. It used to be that those two were inherently tied together so you had to do a lot of math in order to fit a given model. Probabilistic programming can estimate almost any model you dream up which provides the data scientist with a lot of flexibility to iterate quickly on new models that might describe the data even better. Finally, because we operate in a Bayesian framework, the models rest on a very well thought out statistical foundation that handles uncertainty in a principled way.

Much of the math behind Bayesian inference and statistical sampling techniques like MCMC is not new, but probabilistic tooling is. Why is this taking off now?

There are mainly three reasons why probabilistic programming is more viable today than it was in the past. First is simply the increase in compute power, as these MCMC samplers are quite costly to run. Secondly, there have been theoretical advances in the sampling algorithms themselves, especially a new class called Hamiltonian Monte Carlo samplers. These are much more powerful and efficient in how they sample data, allowing us to fit highly complex models. Instead of sampling at random, Hamiltonian samplers use the gradient of the model to focus sampling on high probability areas. By contrast, older packages like BUGS could not compute gradients. Finally, the third required piece was software using automatic differentiation -- an automatic procedure to compute gradients on arbitrary models.

What are the skills required to use probabilistic programming? Can any data scientist get started today or are there prerequisites?

Probabilistic programming is like statistics for hackers. It used to be that even basic statistical modeling required a lot of fancy math. We also used to have to sacrifice the ability to really map the complexity in data to make models that were tractable, but just too simple. For example, with probabilistic programming we don’t have to do something like assume our data is normally distributed just to make our model tractable. This assumption is everywhere because it’s mathematically convenient, but no real-world data looks like this! Probabilistic programming enables us to capture these complex distributions. The required skills are the ability to code in a language like Python and a basic knowledge of probability to be able to state your model. There are also a lot of great resources out there to get started, like Bayesian Analysis with Python, Bayesian Methods for Hackers, and of course the soon-to-be-released Fast Forward Labs report!

Congratulations on the new release of PyMC3! What differentiates PyMC3 from other probabilistic programming languages? What kinds of problems does it solve best? What are its limitations?

Thanks, we are really excited to finally release it, as PyMC3 has been under continuous development for the last 5 years! Stan and PyMC3 are among the current state-of-the-art probabilistic programming frameworks. The main difference is that Stan requires you to write models in a custom language, while PyMC3 models are pure Python code. This makes model specification, interaction, and deployment easier and more direct. In addition to advanced Hamiltonian Monte Carlo samplers, PyMC3 also features streaming variational inference, which allows for very fast model estimation on large data sets as we fit a distribution to the posterior, rather than trying to sample from it. In version 3.1, we plan to support more variational inference algorithms and GPUs, which will make things go even faster!

For which applications is probabilistic programming the right tool? For which is it the wrong tool?

If you only care about pure prediction accuracy, probabilistic programming is probably the wrong tool. However, if you want to gain insight into your data, probabilistic programming allows you to build causal models with high interpretability. This is especially relevant in the sciences and in regulated sectors like healthcare, where predictions have to be justified and can’t just come from a black-box. Another benefit is that because we are in a Bayesian framework, we get uncertainty in our parameters and in our predictions, which is important for areas where we make high-stakes decisions under very noisy conditions, like in finance. Also, if you have prior information about a domain you can very directly build this into the model. For example, let’s say you wanted to estimate the risk of diabetes from a dataset. There are many things we already know even without looking at the data, like that high blood sugar increases that risk dramatically -- we can build that into the model by using an informed prior, something that’s not possible with most machine learning algorithms.

Finally, hierarchical models are very powerful, but often underappreciated. A lot of data sets have an inherent hierarchical structure. For example, take individual preferences of users on a fashion website. Each individual has unique tastes, but often shares tastes with similar users. For example, people are more likely to have similar taste if they have the same sex, or are in the same age group, or live in the same city, state, or country. Such a model can leverage what it has learned from other group members and apply it back to an individual, leading to much more accurate predictions, even in the case where we might only have few data points per individual (which can lead to cold start problems in collaborative filtering). These hierarchies exist everywhere but are all too rarely taken into account properly. Probabilistic programming is the perfect framework to construct and fit hierarchical models.

Interpretability is certainly an issue with deep neural nets, which also require far more data than Bayesian models to train. Do you think Bayesian methods will be important for the future of deep learning?

Yes, and it’s a very exciting area! As we’re able to specify and estimate deep nets or other machine learning methods in probabilistic programming, it could really become a lingua franca that removes the barrier between statistics and machine learning, giving a common tool to do both. One thing that’s great about PyMC3 is that the underlying library is Theano, which was originally developed for deep learning. Theano helps bridge these two areas, combining the power nets have to extract latent representations out of high-dimensional data with variational inference algorithms to estimate models in a Bayesian framework. Bayesian deep learning is hot right now, so much so that NIPS offered a day-long workshop. I’ve also written about the benefits in this post and this post, explaining how Bayesian methods provide more rigor around the uncertainty and estimations of deep net predictions and provides better simulations. Finally, Bayesian Deep Learning will also allow to build exciting new architectures, like Hierarchical Bayesian Deep Networks that are useful for transfer learning. A bit like the work you did to get stronger results from Pictograph using the Wordnet hierarchy.

Bayesian deep nets provide greater insight into the uncertainty around predicted values at a given point. Read more here. 

What books, papers, and people have had the greatest influence on you and your career?

I love Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos series, which got me hooked on science fiction. Michael Frank (my PhD advisor) and EJ Wagenmakers first introduced me to Bayesian statistics. The Stan guys, who developed the NUTS sampler and black-box variational inference, have had a huge influence on PyMC3. They continue to push the boundaries of applied Bayesian statistics. I also really like the work coming out of the labs of David Blei and Max Welling. We hope that PyMC3 will also be an influential tool on the productivity and capabilities on data scientists across the world.

How do you think data and AI will change the financial services industry over the next few years? What should all hedge fund managers know?

I think it’s already had a big impact on finance! And as the mountains of data continue to grow, so will the advantage computers have over humans in their ability to combine and extract information out of that data. Data scientists, with their ability to pull that data together and build the predictive models will be the center of attention. That is really at the core of what we’re doing at Quantopian. We believe that by giving people everywhere on earth a platform that’s state-of-the-art for free we can find that talent before anyone else can.

[maximuswolf]

Sam King, Lenin, monopoly and imperialism. A brief analysis of modern Chinese tech capability via /r/communism

Sam King, Lenin, monopoly and imperialism. A brief analysis of modern Chinese tech capability

I know that this argument has been made on this sub before but I wanted to synthesize it as a quick post and perhaps provide some additional insight. The point is to briefly explain (and provide more examples for) Sam King's thesis which underlines the mechanism behind modern imperialism and the recent "trade war" - hopefully providing a good reference point for these world affairs, a good chance for discussion and a good physical (digital) copy of my own thoughts on it.

Introduction

Over the past decade or so China has increasingly taken up space in the discourse of world politics and economy (to the surprise of nobody reading this). This has been conceptualized in several ways but I should only like to reference two which I have seen to be most common in the material I have interacted with: the "rise of China" and the "continued exploitation of China".

Although there is some overlap between the two conceptualizations and a considerable diversity of arguments within them, they can be somewhat distinguished by their prominent thinkers: the former includes David Harvey and rightists/nationalists (like those on /r/Sino) who seek to prove that China has emerged as a global superpower to challenge the West, and the latter includes (but is not limited to) a more recent movement in anti-imperialist thinking which, in the tradition of unequal exchange, dependency theory and the Global Value Chain, attempts to explain why and how third world countries (including China) are perpetually exploited (John Smith etc). To crudely generalize these: either China is a rising threat to the West (indeed an equal player) or under the boot of imperialism. Obviously there is more nuance to these thoughts (especially from the anti-imperialist school) and they could not be so easily dismissed in an actual scientific article - but they shall serve for a small Reddit post (Smith, Cope and co. are indispensable and are only reduced here by design).

These discourses are typically reconstructed in such a short form on Reddit anyhow, notably shown in recent discussions of the China-US "trade war" which has provided some real-time reference to the "rise/exploitation of China": some argue that Trump/Pompeo and the West are scared of powerful Chinese technology while others argue that they are strong-arming Chinese tech to ensure a continuation of the (unequal & exploiting) status quo. A third trend has been the claim that communists do not care about inter-capitalist rivalries and it would be beneficial for the world's proletariat if Chinese and American capital focused their destructive energy on each other, but without more nuance this (ironically) is just the inverse of r/Sino discourse. Each trend of thought is missing something: "China-boosters" (and their diametrical detractors) cannot accurately analyze China's position in the world, while most modern anti-imperialists accurately identify the global divide but cannot fully explain the mechanisms by which it is perpetuated.

Monopoly & Technology: Samuel King & Lenin

These are the arguments of Samuel King who, writing as a modern anti-imperialist, responds to and critiques both "China-boosters" and his modern anti-imperialist peers. China-boosters are debunked easily enough with a good reading of Smith or Cope and co. (or a direct argument from them), but this modern anti-imperialist thought, King argues, is limited in its explanation of modern affairs because it does not accurately engage with Lenin's basically-correct thesis of imperialism. My writing here is a generalization of King's arguments which are a response to and critique of 70+ years of anti-imperialist writing, so I would encourage the reader to read his thesis (linked above) to understand why he presents these criticisms.

King painstakingly lays out Lenin's thesis of monopoly finance capital - in more specific terms, his argument that monopoly is paired with and maintained by the technological advancement of the labour process. For Lenin, as capitalism approaches monopoly "the most skilled labour is monopolized":

"Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised." - pp. 40

As King notes, Lenin makes this observation while referencing monopolies such as the American Tobacco Trust. Lenin references a report by the American Government Commission on Trusts (pp. 39-40 in the version of Imperialism linked above):

"'Their superiority over competitors is due to the magnitude of its enterprises and their excellent technical equipment. Since its inception, the Tobacco Trust has devoted all its efforts to the universal substitution of mechanical for manual labour. With this end in view it bought up all patents that have anything to do with the manufacture of tobacco and has spent enormous sums for this purpose. Many of these patents at first proved to be of no use, and had to be modified by the engineers employed by the trust. At the end of 1906, two subsidiary companies were formed solely to acquire patents. With the same object in view, the trust has built its own foundries, machine shops and repair shops. One of these establishments, that in Brooklyn, employs on the average 300 workers; here experiments are carried out on inventions concerning the manufacture of cigarettes, cheroots, snuff, tinfoil for packing, boxes, etc. Here, also, inventions are perfected.'...."

The continued quote:

'"....Other trusts also employ so-called developing engineers whose business it is to devise new methods of production and to test technical improvements. The United States Steel Corporation grants big bonuses to its workers and engineers for all inventions that raise technical efficiency, or reduce cost of production.'"

To put it shortly (and again, this is a disservice to King's full revival of Lenin): King argues (through Lenin) that monopoly - more specifically monopoly over scientific advancements in the labour process - is the mechanism by which imperialism keeps the world divided. While Lenin made his observations on American tobacco firms and other monopoly firms of his time, King applies Lenin's theory to the "rise of China" (and more widely against 3rd world advancements); listing several Chinese industries which imperial capital holds monopoly over in the process.

The marriage of finance and industry sees a dumping of huge amounts of capital into R&D to drive innovation and technological advancement, to which the non-monopoly capital of third world firms cannot keep up; thus occupying a subservient role in the global division of labour - possible domination, but never monopoly, over lower-level labour processes like textile manufacturing. This is the crux of King's argument.

Briefly examining Chinese tech

We are able to test this in real-time by observing (but not limiting ourselves to) the ongoing "trade war" and "rise of China". The firms which are targeted by imperialist governments most loudly - Huawei and TikTok - are some of the most technologically competitive firms from China and thus are the most threatening to monopoly capital. Both have set up shop (offices, R&D centres etc) in R&D hot-spots of the global north (like California) and both have been targeted at their weakest link. Huawei relies on foreign chip providers as Chinese chip technology tails the most cutting-edge chip technology of imperialist firms, while both Huawei and TikTok rely on Google mobile services to function and, by extension, access the international market. Unsurprisingly it is these areas by which Huawei and TikTok have been attacked, which - along with the obvious timing of these attacks - illustrates how King's revival of Lenin is correct.

The stage is set for further maneuvering by monopoly capital as China begins to pour more and more capital into its domestic science and technology sectors in an effort to close the gap (Made in China 2025 - Qiao Collective has brought this up before in reference to the trade war). Here I will outline several areas where Chinese technology is behind but attempting to catch up (some of which I adopt from King and some of which are my own predictions) - these are areas to be watched as they are possible targets for future monopoly aggression. Unfortunately I do not have the same resources or thoroughness as King, so while King provides thorough statistics (profit, assets, return on profits) I will provide limited (but easily verifiable) data on tech supply and, by extension, a rough analysis of Chinese tech capability from both private and State-owned companies.

Aerospace:

COMAC planes are still years behind the tech level of the Boeing-Airbus "duopoly". This is most apparent in engine technology, for which COMAC must rely on purchases from Honeywell, General Electric and Rolls Royce. While China can subsidize its aerospace manufacturing domestically it is unlikely to compete independently in the global market if it cannot catch up on the technological front. As part of the China-Russia joint venture for production of the widebody CR929 aircraft, however, China's Aero Engine Corporation and Russia's United Engine Corporation have been working to develop new engines (and both countries have independent development teams as well).

Should China/Russia catch up we should expect to see additional measures to ensure that these airplanes cannot enter wider markets (and so the planes will rely on domestic markets and emerging southern markets). If COMAC can jump ahead technologically and compete we should expect organizations like the FAA or ITC to provide some push-back at the behest of monopoly capital; this has precedence as seen in the experience of Bombardier, for example. Should they continue to tail Western technology, however, they will not be targeted as such; the West would profit off of tech transfer used for domestic Chinese aircraft as COMAC will be out-competed in advanced markets.

Automotive:

Advanced automobile technology is born and consolidated in popular R&D centres like Detroit and Wolfsburg, and typically only available to Chinese automakers through joint-ventures (ie SAIC-Volkswagen or SAIC-GM) or tech-leasing. For many years, China's domestic automobile technology has been exemplified by re-badeged Passats and reconstructed Daihatsus (etc). The most promising global contender based in China today is perhaps privately-run Geely, who was able to purchase Volvo Cars this decade and thus make a significant technological leap forward (Geely Holding Group also owns Lotus cars and has large shares in Volvo AB and Daimler). Another possible contender is privately-owned BYD automotive, a significant developer of EV technology whose parent BYD Co. is 25% owned by Berkshire Hathaway (with the rest split by various Chinese and American capitalists).

BYD has operations in Canada, industry veterans on its design team and plans to expand into Europe, whereas Geely has design centres in Sweden, the USA and the UK. Both companies are targeting the international market; there are other Chinese automobile companies who export their vehicles (and SAIC did buy MG cars and have a R&D centre in the UK at one point) but none have maintained presence in the global north, so I predict that these 2 are the companies to watch (although foreign presence in BYD's stakeholder group will influence how they are approached). To clarify: these are private companies with multinational operations which do not exclude the input of the global north, and so it is possible that their trajectory will not bring them into direct conflict with monopoly interest.

Heavy Industrial Machinery:

The PRC has a significant industrial backbone rooted in the Mao era, but much like the automotive industry the technological capability of Chinese heavy industry is lacking. Chinese heavy machinery is often an amalgamation of tech from different sources; for example, a heavy-truck may have a MAN (German) chassis, a Magna (Canada/Austria) cab and a Cummins (USA) diesel engine; only sometimes containing components from domestic providers like WeiChai Power. Unlike Chinese aerospace and automotive who must compete against large monopolies (Boeing, Toyota etc) in established markets, Chinese heavy machinery has been seen some success internationally thanks to an emerging market in the global south. In other words, the Belt and Road initiative has been a boon for this industry.

Just as American corporations like Caterpillar and Cummins saw huge profit potential in the Chinese construction boom, Chinese machinery manufacturers see increased sales as Chinese capital produces demand for them by funding construction products across the global south. This does not present a challenge to monopoly capital if Chinese industrial tech remains backward and Chinese manufacturers continue to rely on foreign tech input; however, if companies like Shandong Heavy Industry (State-owned and Weichai's parent company) and Sany (private) can develop sufficient technology through significant R&D investment and further foreign acquisitions then we may see more challenge in this area.

Electronics:

The most visible Chinese electronics companies are perhaps Huawei, Xiaomi, Haier, TCL and BBK Electronics (Oppo, OnePlus, Vivo). All of these companies sell a large amount of products yet none really stand out as innovative, overly profitable or competitive outside of their specific low-overhead niches and none (with the exception of Huawei) receive opposition from monopoly capital (Indian boycotting of Chinese brands is tied to nationalism; India does not compete). Therefore, I would like to focus on DJI electronics - a company which dominates the civilian drone market (mostly for photography/videography) and has faced push-back in the USA.

A further qualifier: China has been cited as a leader in surveillance tech and supercomputing, and companies like HikVision are typical references, but Hikvision (and other surveillance and supercomputing firms) rely on Western tech (Intel, Nvidia, Seagate etc) whereas DJI is relatively independent and has even made foreign tech acquisitions (ie Hasselblad imaging tech).

DJI has collaborated with BeiDou satellite systems to create unmanned chemical-spraying options for farmers, made inroads into robotics/AI, propulsion systems, logistics and security, and built R&D and production facilities in California (and several countries). These present the limitations to how DJI can be strong-armed by monopoly capital; the USA cannot disrupt DJI's supply chain so easily, and so they have to base their opposition on fabricated security concerns (which is what we have seen). Depending on DJI's trajectory (assuming further technological innovation which would challenge monopoly interest) I predict that the company will receive more push-back from the "spy" angle.

Note: Chinese software, e-commerce and applications (Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu) may dominate their domestic markets but they present little challenge to entrenched monopoly capital - hence I have not listed them. If they were able to compete in wider markets they would be handled in the same way as ByteDance; unless, perhaps, Huawei was able to develop their own mobile services, which of course assumes that Huawei is able to fight off the aggression they themselves are facing. This further cements the idea that monopoly on higher labour processes is the linchpin of our analysis.

Concluding remarks- catching up?

A common thread through the above examples is the purchase of foreign technology by Chinese corporations. This most certainly appears to be a step up from joint-venture or technological leasing, but one should ask how advanced (and therefore profitable) the technology is which Chinese companies are able to get their hands on. Case in point: Google's sale of Motorola's patents to Lenovo, or IBM's sale of its computer business to (once again) Lenovo.

These examples, which King has written about before (1, 2), point out a flaw in the assumption that the acquisition of foreign tech will allow Chinese firms to catch up: monopolies do not stop innovating in the meantime. If Lenovo, for example, is able to acquire today's "decent tech" from Google in the Motorola purchase, but Google's aim was to slough off less-profitable tech and pursue higher-and-higher areas, then what is the real takeaway? If the phones Lenovo creates cannot compete without Google services, and thus Google still holds monopoly power over them, then it would not appear that Chinese firms are catching up.

I think it is safe to make the following assumption:

No Chinese takeover of tech, "encroachment" on new markets, or so-called advancement in scientific prowess should be considered as noteworthy if it is not challenged by monopoly capital.

While the goal of Made in China 2025 - the advancement of Chinese scientific/technological ability - is obvious, a less-obvious impetus for the Belt and Road Initiative is perhaps the need to create demand for Chinese products that cannot otherwise compete. When this market creation threatens monopoly interest it will be vehemently opposed, but when it presents no such danger it will not be focused upon. Why, for example, would existing imperialist interests take issue with Chinese expansion into the global south if the value ends up in their hands anyway?

Chinese foreign capital investment therefore has no impact on global affairs if there is no monopoly capital backing it. In other words, China's attempt to tread water by carving out a niche for themselves has already proven that there is no push-back where there is no threat to monopoly, and monopoly is the mechanism which keeps China, and the rest of the world, subjugated. Should this actually be challenged in a meaningful way, then we will be facing definite escalation to war.

This turned out much longer than I intended it to be, even while only looking at 4-5 industries, so I may go through it in the future and pare down certain paragraphs. Nonetheless I hope it provokes some thought in its current format. What are some other areas of Chinese industry and technology that should be analyzed in detail? What are some other examples of Global South industry being subjugated by monopoly capital? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Submitted September 04, 2020 at 05:32PM by TheReimMinister via reddit https://ift.tt/3hVSyTn

[specialchan]

Sam King, Lenin, monopoly and imperialism. A brief analysis of modern Chinese tech capability via /r/communism

Sam King, Lenin, monopoly and imperialism. A brief analysis of modern Chinese tech capability

I know that this argument has been made on this sub before but I wanted to synthesize it as a quick post and perhaps provide some additional insight. The point is to briefly explain (and provide more examples for) Sam King's thesis which underlines the mechanism behind modern imperialism and the recent "trade war" - hopefully providing a good reference point for these world affairs, a good chance for discussion and a good physical (digital) copy of my own thoughts on it.

Introduction

Over the past decade or so China has increasingly taken up space in the discourse of world politics and economy (to the surprise of nobody reading this). This has been conceptualized in several ways but I should only like to reference two which I have seen to be most common in the material I have interacted with: the "rise of China" and the "continued exploitation of China".

Although there is some overlap between the two conceptualizations and a considerable diversity of arguments within them, they can be somewhat distinguished by their prominent thinkers: the former includes David Harvey and rightists/nationalists (like those on /r/Sino) who seek to prove that China has emerged as a global superpower to challenge the West, and the latter includes (but is not limited to) a more recent movement in anti-imperialist thinking which, in the tradition of unequal exchange, dependency theory and the Global Value Chain, attempts to explain why and how third world countries (including China) are perpetually exploited (John Smith etc). To crudely generalize these: either China is a rising threat to the West (indeed an equal player) or under the boot of imperialism. Obviously there is more nuance to these thoughts (especially from the anti-imperialist school) and they could not be so easily dismissed in an actual scientific article - but they shall serve for a small Reddit post (Smith, Cope and co. are indispensable and are only reduced here by design).

These discourses are typically reconstructed in such a short form on Reddit anyhow, notably shown in recent discussions of the China-US "trade war" which has provided some real-time reference to the "rise/exploitation of China": some argue that Trump/Pompeo and the West are scared of powerful Chinese technology while others argue that they are strong-arming Chinese tech to ensure a continuation of the (unequal & exploiting) status quo. A third trend has been the claim that communists do not care about inter-capitalist rivalries and it would be beneficial for the world's proletariat if Chinese and American capital focused their destructive energy on each other, but without more nuance this (ironically) is just the inverse of r/Sino discourse. Each trend of thought is missing something: "China-boosters" (and their diametrical detractors) cannot accurately analyze China's position in the world, while most modern anti-imperialists accurately identify the global divide but cannot fully explain the mechanisms by which it is perpetuated.

Monopoly & Technology: Samuel King & Lenin

These are the arguments of Samuel King who, writing as a modern anti-imperialist, responds to and critiques both "China-boosters" and his modern anti-imperialist peers. China-boosters are debunked easily enough with a good reading of Smith or Cope and co. (or a direct argument from them), but this modern anti-imperialist thought, King argues, is limited in its explanation of modern affairs because it does not accurately engage with Lenin's basically-correct thesis of imperialism. My writing here is a generalization of King's arguments which are a response to and critique of 70+ years of anti-imperialist writing, so I would encourage the reader to read his thesis (linked above) to understand why he presents these criticisms.

King painstakingly lays out Lenin's thesis of monopoly finance capital - in more specific terms, his argument that monopoly is paired with and maintained by the technological advancement of the labour process. For Lenin, as capitalism approaches monopoly "the most skilled labour is monopolized":

"Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised." - pp. 40

As King notes, Lenin makes this observation while referencing monopolies such as the American Tobacco Trust. Lenin references a report by the American Government Commission on Trusts (pp. 39-40 in the version of Imperialism linked above):

"'Their superiority over competitors is due to the magnitude of its enterprises and their excellent technical equipment. Since its inception, the Tobacco Trust has devoted all its efforts to the universal substitution of mechanical for manual labour. With this end in view it bought up all patents that have anything to do with the manufacture of tobacco and has spent enormous sums for this purpose. Many of these patents at first proved to be of no use, and had to be modified by the engineers employed by the trust. At the end of 1906, two subsidiary companies were formed solely to acquire patents. With the same object in view, the trust has built its own foundries, machine shops and repair shops. One of these establishments, that in Brooklyn, employs on the average 300 workers; here experiments are carried out on inventions concerning the manufacture of cigarettes, cheroots, snuff, tinfoil for packing, boxes, etc. Here, also, inventions are perfected.'...."

The continued quote:

'"....Other trusts also employ so-called developing engineers whose business it is to devise new methods of production and to test technical improvements. The United States Steel Corporation grants big bonuses to its workers and engineers for all inventions that raise technical efficiency, or reduce cost of production.'"

To put it shortly (and again, this is a disservice to King's full revival of Lenin): King argues (through Lenin) that monopoly - more specifically monopoly over scientific advancements in the labour process - is the mechanism by which imperialism keeps the world divided. While Lenin made his observations on American tobacco firms and other monopoly firms of his time, King applies Lenin's theory to the "rise of China" (and more widely against 3rd world advancements); listing several Chinese industries which imperial capital holds monopoly over in the process.

The marriage of finance and industry sees a dumping of huge amounts of capital into R&D to drive innovation and technological advancement, to which the non-monopoly capital of third world firms cannot keep up; thus occupying a subservient role in the global division of labour - possible domination, but never monopoly, over lower-level labour processes like textile manufacturing. This is the crux of King's argument.

Briefly examining Chinese tech

We are able to test this in real-time by observing (but not limiting ourselves to) the ongoing "trade war" and "rise of China". The firms which are targeted by imperialist governments most loudly - Huawei and TikTok - are some of the most technologically competitive firms from China and thus are the most threatening to monopoly capital. Both have set up shop (offices, R&D centres etc) in R&D hot-spots of the global north (like California) and both have been targeted at their weakest link. Huawei relies on foreign chip providers as Chinese chip technology tails the most cutting-edge chip technology of imperialist firms, while both Huawei and TikTok rely on Google mobile services to function and, by extension, access the international market. Unsurprisingly it is these areas by which Huawei and TikTok have been attacked, which - along with the obvious timing of these attacks - illustrates how King's revival of Lenin is correct.

The stage is set for further maneuvering by monopoly capital as China begins to pour more and more capital into its domestic science and technology sectors in an effort to close the gap (Made in China 2025 - Qiao Collective has brought this up before in reference to the trade war). Here I will outline several areas where Chinese technology is behind but attempting to catch up (some of which I adopt from King and some of which are my own predictions) - these are areas to be watched as they are possible targets for future monopoly aggression. Unfortunately I do not have the same resources or thoroughness as King, so while King provides thorough statistics (profit, assets, return on profits) I will provide limited (but easily verifiable) data on tech supply and, by extension, a rough analysis of Chinese tech capability from both private and State-owned companies.

Aerospace:

COMAC planes are still years behind the tech level of the Boeing-Airbus "duopoly". This is most apparent in engine technology, for which COMAC must rely on purchases from Honeywell, General Electric and Rolls Royce. While China can subsidize its aerospace manufacturing domestically it is unlikely to compete independently in the global market if it cannot catch up on the technological front. As part of the China-Russia joint venture for production of the widebody CR929 aircraft, however, China's Aero Engine Corporation and Russia's United Engine Corporation have been working to develop new engines (and both countries have independent development teams as well).

Should China/Russia catch up we should expect to see additional measures to ensure that these airplanes cannot enter wider markets (and so the planes will rely on domestic markets and emerging southern markets). If COMAC can jump ahead technologically and compete we should expect organizations like the FAA or ITC to provide some push-back at the behest of monopoly capital; this has precedence as seen in the experience of Bombardier, for example. Should they continue to tail Western technology, however, they will not be targeted as such; the West would profit off of tech transfer used for domestic Chinese aircraft as COMAC will be out-competed in advanced markets.

Automotive:

Advanced automobile technology is born and consolidated in popular R&D centres like Detroit and Wolfsburg, and typically only available to Chinese automakers through joint-ventures (ie SAIC-Volkswagen or SAIC-GM) or tech-leasing. For many years, China's domestic automobile technology has been exemplified by re-badeged Passats and reconstructed Daihatsus (etc). The most promising global contender based in China today is perhaps privately-run Geely, who was able to purchase Volvo Cars this decade and thus make a significant technological leap forward (Geely Holding Group also owns Lotus cars and has large shares in Volvo AB and Daimler). Another possible contender is privately-owned BYD automotive, a significant developer of EV technology whose parent BYD Co. is 25% owned by Berkshire Hathaway (with the rest split by various Chinese and American capitalists).

BYD has operations in Canada, industry veterans on its design team and plans to expand into Europe, whereas Geely has design centres in Sweden, the USA and the UK. Both companies are targeting the international market; there are other Chinese automobile companies who export their vehicles (and SAIC did buy MG cars and have a R&D centre in the UK at one point) but none have maintained presence in the global north, so I predict that these 2 are the companies to watch (although foreign presence in BYD's stakeholder group will influence how they are approached). To clarify: these are private companies with multinational operations which do not exclude the input of the global north, and so it is possible that their trajectory will not bring them into direct conflict with monopoly interest.

Heavy Industrial Machinery:

The PRC has a significant industrial backbone rooted in the Mao era, but much like the automotive industry the technological capability of Chinese heavy industry is lacking. Chinese heavy machinery is often an amalgamation of tech from different sources; for example, a heavy-truck may have a MAN (German) chassis, a Magna (Canada/Austria) cab and a Cummins (USA) diesel engine; only sometimes containing components from domestic providers like WeiChai Power. Unlike Chinese aerospace and automotive who must compete against large monopolies (Boeing, Toyota etc) in established markets, Chinese heavy machinery has been seen some success internationally thanks to an emerging market in the global south. In other words, the Belt and Road initiative has been a boon for this industry.

Just as American corporations like Caterpillar and Cummins saw huge profit potential in the Chinese construction boom, Chinese machinery manufacturers see increased sales as Chinese capital produces demand for them by funding construction products across the global south. This does not present a challenge to monopoly capital if Chinese industrial tech remains backward and Chinese manufacturers continue to rely on foreign tech input; however, if companies like Shandong Heavy Industry (State-owned and Weichai's parent company) and Sany (private) can develop sufficient technology through significant R&D investment and further foreign acquisitions then we may see more challenge in this area.

Electronics:

The most visible Chinese electronics companies are perhaps Huawei, Xiaomi, Haier, TCL and BBK Electronics (Oppo, OnePlus, Vivo). All of these companies sell a large amount of products yet none really stand out as innovative, overly profitable or competitive outside of their specific low-overhead niches and none (with the exception of Huawei) receive opposition from monopoly capital (Indian boycotting of Chinese brands is tied to nationalism; India does not compete). Therefore, I would like to focus on DJI electronics - a company which dominates the civilian drone market (mostly for photography/videography) and has faced push-back in the USA.

A further qualifier: China has been cited as a leader in surveillance tech and supercomputing, and companies like HikVision are typical references, but Hikvision (and other surveillance and supercomputing firms) rely on Western tech (Intel, Nvidia, Seagate etc) whereas DJI is relatively independent and has even made foreign tech acquisitions (ie Hasselblad imaging tech).

DJI has collaborated with BeiDou satellite systems to create unmanned chemical-spraying options for farmers, made inroads into robotics/AI, propulsion systems, logistics and security, and built R&D and production facilities in California (and several countries). These present the limitations to how DJI can be strong-armed by monopoly capital; the USA cannot disrupt DJI's supply chain so easily, and so they have to base their opposition on fabricated security concerns (which is what we have seen). Depending on DJI's trajectory (assuming further technological innovation which would challenge monopoly interest) I predict that the company will receive more push-back from the "spy" angle.

Note: Chinese software, e-commerce and applications (Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu) may dominate their domestic markets but they present little challenge to entrenched monopoly capital - hence I have not listed them. If they were able to compete in wider markets they would be handled in the same way as ByteDance; unless, perhaps, Huawei was able to develop their own mobile services, which of course assumes that Huawei is able to fight off the aggression they themselves are facing. This further cements the idea that monopoly on higher labour processes is the linchpin of our analysis.

Concluding remarks- catching up?

A common thread through the above examples is the purchase of foreign technology by Chinese corporations. This most certainly appears to be a step up from joint-venture or technological leasing, but one should ask how advanced (and therefore profitable) the technology is which Chinese companies are able to get their hands on. Case in point: Google's sale of Motorola's patents to Lenovo, or IBM's sale of its computer business to (once again) Lenovo.

These examples, which King has written about before (1, 2), point out a flaw in the assumption that the acquisition of foreign tech will allow Chinese firms to catch up: monopolies do not stop innovating in the meantime. If Lenovo, for example, is able to acquire today's "decent tech" from Google in the Motorola purchase, but Google's aim was to slough off less-profitable tech and pursue higher-and-higher areas, then what is the real takeaway? If the phones Lenovo creates cannot compete without Google services, and thus Google still holds monopoly power over them, then it would not appear that Chinese firms are catching up.

I think it is safe to make the following assumption:

No Chinese takeover of tech, "encroachment" on new markets, or so-called advancement in scientific prowess should be considered as noteworthy if it is not challenged by monopoly capital.

While the goal of Made in China 2025 - the advancement of Chinese scientific/technological ability - is obvious, a less-obvious impetus for the Belt and Road Initiative is perhaps the need to create demand for Chinese products that cannot otherwise compete. When this market creation threatens monopoly interest it will be vehemently opposed, but when it presents no such danger it will not be focused upon. Why, for example, would existing imperialist interests take issue with Chinese expansion into the global south if the value ends up in their hands anyway?

Chinese foreign capital investment therefore has no impact on global affairs if there is no monopoly capital backing it. In other words, China's attempt to tread water by carving out a niche for themselves has already proven that there is no push-back where there is no threat to monopoly, and monopoly is the mechanism which keeps China, and the rest of the world, subjugated. Should this actually be challenged in a meaningful way, then we will be facing definite escalation to war.

This turned out much longer than I intended it to be, even while only looking at 4-5 industries, so I may go through it in the future and pare down certain paragraphs. Nonetheless I hope it provokes some thought in its current format. What are some other areas of Chinese industry and technology that should be analyzed in detail? What are some other examples of Global South industry being subjugated by monopoly capital? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Submitted September 04, 2020 at 05:32PM by TheReimMinister via reddit https://ift.tt/3hVSyTn

[smilystore]

NASA’s BITSE Solar Scope Is Ready for Balloon Flight Over New Mexico

NASA and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, or KASI, are getting ready to test a new way to see the Sun, high over the New Mexico desert.

A balloon large enough to hug a football field is scheduled to take flight no earlier than Aug. 26, 2019, carrying beneath it a solar scope called BITSE. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere, called the corona. Short for Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona, BITSE seeks to explain how the Sun spits out the solar wind.

The solar wind is the stream of charged particles that constantly blows from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, washing over the entire solar system. While scientists generally know where it forms, exactly how it does so remains a mystery. But unlocking the nature of the solar wind is key to predicting how solar eruptions travel. The solar wind is a bit like a water slide: Its flow determines how a solar storm barrels through space. Sometimes, the storms crash into Earth’s magnetic field, sparking disturbances that can interfere with satellites and everyday communications systems like radio or GPS.

A collaboration between NASA and KASI, BITSE demonstrates a new way to study the solar wind. While standard coronagraphs capture the corona’s density, BITSE also measures the temperature and speed of electrons in the solar wind to help understand the powerful forces that accelerate them to speeds of 1 million miles per hour. BITSE’s balloon flight is a key step in the testing and development of this instrument and will help the team of scientists and engineers fine-tune their technology for future spaceflight.

“This is a coronagraph capable of measuring these three properties, all of which you need to understand how the solar wind is formed and accelerated,” said Nat Gopalswamy, BITSE principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. By improving coronagraphs, BITSE furthers our understanding of the corona itself, the driving force behind the solar stuff that fills the space around Earth ultimately improving our ability to forecast weather in space.

Flying to the edge of the atmosphere 

Before launch, in the wee hours of the morning, technicians from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility’s field site in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, will ready the balloon for flight, partially filling the large plastic envelope with helium. The balloon is made of polyethylene — the same material grocery bags are made of and is about as thick as a plastic sandwich bag, but much stronger. As the balloon rises higher above the surface and atmosphere pressure drops, the gas in the balloon expands and it swells.

BITSE will meander upwards until it is some 22 miles above the ground. There, it will coast, taking pictures of the Sun’s seething hot atmosphere. By the end of the day, it will have collected as much as 64 gigabytes 40 feature-length movies’ worth of data.

BITSE’s journey to the sky began with an eclipse. Coronagraphs work by mimicking eclipses; like the Moon, a metal disk called an occulter blocks the Sun, bringing the corona into the spotlight. During the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, Gopalswamy, and his team tested key parts of the instrument in Madras, Oregon. In just two minutes of totality, they took 50 images and demonstrated the challenges and advantages of utilizing their instrument’s particular technique.

Now, the team is no longer limited to hurried research in the Moon’s shadow. A balloon will take their instrument to the edge of the atmosphere, where it will fly for at least six hours. Balloons offer a low-cost way to access this region, allowing scientists to make measurements and perform tests they can’t from the ground. There, BITSE can collect its images with much less background light than from the ground, which interferes with observations of the dim corona.

A new type of coronagraph

Team member Nelson Reginald examines the BITSE instrument in the lab where it was built, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere.

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng

BITSE combines several important technologies. First, the instrument is constructed with a single occulting stage. Then, there’s a special camera that captures polarized light light waves that bob in certain directions. Scientists use these photos to map out electron density, or how many electrons are in the corona and where.

Typical coronagraphs use a wheel that cycles through polarizer filters each oriented to different angles and combine the images to get the polarized light. BITSE’s polarization camera analyzes the observations pixel by pixel, making the process more reliable by reducing the number of moving parts.

“We glued the entire sheet of micro-polarizers on top of the camera detector, so we don’t need the polarization wheel,” said Qian Gong, BITSE lead optics engineer at Goddard.

BITSE also has a filter wheel, which blocks out all the corona’s light except for four specific wavelengths. The ratios of these different wavelengths provide scientists with the temperature and speed of electrons in the corona measurements they can’t obtain from the ground, even during an eclipse. By focusing on a previously unstudied slice of the corona that is key to solar wind formation, the scientists hope to gather new clues to its origins. One day, a version of BITSE could make these measurements from space, extending their observation time from hours to months.

More than 22 miles above the surface, BITSE will drift high above the realm of birds, airplanes, weather, and the blue sky itself. The altitude presents unique challenges, Gong said. Certain design elements are specific to a balloon flight, like BITSE’s temperature-sensitive optics. An onboard thermal system will ensure BITSE doesn’t get too cold during its ascent. Even the glue they used on the polarization filters was carefully selected both to provide good adhesive and withstand the expected temperatures. A shift of just a few microns an average human hair is 75 microns across in response to the chilly upper atmosphere could impact their data, she explained, since each pixel is 7.5 microns wide.

At such high altitudes, the sky is dimmer; where the atmosphere is thin, there are few air particles to scatter light. Compared to the ground, these are much better conditions for a coronagraph. Still, the edge of the atmosphere is brighter than space.

“The sky brightness fundamentally limits what we can see, and drives our need to go to the next step: observations from space,” Goddard solar scientist Jeff Newmark said. Together, Gopalswamy and Newmark are leading the team sending BITSE to the sky, one step closer to space, where there’s no interfering background light.

A true collaborative mission, BITSE features extensive contributions from both NASA and KASI. NASA provided the main optical, mechanical, pointing, communications, and gondola assemblies, as well as overall management and launch of the mission, while KASI provided the filter wheel, instrument computer, and camera system, among other contributions.

Lofty goals

At the end of BITSE’s flight, technicians at the Fort Sumner field site will send termination commands, kicking off a sequence that separates the instrument and balloon, deploys the instrument’s parachute, and punctures the balloon. An airplane circling overhead will keep watch over the balloon’s final moments, and relay BITSE’s location. Hours later, far from where it started, the coronagraph will parachute to the ground. A crew will drive into the desert to recover both the balloon and BITSE at the end of the day.

Data from BITSE’s flight will be useful for the models that scientists use to predict space weather. But the team will be looking to the flight to validate BITSE’s design and performance in a near-space environment. From their field campaign observing the Aug. 2017 solar eclipse to this year’s balloon flight and eventually, spaceflight, the team has continued to set their sights ever higher.

By Nasa

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