#ballistic expert career guide

[forensicfield]

How To Become a Forensic Ballistics Examiner? | forensicfield

Investigating firearm-related evidence at a crime scene, including projectile and explosive behavior, is known as forensic ballistics. An expert in forensic ballistics matches bullets, fragments, and other pieces of evidence with the suspects' or other ..

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[mightystargazer]

Readinglist 2020

Another year gone, another (audio)booklist completed! Not as many as past years, but that´s because I watched a lot of series instead.

Here goes!

Stephen Leather The House on Gable Street

Scott Sigler Pandemic

Jennifer McMahon The Invited

Robert R. McCammon Swan Song

Peter James The House on Cold Hill

Michael McBride Subterrestrial

Karl Beecher Interstellar Caveman

Flint Maxwell Dead Haven

Flint Maxwell Dead Hope

Flint Maxwell Dead Nation

Flint Maxwell Dead Coast

Flint Maxwell Dead End

Andrzej Sapkowski The Last Wish

Andrzej Sapkowski Season of Storms

Andrzej Sapkowski Sword of Destiny

Andrzej Sapkowski Blood of Elves

Andrzej Sapkowski Time of Contempt

Andrzej Sapkowski Baptism of Fire

Andrzej Sapkowski The Tower of the Swallow

Andrzej Sapkowski Lady of the Lake

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Ashes

Jonathan Maberry Rage

T.W. Piperbrook The Reckoning

T.W. Piperbrook The Change

Jeremy Robinson Infinite

Bobby Akart The Shift

Bobby Akart The Pulse

Bobby Akart The Collapse

Chuck Dixon Blooded

Eoin Colfer Highfire

India Hill Brown The Forgotten Girl

Jeff Strand Cyclops Road

Kevin Hearne First Dangle and Other Stories

Douglas Preston Gideon’s Sword

Douglas Preston Gideon’s Corpse

Douglas Preston The Lost Island

Douglas Preston Beyond the Ice Limit

Douglas Preston The Ice Limit

Douglas Preston The Pharaoh Key

Adrienne Lecter Uprising

Adrienne Lecter Retribution

David Morrell Creepers

David Morrell Scavenger

Greig Beck The Void

Greig Beck From Hell

Peter Clines Terminus

James Herbert Moon

Damian Dibben Tomorrow

Dean Koontz Ricochet Joe

Jack Hunt As We Fall

James Herbert The Dark

Jeremy Robinson Tribe

Michael McBride Subhuman

Michael McBride Forsaken

Mark Tufo Asabron

Dean Koontz 77 Shadow Street

George Hill Uprising USA

J R Grey Supervillainy and Other Poor Career Choices

Simone St. James The Sun Down Motel

Mike Evans Origins

Mike Evans Surviving the Turned

Mike Evans Strangers

Mike Evans White Lie

Mike Evans Civil War

Mike Evans Divided

Mike Evans Flight

Keith C. Blackmore Make Me King, Mountain Man

Dean Koontz Darkness Under the Sun

Craig DiLouie One Of Us

Mira Grant Alien Echo

Ambrose Ibsen The Splendor of Fear

Daniel Kraus Bent Heavens

Dean Koontz Watchers

Jack Townsend Tales from the Gas Station 2

Jeff Strand Dead Clown Barbecue

Patrick F. McManus Strange Encounters of the Bird Kind

Scott Cawthon The Silver Eyes

Scott Cawthon The Twisted Ones

Scott Cawthon The Fourth Closet

Eoin Colfer The Fowl Twins

Richard Laymon The Traveling Vampire Show

Peter Meredith The Queen Unthroned

Peter Meredith The Queen Enslaved

Peter Meredith The Queen Unchained

Luke Duffy When There's No More Room in Hell

Larry Levin Oogy

Joseph  Duncan The Oldest Living Vampire

Joseph  Duncan The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl

Jeff Strand Sick House

Douglas Adams Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency

Patrick F. McManus Mosquito Bay

Clive Barker Mister B Gone

Jeremy Robinson Tether

James Herbert The Survivor

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child Thunderhead

Darcy Coates The Carrow Haunt

Adam Nevill The Ritual

Ben Kissel The Last Book on the Left

Craig Robertson The Galaxy According to Giddeon

Kc Wayland We're Alive season 1

Kc Wayland We're Alive season 2

Kc Wayland We're Alive season 3

Kc Wayland We're Alive season 4

Stephen King If It Bleeds

Patric F McManus Scritch's Creek

Luke Duffy The Dead Walk

Jeff VanderMeer Annihilation

Jeff VanderMeer Authority

Jeff VanderMeer Acceptance

Adrian Tchaikovsky The Expert System's Brother

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Days

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Lies

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Hearts

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Games

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Places

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Reapers

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Rites

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Witches

Amanda M. Lee Freaky Fangs

André Alexis Fifteen Dogs

Cherie Priest The Family Plot

Danielle Trussoni The Ancestor

Michael McBride Burial Ground

Mary Roach Stiff

Dean Koontz Devoted

Grady Hendrix The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

James Herbert The Jonah

Mark Tufo Bitfrost

Robert Bevan 7d6

Scott Carson The Chill

Ambrose Ibsen Beyond

Creepypasta Creepypasta storytime

Darcy Coates Craven Manor

Greg F. Gifune Children of Chaos

Joe Hill Full Throttle

Jonathan Janz Exorcist Falls

Linda S. Godfrey Monsters Among Us

Michael Bray Something in the Dark

Terry Pratchett The Colour of Magic

Terry Pratchett Light Fantastic

Terry Pratchett Equal Rites

Terry Pratchett Mort

Terry Pratchett Sourcery

Terry Pratchett Wyrd Sisters

Terry Pratchett Pyramids

Terry Pratchett Guards Guards

Terry Pratchett Eric

Terry Pratchett Moving Pictures

Terry Pratchett Reaper Man

Terry Pratchett Witches Abroad

Terry Pratchett Small Gods

Terry Pratchett Lords and Ladies

Terry Pratchett Men at Arms

Terry Pratchett Soul Music

Terry Pratchett Intreresting Times

Dean Koontz Breathless

Terry Pratchett Maskerade

Terry Pratchett Feet of Clay

Terry Pratchett Hogfather

Terry Pratchett Jingo

Terry Pratchett The Last Continent

Dean Koontz By the Light Of the Moon

Terry Pratchett Carpe Jugulum

Terry Pratchett The Fifth Elephant

Terry Pratchett The Truth

Terry Pratchett Thief of Time

Terry Pratchett The Last Hero

Dean Koontz After the Last Race

Adrienne Lecter Green Fields Book 12

Dean Koontz Chase

Terry Pratchett The Amazing Maurice

Terry Pratchett Night Watch

Terry Pratchett The Wee Free Men

Terry Pratchett Monstrous Regiment

Terry Pratchett A Hat Full of Sky

Terry Pratchett Going Postal

Terry Pratchett Thud

Terry Pratchett Wintersmith

Terry Pratchett Making Money

Terry Pratchett Unseen Academicals

Terry Pratchett I Shall Wear Midnight

Terry Pratchett Snuff

Terry Pratchett Raising Steam

Terry Pratchett The Shepherds Crown

Dean Koontz Shattered

Terry Pratchett Mrs Bradshaws Handbook

Terry Pratchett The Folklore of Discworld

Terry Pratchett The Science of Discworld I

Terry Pratchett The Science of Discworld II

Terry Pratchett The Science of Discworld III

Terry Pratchett The Science of Discworld IV

Dean Koontz Darkfall

Mark Tufo Hvergelmir

Stephen R. George Nightscape

Alan Dean Foster To the Vanishing Point

Barry J. Hutchison A Lot of Weird Space Shizz

Drew Hayes The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales

Drew Hayes Undeath and Taxes

Drew Hayes Bloody Acquisitions

Drew Hayes The Fangs of Freelance Fred

Drew Hayes Deadly Assessments

Drew Hayes Undeasding Bells Fred

Guillermo del Toro Blackwood Tapes 01

Mark Tufo The Bleed

David Haynes Dead Crow

Alex North The Shadows

Adam Nevill Apartment 16

David Gerrold Hella

DC Alden UFO Down

Rachel Aukes 100 Days in Deadland

Rachel Aukes Deadland's Harvest

Rachel Aukes Deadland Rising

Dean Koontz Nightmare Journey

Mark Tufo The Trembling Path

Drew Hayes Underqualified Advice

Tim Lebbon Eden

Eden

Jeff Strand Wolf Hunt 1

Jeff Strand Wolf Hunt 2

Jeff Strand Wolf Hunt 3

L.G. Estrella Two Necromancers, a Bureaucrat, and an Army of Golems

Rick Gualtieri Strange Days

Rick Gualtieri Everyday Horrors

Jeff VanderMeer A Peculiar Peril

Dean Koontz The Taking

John Connolly A Book of Bones

John Connolly The Dirty South

Neil Gaiman The Sandman

Greig Beck The Siberian Incident

Robert A. Heinlein Between Planets

TW Brown Zomblog

TW Brown Zomblog II

TW Brown The Final Entry

TW Brown Snoe

TW Brown Snoe's War

TW Brown Snoe's Journey

Adam Nevill The Reddening

Dean Koontz The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Bernard Taylor The Godsend

Carole Stivers The Mother Code

Spencer Quinn A Cat was Involved

Spencer Quinn Tail of Vengeance

Spencer Quinn Dog on It

Spencer Quinn Thereby Hangs a Tail

Spencer Quinn To Fetch a Thief

Spencer Quinn The Dog Who Knew Too Much

Spencer Quinn A Fistful of Collars

Spencer Quinn The Iggy Chronicles

Spencer Quinn The Sounds and the Furry

Spencer Quinn Paw and Order

Spencer Quinn Scents and Sensibilty

Spencer Quinn Heart of Barkness

Spencer Quinn Of Mutts and Men

Mark Tufo United States of Apocalypse

Robert Bevan Critical Failures VIII

Jeremy Robert Johnson The Loop

Nathan Hystad Red Creek

Nathan Hystad Return to Red Creek

Tom Abrahams The Scourge

Gary Small M.D The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head

Dean Koontz The Voice Of The Night

Mark Tufo The Spirit Clearing

Robert Paolini To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Orson Scott Card Treasure Box

Ted Dekker House

Darcy Coates Hunted

Dean Koontz The Vision

Mark Tufo Encounters

Mark Tufo Reckoning

Mark Tufo Conquest

Mark Tufo From the Ashes

Mark Tufo Into the Fire

Mark Tufo Victory's Defeat

Mark Tufo Defeat's Victory

Brandon Sanderson The Original

Dean Koontz Elsewhere

Mike Baron Florida Man

Keith C Blackmore The Majestic 311

L.G. Estrella Two Necromancers a Dragon and a Vampire

L.G. Estrella The Hungry Dragon Cookie Company

L.G. Estrella a Dwarf Kingdom and a Sky City

Bobby Adair Zero Day

Bobby Adair Infected

Bobby Adair Destroyer

Bobby Adair Dead Fire

Bobby Adair Torrent

Bobby Adair Bleed

Bobby Adair City of Stin

Bobby Adair Grind

Bobby Adair Sanctum

Darcy Coates Ghost Camera

Susanna Clarke Piranesi

Marc-Uwe Kling QualityLand

Darcy Coates The Folcroft Ghosts

Charles Stross Dead Lies Dreaming

D.M. Siciliano Inside

Jim C. Hines Tamora Carter

Jamie McFarlane Junkyard Pirate

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne The Salvage Crew

Andy Mulvihill Action Park

Darcy Coates The Haunting of Blackwood House

Luke Arnold Dead Man in a Ditch

Iain Reid Foe

Micaiah Johnson The Space Between Worlds

Richard Kadrey Hollywood Dead

Richard Kadrey Ballistic Kiss

Orson Scott Card Lost and Found

Greig Beck To the Center of the Earth

Jenny Lawson Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Jenny Lawson Furiously Happy

Guy Adams Arkham County

James Patterson The Warning

James S. Murray Don't Move

Neal Asher Dark Intelligence

Luke Arnold The Last Smile in Sunder City

Jeff Menapace Dark Halls

Darcy Coates The Haunting of Rookward House

Laurel Hightower Crossroads

Pierce Brown Red Rising

Bobby Adair The Liar

Erik Henry Vick Demon King

Alister Hodge The Cavern

Linda S. Godfrey Monsters Among Us

Aaron Mahnke Dreadful Places

R. R. Haywood A Town Called Discovery

Kate Alice Marshall Rules for Vanishing

Ted Dekker The Girl Behind the Red Rope

Steve Alten Primal Waters

Steve Alten Hell's Aquarium

Steve Alten Nightstalkers

Steve Alten Generations

Adam Savage Every Tool's a Hammer

Darcy Coates Black Winter

Eoin Colfer Deny All Charges

David Moody Isolation

Jonathan Maberry Ink

Stephen Graham Jones The Only Good Indians

Barry J. Hutchison The Hunt for Reduk Topa

Lily Brooks-Dalton Good Morning, Midnight

[alexsmitposts]

Why are Tel Aviv and Washington Inflaming the Situation in the Persian Gulf? During the run-up to the anniversary of the insidious assassination of Iranian General Soleimani – and after one month had passed since the equally controversial massacre of leading nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – Israel and the United States, which are ones responsible for this atrocity, are demonstratively increasing their military presence in the Middle East, and doing so in demagogic fashion under the guise of fearing “retaliation from Iran”. The United States, located both at a considerable distance from Iran and outside the range of its missiles, having provoked this crisis clearly fears only a missile attack on its diplomatic mission in Iraq, as well as other American facilities in the region. Washington is trying to validate these fears with reports from American intelligence services, according to which pro-Iranian armed formations that can deliver a “retaliatory strike” have allegedly stepped up their activity in Iraq. However, on December 21 Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh denied these suspicions, which especially resounded in recent statements made by US Secretary of State M. Pompeo about the alleged complicity of pro-Iranian militia in the latest rocket strikes executed on Baghdad’s “Green Zone”. Along with that, Khatibzadeh wrote on Twitter that for Tehran “attacks on diplomatic facilities are unacceptable”. Washington still dispatched additional warships and a squadron of fighters to the Middle East, and demonstratively conducted a nonstop flight of a B-52 strategic bomber that has the ability to carry nuclear weapons, by doing so intending to “intimidate Tehran”. In addition, on December 21 a US naval unit entered the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz that included a USS Georgia (SSGN 729) Ohio-class submarine, which carries up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles and is capable of taking on board up to 66 special operations service personnel, as well as two Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers: a USS Port Royal (CG 73) and a USS Philippine Sea (CG 58). Previously, at the end of November, a USS Nimitz (CVN-68) aircraft carrier was sent off the Persian Gulf “to help contain the enemy”; this was rationalized by the need “to have additional defensive capabilities in the region in case of any unforeseen circumstances”. As far as Israel goes, it clearly fears a “retaliation strike” from Iran since, given the Jewish state’s modest size, a successful attack on it could actually terminate its existence. This is especially true if the strike were to hit the Dimona Nuclear Research Center, which is considered to be the site where Israeli nuclear weapons originated; Tel Aviv neither confirms nor denies that the center exists. Incidentally, Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Movahedi Kermani already delivered a warning to Israel that “if Iran decides to put up resistance, then one missile strike on the Dimona reactor would be enough”. It is clear that Iranian missiles will not really be launched at Dimona, since this is fraught with consequences that entail nuclear contamination and destruction not only for Israel, but for Iran and quite a few neighboring countries across the region. And that is why the Iranian media occasionally names another target: the Israeli city of Haifa. Israel, fearing the hysteria itself that potential military action could unleash, in a speech made by IDF Chief of General Staff Aviv Kochavi on December 21 cautioned Iran not to attack Israel, stating that “the Jewish state will retaliate against any aggression”. Along with that, A. Kohavi evidently pointedly forgot to mention that it is not Iran, but Israel itself, that has already demonstrated its aggressive stance toward the Islamic Republic to the whole world by organizing and initiating acts of terrorism and assassinations – and not only against nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. After all, this is far from the first time that Iranian scientists and leading representatives from Iranian society have been killed by an Israeli act of terrorism. For example, in Tehran, five nuclear physicists have been assassinated recently – and this specifically includes Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the architect of Iran’s ballistic missile program. All this points to the systematic destruction of the best Iranian scientists employed in the defense industry, which is being accomplished by the international community with impunity. This series of assassinations of prominent Iranian scientists, politicians, and military personnel – who ended up being unacceptable for the United States and Israel – substantiates the suspicions first voiced long ago that Western intelligence services and Israel have adopted the terrorist practice of eliminating key personnel and various prominent figures in those countries with which they are at war; this is done to weaken their defense systems and technological potential. In addition to the words it speaks to help deter Tehran, Tel Aviv has taken a series of measures to test the combat readiness of its army against any potential foreign attacks, and is active about consulting with Washington – especially with representatives from the Pentagon – about how to work out joint coordination for the two countries to take military action against Iran. In particular, large-scale, unprecedented exercises came to an end in December, during which the capabilities of the three levels of Israel’s anti-missile defense (ABM) systems to neutralize various air threats were put to the test. Senior Israel Defense Forces officers, according to the Internet publication Breaking Defense, held “negotiations on coordination work” with their counterparts in the US Central Command (CENTCOM, which includes the Middle East) to bolster cooperation between the armed forces in the two countries “against Iran possibly taking revenge in the region”. According to this publication, the IDF has reached its highest degree of readiness, in particular with regard to repelling “some of the 140,000 missiles that Iran-backed Hezbollah has in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen”. At the same time, it has been reported that although the Israeli command does not disclose the details about how it prepares for war, its tactical and operational anti-missile defense systems, and long-range missile systems, are still on high alert. In addition, as reported by The Times of Israel, on December 17, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley arrived in Israel as part of his Middle East tour to discuss the threat that Iran poses to Washington’s allies, including the Jewish state. As part of preventive measures taken against the armed situation in the region potentially escalating, Israel began to actively spread out its naval fleet around Iran. An Israeli Navy Dolphin-class (Type 800) submarine carrying cruise missiles on board passed through the Suez Canal, and on December 21 demonstratively surfaced in the Persian Gulf, in the waters that stretch between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Dolphin is a series of German modified diesel-electric submarines that are specially designed for Israel, and which have from 6-10 torpedo tubes. Besides torpedoes, they are armed with mines and Popeye Turbo SLCM cruise missiles that have a range of up to 1,500 km, and are capable of carrying nuclear charges with a capacity of up to 200 kilotons launched from torpedo tubes. The Israelis regularly keep at least two of their submarines.in the Indian Ocean, in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf. Today, in the assessments made by numerous experts, there is reason to presume that in January 2021, before Donald Trump leaves the White House, a joint American-Israeli missile strike could be launched against Iran, primarily to neutralize Iran’s air defense systems, as well as its nuclear industry facilities. However, while ramping up the degree of military tension in the region Tel Aviv and Washington cannot help but clearly see that Iran does not intend to attack either the United States or Israel. Iran is not in an ideal condition to wage war now, since its economy is seriously undermined by the restrictive measures imposed on its oil sales abroad, as well as by the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, the deficit inflicting its national budget, and the weakening of its national currency. Yes, military operations “against American and Israeli aggressors” can raise patriotic sentiments in the Islamic Republic for a certain period, but they would quickly drain the Iranian economy and militaristic zeal. In addition, hoping for a change in the attitude taken toward it after the White House administration changes, for political and economic reasons it would now be clearly disadvantageous for Tehran to carry out any large-scale “retaliatory strike”. Therefore, the maximum that Tehran is capable of doing today, without causing itself significant damage, is to carry out a special operation against the Israelis involved in the murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – or to inflict a targeted strike on American facilities in the region through its “proxies”. As for the United States, Israel, and their allies taking military action against Iran right now, it should be kept in mind that the Islamic Republic, despite all its existing economic problems, is a pretty tough nut to crack in terms of its military, and aggression against it would have serious costs. And this cost is obviously unacceptable for either Trump or Netanyahu, who intend to keep pursuing their political careers.

[mikeeselvig]

Umpqua fly fishing gear

Umpqua fly fishing gear has dramatically transformed the fly fishing into an easy and enjoyable task to both novice and veteran anglers. With over 40 years of experience in fly fishing, Umpqua has revolutionized this activity to a different perspective, the one that people talk positively about.

Black Dennis founded this fishing apparels in 1972 under the company name Umpqua feather merchants.

Dennis Black was required with fly tying skills that made him a dependable expert in the United States. The American used to rely on imports from Asia for their fly fishing activities. However, Dennis made the availability of fishing apparels easier by setting up a production company in America.

Since then, this company has been producing versatile gears that efficient and dependable.

The quality features of Umpqua fly fishing apparels.

Umpqua experts are visionary individuals whose aims are to produce quality products that will deliver maximum services to all anglers. As a result of their ambitions, Umpqua has managed to provide top quality tools having the following features.

Durability.

Umpqua gears are all long-lasting tools that will ensure you get extended time services. Umpqua gears are made of the world's top-quality materials that are strong enough to resist the abrasion effects of water and other weather conditions.

Lightweight.

Lightweight tools are more comfortable to carry around and use. Casting requires super lightweight equipment so that a soft landing upon your target. Umpqua has done precisely that, to make your fishing enjoyable. You can carry enough fly boxes, accessories, and other fishing devices.

Design.

The design of Umpqua gears is extraordinarily admirable and suitable for many outfits. They provide fashionista anglers with a wide variety of tools and outfits that can fit with your colour choice. If you are such an angler, then you can embrace fly-fishing culture from all angles.

Types of Umpqua apparels.

As mentioned earlier, Umpqua has managed to produce various designs of fishing tools that are available in the market. This article looks at the main Umpqua gears that are suitable for all anglers.

Umpqua fly patch.

This is a handy and portable foam fly patch Which is a new design of the Umpqua's bags and sweep bags. What comes to an anglers mind when he here's about a handy bag, is its size. Anglers value enough storage space that which can accommodate all the fishing accessories. However, this gear has many storage compartments for carrying all the necessary devices you'll need for a whole day.

It comes together with a carabineer and various loop and hook attachments for holding extra accessories. It's also fitted with clips which offer attachment points for vests and bags.

Good enough, it contains holes for attaching and clips. This means you can even choose to play it on your buckles around your waist. This is very important, especially when both your hands are engaged.

This bag weighs 0.8ounces, with 13andndash;1andndash;1 as its dimensions. This is a suitable size for those anglers who would like to keep a lower profile while taking a whole day tour. It goes at only $11, an affordable price for all anglers.

Umpqua bandolier sling.

This is an improved form of the common traditional carrier bag that is passed over your shoulder. An angler can comfortably carry his or her fishing apparels without experiencing any hindrances.

Its main compartment can accommodate two fly boxes. It's also fitted with two side pockets for holding tippets and other accessories. Additionally, it contains two best retractor stations where you can fix your fixtures quickly.

It has a pleasant internal organization for positioning various gears at specific points for easy access, including internal clips for attaching keys and small fly boxes.

Furthermore, it contains a foam fly station that has a fly patch. Web net loops are also available for holding your fly net.

Good enough, its made of ballistic Cordura, a very long-lasting material that will ensure you enjoy long term service. The outer and inner parts of this bag are covered with nylon materials to make super waterproof, thus guaranteeing the safety of your products.

It's a unisex gear that weighs 8 ounces, and its dimensions are 32andndash;15andndash;4. This product is available on the Umpqua's website and other online retail shops and goes at $66.

Umpqua Deluxe Tying kit.

This is a fly tying apparel having a comprehensive service that any angler would expect. A contains a bobbin, scissors, pliers, hooks, a vise, hackle, and Metz for beginners.

This kit comes with a guide book for assisting the user in fixing his or her gears.

Additionally, its dimensions are 9.6andndash;7andndash;2.7inches and weigh 1pounds, which is a suitable shipping weight throughout the world. It's a new product on the market and costs $150.

Umpqua Rivergrip nipper.

This is a suitable gear for fly fishing in rivers and streams. It's easy to Crip in cold or wet conditions, nip, and grip because of its rubberized grips.

This item comes with a suitable hook-eye cleaner that will keep your device efficient.

You shouldn't have any worries about how you will carry such a gear since its equipped with holes where you can clip and attach on your waist belt.

It's a super lightweight product that won't inconvenience an angler in any way since it only weighs 0.8ounces. Its dimensions are 13andndash;1andndash;1, a suitable size to be carried all day long. You can find this product at only $8 and get relentless services.

In addition to the above tools that most people don't know about, Umpqua has also got a wide range of necessary fishing devices such as large arbor Fly rods, reels, tippets, sling packs, carrier bags, waistcoats, and wading apparels.

Umpqua also produces various lure flies like wet flies, dry flies, nymphs and streamers that enables anglers to fish different fish species by feeding them with super attractor lures.

It's easier for beginning anglers to start their fly fishing career with Umpqua gears because it gives them an all-round opportunity of demonstrating their skills and techniques quickly. Veterans can also up their fly fishing game using these tools.

[olivierknox]

The 'bloody-nose option'? Trump eyes action on North Korea in 2018

WASHINGTON — A year of erratic U.S. rhetoric and steadily escalating diplomatic and economic pressure has failed to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, leaving the frustrated Trump administration to reconsider its options going into 2018 as the world wonders whether it’s on the edge of war.

“We’re not committed to a peaceful resolution — we’re committed to a resolution,” President Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, told BBC News this week.

“We want the resolution to be peaceful, but as the president said, all options are on the table. And we have to be prepared, if necessary, to compel the denuclearization of North Korea without the cooperation of that regime,” McMaster said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watching the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile, Sept. 16, 2017. (Photo: KCNA via Reuters)

Inside the administration and in Congress, officials are looking at a wide range of options for dealing with the regime of Kim Jong Un. Some are conventional, like continuing to pressure countries to fully enforce international sanctions meant to starve North Korea of cash and isolate it diplomatically. Some are less so: Two U.S. officials said Trump could consider taking the largely symbolic step of naming a retired military official to coordinate North Korean policy across all of government. That job currently falls to the special representative for North Korea policy, career diplomat Joseph Yun. Some in Congress want the administration to take a much harder line on businesses and countries that flout sanctions.

“We are not on the same sheet of music, when it comes to North Korea, in the U.S. government,” a senator’s senior foreign policy aide who tracks the issue closely told Yahoo News.

And there are more radical options short of an all-out war, including a one-off strike that a former senior U.S. official referred to as “the bloody-nose option” to try to force Pyongyang to negotiate.

In that scenario, the United States would hit a target relevant to North Korea’s missile or nuclear programs, far from civilians, Dennis Wilder, the top East Asia expert on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, told Yahoo News in an interview on December 15. It would be consciously modeled on Trump’s decision to order airstrikes on a Syrian airfield in April in response to the regime’s chemical weapons attack on civilians.

President Trump is briefed about a military strike on Syria from his national security team, April 6, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

“They have a belief that they can do this,” Wilder said of the administration. “Call it ‘the kick in the shin,’ or ‘the bloody nose option’ — you take a single strike, you make sure that the Chinese, the Russians, everybody knows that it’s a single strike.”

That would reduce, though not eliminate, the likelihood of escalation, Wilder said, adding: “You could take that facility out and say, ‘Enough, Mr. Kim, it’s time for you to come and talk.’”

Another option, two congressional officials and one former White House official told Yahoo News, would be for the United States to show it’s serious about interdicting ship-to-ship smuggling. That tactic, aimed at getting around international sanctions, involves North Korean ships swapping cargoes with foreign vessels, usually bearing refined petroleum products.

“I expect we’re going to see more pressure from the U.S., in the form of harsher sanctions (both multilateral and unilateral) and increased maritime interdictions,” Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia under Obama, told Yahoo News via email.

Kim Jong Un guides the second test-fire of intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-14, July 29, 2017. (Photo: KCNA via Reuters)

Washington has already imposed unilateral sanctions on ships that visit North Korean ports. But now, the sources said, some administration officials advocate boarding ships suspected of carrying contraband. The United States would invoke the principles of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a global post-9/11 program to prevent the spread of dangerous technologies. But Washington would have to tread extremely carefully: China never joined the PSI, and boarding a Chinese firm’s ship without Beijing’s at-least-tacit approval would test Sino-U.S. relations. And just who would do the boarding is another extremely sensitive question.

Regional tensions have steadily built over the past few months, with North Korea testing its most powerful nuclear weapon yet and firing its most advanced missile to date — a rocket widely believed to be able to reach anywhere on U.S. soil. From a technical perspective, it’s not clear yet whether the regime has a guidance system reliable enough to hit a specific desired target, or whether it has perfected the technology needed for its warhead to survive the heat of reentry into the atmosphere

Meanwhile, the Trump administration successfully wrangled 15-0 U.N. Security Council votes to toughen sanctions, returned North Korea to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, cheered as nations like Singapore and Sudan cut economic ties with the regime in Pyongyang, and successfully encouraged allies — like Germany — to reduce diplomatic engagement with the secretive Stalinist prison state. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson publicly suggested North Korea would be welcome at the negotiating table without needing to agree to preconditions, then seemed to rescind the invitation. Tillerson also surprised longtime observers of Asian power politics by revealing that the United States and China — Pyongyang’s de facto patron — had discussed in considerable detail how to secure North Korea’s nuclear weapons in the event the regime collapsed.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at the U.N. (Photo: Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

At home, the administration has stepped up its campaign to paint North Korea as a bad actor. First, there was a late-November op-ed by senior State Department official Brian Hook in the New York Times that compared Kim’s elite entourage to intestinal parasites. Then, on Tuesday, Trump homeland security adviser Tom Bossert publicly blamed North Korea for the WannaCry “ransomware” attack that disabled computers around the word in May — an unusual step, given how difficult it can be to definitively determine the authorship of online attacks.

“North Korea has done everything wrong as an actor on the global stage that a country can do,” Bossert later told reporters in the White House briefing room. “President Trump has used just about every lever you can use, short of starving the people of North Korea to death, to change their behavior. And so we don’t have a lot of room left here to apply pressure to change their behavior.”

In a little-noticed section of the White House’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) — a nonbinding document that lays out the president’s view of the world — the administration effectively laid claim to the right to preemptively and unilaterally disrupt future North Korean missile launches.

Tom Bossert, homeland security adviser to President Trump, accuses North Korea of unleashing the so-called WannaCry cyberattack, Dec. 19, 2017. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

“The United States is deploying a layered missile defense system focused on North Korea and Iran to defend our homeland against missile attacks. This system will include the ability to defeat missile threats prior to launch,” the document says.

The NSS did not spell out whether this ability would involve traditional military force — like cruise missile strikes — or high-tech capabilities like hacking or the introduction of a virus. It also does not lay out how the United States would determine whether a missile poses a threat, or to whom.

The warning about possible preemptive U.S. action doesn’t come as a major surprise. U.S. officials, past and present, have discussed that possibility for years. The New York Times reported in March that former President Barack Obama waged clandestine cyberwar on North Korea’s missile launches.

“The president has made it clear that he would not tolerate a North Korean capability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, and it is highly possible that North Korea may attempt to cross that threshold in 2018,” said Denmark, the Obama official. “President Trump’s response will be the critical moment in this crisis and will define geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come.”

The blustery talk from Washington — threatening to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, or “totally destroy” it, or suggesting North Korean leaders “won’t be around much longer” — while playing down the value of negotiations has made some wonder whether the administration is giving diplomacy a shot.

Amid talk of war, another North Korea expert predicts that the Trump administration would be “muddling through” 2018 without dramatic shifts on policy.

President Trump making a national security strategy speech, Dec. 18, 2017. (Photo: Zach Gibson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“The risk of ending program militarily is enormous compared with the risk of managing it,” Mike Green, who preceded Wilder as the top Asia hand on Bush’s National Security Council, told Yahoo News.

“If they shoot back, it’s tens of thousands killed in a conventional war and potentially millions if they use chemical or biological weapons, or target Tokyo with a nuclear missile,” he added.

Still, Green said, “living with North Korea, it’s not going to be comfortable. The term ‘live with’ actually sounds too comfortable.” Instead of the mutual deterrence of the Cold War, Washington needs to prepare to counter a nuclear North Korea’s efforts “to blackmail, intimidate, threaten” in a kind of “ugly deterrence” he said.

Still, there are some things that could be a prelude to armed conflict, like the withdrawal of U.S. government officials or their relatives from South Korea, as happened in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“If there’s an evacuation, that means I was wrong,” Green said.

Another clue could be how big business, including firms with ties to China, operates in South Korea.

“Keep an eye on companies. Do corporations visibly start pulling out dependents, or changing their supply chains?” Green said.

Pyongyang has a say in the standoff, of course.

President Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in participate in a joint news conference in Seoul, South Korea, Nov. 7, 2017. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)

“Look at what — and when and where — the North Koreans test,” Green said. “Do they demonstrate their capability undeniably by blowing up something in the atmosphere?”

There are other things to watch as well, Green said, like whether and how the United States helps South Korea and Japan develop offensive military capabilities – and whether and how Washington tries to calm skittish allies in the region.

Another open question is “does Tillerson stay in office, and does he get enough of a leash to try diplomacy,” Green said.

The next few months will also provide a clue as to “instability within North Korea – answering the question of just how stable is the regime under sanctions pressure, and as sanctions ramp up,” said Green.

But the most important factor to watch is Trump himself.

“The real question is if the president will use military force to prevent North Korea from crossing the threshold of achieving a credible nuclear deterrent,” said Denmark. “If that happens, there is no prediction what happens next.”

_____

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[fumpkins]

The Order of the Dolphin: SETI’s secret origin story

The Stage Is Set

Now, back to that clandestine 1961 meeting at Green Bank.

The Space Science Board, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, had tasked scientist and ballistics expert J.P.T. Pearman with putting together a meeting to expand the search for alien intelligence. While it wasn’t officially a secret meeting, it wasn’t well publicized either, since the topic was still considered one of the fringes of established research. No one wanted to put their career on the line to search for little green men.

Counting Pearman, the gathering included 10 scientists. Drake and Lilly were there, of course, as well as Drake’s inspiration Morrison. Also in attendance were radio expert Dana Atchley,pre-eminent biochemist Melvin Calvin, optical astronomer Su-Shu Huang (who first conceived of stars having “habitable zones”), computing pioneer Barney Oliver and Russian radio astronomer Otto Struve. The final attendee was a young Carl Sagan, now perhaps the best known of the bunch.

(One more unofficial attendee: A supply of champagne to celebrate the likely announcement of a Nobel Prize for Calvin’s work on plant photosynthesis.)

The biggest outcome of the conference was the Drake Equation. To know if aliens were out there, it helped to have an idea of how abundant they might be. The equation quantified estimates of star formation, planet formation, the likelihood of intelligent life arising and other factors necessary for intelligent life to exist. Written out, the final equation is N = R* • fp • Ne • fl • fi • fc • L.

Despite its output of hard numbers, the Drake Equation is more symbolic than descriptive, a thoughtful tool to guide how scientists should think about looking for alien life. It set the tone for SETI and how it would be carried out in the subsequent decades, and offered a way forward for research that combined various legitimate scientific disciplines.

Cause for Celebration

As it happened, Calvin did win the Nobel, and the attendees indeed busted out the bubbly. But Lilly became another star of the show. Drake would write that, “Much of that first day, he regaled us with tales of his bottlenosed dolphins, whose brains, he said, were larger than ours and just as densely packed with neurons. Some parts of the dolphin brain looked even more complex than their human counterparts, he averred. Clearly, more than one intelligent species had evolved on Earth.”

Lilly told the attendees he also heard signs of language, and empathy, in recordings of the dolphins. “In fact, if we slowed down the playback speed of the tape recorder enough, the squeaks and clicks sounded like human language,” Drake wrote. “We were all totally enthralled by these reports. We felt some of the excitement in store for us when we encounter nonhuman intelligence of extraterrestrial origin.”

Lilly’s research generated so much excitement that, by the end of the conference, the attendees called themselves the Order of the Dolphin. Calvin, in his post-Nobel joy, even went on to send commemorative pins to the attendees. “He caused to be made these little pins which had silver dolphins on them, which he sent to all of us,” Morrison told David Swift, author of the book SETI Pioneers. “It wasn’t that we ever had meetings or chose officers of the Order of the Dolphin. It was just a souvenir of the particular time together.”

Their excitement may have been a little hasty. “In retrospect,” Drake wrote, “I now think that Lilly’s work was poor science. He had probably distilled endless hours of recordings to select those little bits that sounded humanlike.” He wasn’t alone.

“At that time we were quite enthusiastic about it because John Lilly came and told us about communications with dolphins,” Morrison told Swift. “Within a few years, the subject had pretty much dissipated, and Lilly’s work was not found to be reliable.”

Shortly after the Order of the Dolphin meeting, Lilly began incorporating ketamine and LSD (legal at the time) into his experiments, hoping it would help him communicate better with dolphins. While Sagan visited the early experiments, reporting back to Drake on Lilly’s progress, as the science became hazier Sagan’s interest drifted as well. The work has tainted attempts to understand the intelligence of dolphins ever since.

But while he may have veered into the realm of pseudo-science, Lilly did provide one useful guideline for future SETI efforts. “We came to a general conclusion … that in order to make any sense out of an alien language you had to hear a conversation between two of them,” Calvin told Swift. “You had to sit between them and hear a call and a response. You couldn’t just hear one side of the conversation, you couldn’t just receive.”

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New post published on: https://www.livescience.tech/2018/10/10/the-order-of-the-dolphin-setis-secret-origin-story/

[zipgrowth]

How a Science Research Program Taught Students to Pursue Futures Fueled by Passion

When Antonio was 16, he had bugs in his basement. While this sounds like a reason to call the exterminator, it was actually planned. Antonio’s mother had been in touch with his science teacher and was brave enough to allow her son to hatch praying mantis eggs in their basement as part of his research.

Antonio was just one of the memorable students in my first science research class at Christ the King Regional High School, a parochial school in Queens, New York. Projects like this were not uncommon in the early years of developing our authentic-learning science program in the mid-nineties.

At the time, our school had a reputation for high standards, but its instructional model was very cookie cutter. Science classes were lecture-based with occasional labs, and each course culminated in a statewide Regents Exam.

By 1996 I had already been teaching earth science for 20 years. I enjoyed my work, but I was searching for something that would have more a lasting impact on my students’ lives. I knew that I was teaching valuable learning skills and preparing students to become informed citizens, but was I really helping them see science as a possible career path?

Then I attended a six-hour workshop that radically changed my approach to teaching. At that workshop, I was introduced to a model that involved developing a 3-year program, a version of which I later adopted at my school.

Beginning in 10th grade, students would be taken through a process that would help them choose their own personal topic of interest. There would be a focus on research, writing and oral presentation skills. Students would have opportunities to develop collaboration and sharing skills throughout the program. In 11th grade students would develop their own unique experiment and carry it out with a mentor in their field of interest. In 12th grade students would write a formal research paper and use their findings to enter numerous competitions, including the most prestigious of all at that time, the Intel Talent Search. (This competition is still in existence today as the Regeneron Science Talent Search.) If they put in the requisite number of hours during the three years and summers, they could earn 12 college credits for their work.

My 15-year-old students had the confidence to email and call some of the top scientists in the country to ask questions about what they had read and seek advice for their own experiments

It was an ambitious and daunting task. How could all of this fit in to a student’s scheduled day? I decided we would use the before-school zero period. At 7 a.m. each morning a group of the most motivated students I have ever worked with would come together to work on their research. While many teenagers were just getting out of bed, these students would listen to presentations given by their peers and provide critical feedback on both the scientific methods used and their oral presentation skills. They would help each other with research techniques and fill out competition applications together.

Every two weeks I would conference with each student individually to learn about how their research was progressing. We would work on organizational skills and plan out next steps. We would identify mentors, people in the scientific community who would be willing to answer questions and hopefully guide the experiments of these budding scientists. That was probably the most difficult task in this development process. Christ the King was known for its wonderful athletic program, not its science program, so it was almost impossible to procure mentors. We didn’t have the pedigree of Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech. We still had to prove that we could compete with the big-name science schools in New York.

We persisted. After six years the results showed a program that had grown from eight students to 36. Our high school students had become experts in their field of interest, and had developed a broad range of research skills, like developing hypotheses and reading dense texts, as well as organizational and public speaking skills. They critiqued the work and presentations of their classmates with a positive approach and a level of maturity that belied their young ages.

My 15-year-old students had the confidence to email and call some of the top scientists in the country to ask questions about what they had read and seek advice for their own experiments. They competed alongside the top science students in New York City and walked away with their share of awards. They presented their work with the community at an annual symposium that became more impressive each year.

Did all of the students pursue science as a career? Of course not, but many found a career path that they didn’t even know existed before they embarked on this journey.

They left this program with the ability to figure out what they were interested in because they had already experienced that process. They had actively participated in an instructional model that encouraged them to pursue projects fueled by their passions.

Now well into their thirties, many of my former students have kept in touch via social media. Antonio, the praying mantis hatcher (aka “bug boy”), now works as a forensic scientist. Gretchen, who researched the effect of urban sounds on coyotes, is now a zoo keeper at the same zoo where she conducted her research and experiment almost 20 years ago. Lenny, an Intel semi-finalist who launched rockets in a park and built a robot in his bedroom, is a technical staff member at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory where he provides analysis to the U.S. government to develop and maintain the national Ballistic Missile Defense System. Gina, who studied the genetic and environmental factors involved in forensic psychology, works at Cornell University focusing on chromosomal abnormalities and genetic testing and counseling.

Even the students who did not continue in scientific fields use what they learned in their professions. One student, Kelly, has contacted me several times to inform me that she was learning about institutional review boards and how to record data in graduate courses she was taking for her master's degree in education—something she reminded me I taught her in 10th grade. Jennifer has written to me about how she uses what she learned in our science research program to motivate her math students. She recalled being challenged to do things she did not think she could do and pushing herself to succeed.

This was a learning experience for me as well. I was in the middle of my career as an educator, but I learned valuable lessons about going beyond delivering a curriculum. I learned how to understand each learner so that I could teach them more than facts. I wanted to teach them not only how to learn, but how each of them learned individually.

As I look toward the end of my career in education, which has spanned over four decades, it’s clear that the crux of my journey lies in the personal relationships I forged with students and the positive impact those relationships may have had on their lives and careers.

It’s also pretty symbolic that as I’m about to retire, education researchers, journalists and politicians are buzzing about personalized learning. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not new. It’s what good educators have done for a long time—or at least since the nineties.

How a Science Research Program Taught Students to Pursue Futures Fueled by Passion published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[technato]

Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm

The IBM engineer’s hashing algorithm gave computers a way to quickly search documents, DNA, and databases

Photo: IBM

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Photo: IBM

Information Scientist: Starting in the 1940s, Luhn devised machines and schemes for parsing information, most notably the now widely used hashing algorithm, which he suggested as a way to sort both numbers and text.

In November 1958, at a six-day international conference devoted to scientific information, the inventor Hans Peter Luhn demonstrated a series of his electromechanical machines. They looked rather ordinary. Much like other computing devices of the day, they were boxy and utilitarian, designed to scoop and sort tall stacks of punch cards into slots and bins.

Unlike other computers, however, Luhn’s devices were not designed to work with numbers and calculations but rather with words and sentences. One machine that drew particular attention implemented an algorithm that Luhn called KWIC, for Key Word in Context. Taking in a large number of texts—typically, articles from 500 to 5,000 words in length—the KWIC system could quickly and automatically construct a kind of index.

At the time, indexing, classifying, and organizing written information was a painstaking process, even for the most experienced specialists. And the volume of information in many fields was growing too rapidly for anyone to keep up. A better means for abstracting and summarizing was desperately needed. For the otherwise staid gathering of librarians and information scientists in Washington, D.C., the demonstration of KWIC was nothing short of earthshaking, with newspapers across the United States reporting on Luhn’s astounding invention.

By the early 1960s, KWIC had become central to the design of hundreds of computerized indexing systems, including those used by the Chemical Abstracts Service, Biological Abstracts, and the Institute for Scientific Information. One expert called KWIC “the greatest thing to happen in chemistry since the invention of the test tube.” Luhn, a senior engineer at IBM, also built KWIC into an “intelligence system” for businesses, designed to identify and then deliver relevant information to specific individuals within a large organization. KWIC was basically the era’s equivalent of a search engine: It allowed users to speedily locate the information they needed.

We now take for granted that computers can make sense of information, readily offering up restaurant reviews, sports scores, and stock prices on demand. In Luhn’s time, though, computers were crude and simple. His attempts to manipulate text contributed to a more expansive way of thinking about computers and their capabilities, and his ideas still underpin modern-day algorithms that we use for online shopping, automatic translation, and genetic research. In the 1950s, of course, many of these applications weren’t even conceivable. Here I’ll explore what led Luhn to the solution of a problem that didn’t yet exist—a solution called the hash function.

The years following World War II were formative ones for electronic computers. Various kinds of computers built during the war made vital calculations for ballistics, atomic weapons, and cryptography. Cold War tensions ensured continued funding for the development of computers, and as a result they grew faster, more accurate, and more powerful. But their main uses—crunching and storing numbers—changed little.

Within this nascent computer world, Luhn cut an unusual figure. An elegant dresser throughout his life, Luhn knew more about the textiles industry than computer science when he arrived at IBM in 1941. His many inventions seemed to belong to an earlier, predigital era of mechanical calculators and slide rules. Even in the 1950s, digital computers were supplanting his electromechanical devices. Nevertheless, his ideas, transformed and remixed for a variety of purposes, are now embedded in almost every kind of software we can think of.

Luhn was born in Barmen, Germany, in 1896. His father, Johann, was a master printer, prosperous and apparently very tolerant of his children’s endeavors. At one point, Luhn and his younger siblings built a miniature railroad in the family garden, including 70 meters of track made by melting down printer’s lead.

After high school, Luhn went to Switzerland to learn the family trade. But World War I and a stint in the German army interrupted his printing career, and after the war, he landed in the textile trade. Luhn came to the United States in 1924 to scout for potential locations for textile mills. Even in textiles, Luhn’s inventive bent was apparent. In 1927, he developed a rulerlike device that could be used to gauge the thread count of cloth. The Lunometer is still sold by H.P. Luhn & Associates, an engineering consulting company that Luhn founded.

Luhn was a quick study, absorbing information from a wide variety of fields and becoming in turn a proficient mountain climber, gourmet cook, and expert landscape painter. During the 1930s, his numerous patents included a foldable raincoat, a device for shaping women’s stockings, a game table, and the “Cocktail Oracle”—a guide that told the user what drinks could be made from the ingredients on hand.

Illustration: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Drinks, Anyone? Luhn’s inventive mind roamed far and wide. In 1933, shortly before the end of Prohibition, he filed for a U.S. patent on a recipe guide that helped the user create cocktails from materials on hand.

But Luhn’s real interest was in the storage, communication, and retrieval of information, especially text, and it was largely to pursue those interests that he joined IBM. Given the title of “inventor,” Luhn was prolific—he ended up producing 70 patents for IBM. Although he had the latitude to tackle whatever problems he liked, many of his inventions focused on using machines, including electronic computers, for manipulating information.

In 1946 and 1947, for example, Luhn worked on creating machine-readable typewritten documents. One device consisted of a metallic ribbon inserted into a typewriter, which punched magnetic patterns onto paper that could then be scanned by machine. Shortly afterward, he began to work with two MIT chemists, Malcolm Dyson and James Perry, on a machine that could automatically search through chemical compounds using punch cards. Each punch card was encoded with information about a particular compound. The user inserted a “question card” into the machine listing a set of criteria against which all the compound cards could be compared and sorted. Although Luhn’s scanner was highly specialized, he continued to look for more general-purpose ways to automatically process information.

Information was very much on people’s minds. The postwar years saw an explosion in the number of published papers in science and engineering. Many experts worried that “information overload” threatened to overwhelm researchers and businessmen alike. Vannevar Bush, a leader of America’s massive wartime scientific bureaucracy and one of the architects of the National Science Foundation, proposed a desk-size electromechanical device, the Memex, for storing and linking together information.

Bush’s idea was never realized, but Luhn’s ideas were. On 6 January 1954, for instance, he filed for a U.S. patent on a “Computer for Verifying Numbers” [PDF]. This handheld mechanical device aimed to solve a simple practical problem. At the time, various kinds of identification numbers, such as credit card numbers and Social Security numbers, were beginning to play an important role in public and private life. But the numbers were difficult to remember, and they could be transcribed incorrectly or deliberately falsified. What was needed was a means of quickly verifying whether an ID number was valid.

Luhn’s handheld computer did that, using a checksum algorithm he developed. For a 10-digit number, the computer would perform the following steps:

Double every second digit

If any result is 10 or greater, add up the digits of that result to get a single-digit number (for example, “16” would become 1 + 6 = 7)

Add up all 10 digits of the new number

Multiply by 9

Take the last digit of that result

This recipe produced a single-digit “check” number. In Luhn’s original formulation, a 0 indicated the original number was valid. In later versions, the check was simply appended to the original number as a final digit, so that you could easily verify that the final digit matched the check number produced by his machine. The underlying sequence of calculations, now known as the modulus 10 algorithm, is still widely used. The International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers assigned to cellular phones are verified in this way.

Photo: IBM

Quick Indexing: At the 1958 International Conference for Scientific Information, Hans Peter Luhn [right] demonstrated an IBM system for automatically generating indexes of documents, based on an algorithm he’d developed called KWIC, for Key Word in Context.

More significantly, the gears and wheels of Luhn’s machine became the foundation for one of the most important algorithms of the digital age: the hash. This wide class of algorithms provides a powerful means of organizing information so that it’s easy for a computer to find. Much like a culinary hash of corned beef and potatoes, a hash algorithm chops and mixes up data in various ways. Such mixing, when cleverly deployed, can speed up many types of computer operations.

In early 1953, Luhn had written an internal IBM memo in which he suggested putting information into “buckets” in order to speed up a search. Let’s say you wanted to look up a telephone number in a database and find out whom it belonged to. Given the 10-digit number 314-159-2652, a computer could simply search through the list one number at a time until it found the relevant entry. In a database of millions of numbers, though, this could take a while.

Luhn’s idea was to assign each entry to a numbered bucket, as follows: The phone number’s digits were grouped into pairs (in this case, 31, 41, 59, 26, 52). The paired digits were then added together (4, 5, 14, 8, 7), from which a new number was generated, consisting of each single-digit result or, in the case of a double-digit result, just the last digit (yielding 45487). The original phone number and the name or address corresponding to it would then be put into a bucket labeled 45487.

Looking up an entry from a phone number involved quickly calculating the bucket number using Luhn’s method and then retrieving the information from that bucket. Even if each bucket contained multiple entries, sequentially searching through a single bucket was much faster than searching the entire list.

Over the decades, computer scientists and programmers have improved on Luhn’s methods and pushed them to new uses. But the basic idea is still the same: Use a math problem to organize data into easily searchable buckets. Because organizing and searching for data are such widespread problems in computing, hashing algorithms have become crucial to cryptography, graphics, telecommunications, and biology. Every time you send a credit card number over the Web or use your word processor’s dictionary, hash functions are at work.

Luhn’s ideas about computing went far beyond simple lookups. He saw that computers could be sophisticated text manipulators—for reading and understanding written language and then indexing and organizing that information so as to solve practical problems in science and business. By 1958, his chemical card sorter had evolved into the Universal Card Scanner and the 9900 Special Index Analyzer, which he demonstrated at the Washington, D.C., conference. These were electromechanical devices that could search and sort punched cards according to the user’s criteria.

What really caused a stir, though, was KWIC, Luhn’s computerized method of constructing concordances. A concordance is an alphabetical list of key words used in a book or a collection of writings. It’s like an index, but it lists only actual words that appear in the text, not the concepts (and it excludes trivial words, like a and the). Concordances have long been used in theology and philology. A concordance of the Bible, for instance, will show every instance of the word love, citing book, chapter, and verse. Before full-text computerized search came along, constructing a concordance was arduous and generally done only for major works like the Bible or the collected writings of Shakespeare.

What Luhn’s bucket scheme did for numbers, his KWIC concordance system did for texts. Both made a large body of information easily searchable. To take a very simple example, let’s say you wanted to generate a concordance of the words in the following four book titles: Gone With the Wind, War and Peace, The Shadow of the Wind, and Shadows of War.

A KWIC concordance of these titles would produce

Gone With the Wind War and Peace The Shadow of the Wind Shadows of War War and Peace Shadows of War Gone With the Wind The Shadow of the Wind

The KWIC algorithm rearranged the words from the titles in all possible orders and then arranged each permutation alphabetically. The result was a complete list of keywords (meaning everything except prepositions, conjunctions, and articles) in the context they appeared.

Luhn’s KWIC system was rapidly adopted throughout the scientific community. He knew it could be useful for business users, too. In 1958, he wrote an article for the IBM Journal of Research and Development entitled “A Business Intelligence System.” In it, he proposed a system that could automatically generate article abstracts, extract “action points” from the abstracts, and then distribute the results to appropriate people within an organization. Luhn understood that solving the information overload problem meant devising a way to quickly sort through the crush of information without burdening people with irrelevant material.

The New York Times, in Luhn’s 1964 obituary, described his auto-abstracting system this way:

“Mr. Luhn, in a demonstration, took a 2,326-word article on hormones of the nervous system from The Scientific American, inserted it in the form of magnetic tape into an I.B.M. computer, and pushed a button. Three minutes later, the machine’s automatic typewriter typed four sentences giving the gist of the article, of which the machine had made an abstract.”

Luhn’s abstracting program worked by first counting the frequency of all the words within an article. After discarding very common words, the auto-abstracter located sentences in which several of the most frequent words occurred together. Such sentences were deemed to be representative of the overall content and so were placed into the abstract. This was a purely statistical method, making no attempt to “understand” the words in an article or the relationships between them. But like KWIC, it showed how computers could be fruitfully put to work organizing text into formats that humans could more easily understand.

Luhn retired from IBM in 1961 and died of leukemia three years later, and he didn’t live to see the profound changes wrought by the Internet and the Web. Beyond a limited circle of information specialists, textile makers, and historians, his name is largely forgotten. But Luhn’s ideas endure. Today, hashing plays a host of roles in managing and protecting our digital lives. When you enter your password on a website, the server is likely storing a hashed version of your password. When you interact with a website using a secure connection (where the URL begins with “https”) or purchase something with Bitcoin, hashes are at work there, too. For cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive, hashing makes storing and sharing files far more efficient. In genetics and other data-intensive research, hashing sharply reduces the time needed to computationally sift through vast quantities of data.

Hashes have turned computers into textual tools that can reason with letters and words. Google Translate, Google N-gram, Google AdWords, and Google Search are all devoted to determining, in one way or another, the meanings of texts. The explosion of information on the Web has made automated reading and understanding of central importance to business, to science, to everyone. The development of hashes was connected to texts, reflected in Luhn’s thinking about words, sentences, concordances, abstracts, indexes, and digests.

This is Luhn’s legacy: He helped show that computers and computation weren’t just the province of mathematics, statistics, and logic but also of language, linguistics, and literature. In his day, this was a revolutionary way to think about machines.

Technology historian Michael Mahoney has called the computer “a protean machine”: not just one thing but many things, a machine waiting to be shaped for different purposes. Even now, we tend to consider computers in a narrow way, as giant number crunchers, performing so many calculations and operations per second. Hans Peter Luhn’s view of computers was more farsighted. And in imagining the computer’s multiplicity, he helped open up promising new territories for exploration.

About the Author

Hallam Stevens is a history professor at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore.

Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com