White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

I’m Not Old — I Just Remember Other Things

by 1 Comment

I am approaching what may be thought of as a significant birthday next month. I’m not sure what makes it significant except the number attached to it.

If we don’t know how old we are, most people, including the elderly, will think they are younger, even if they have arthritic knees. If they take a morning cocktail of pills, they will still think they are much younger than the calendar dictates.

So, here is my guide to knowing, empirically, how old you are. You are old if …

—You remember when all restaurants served half a grapefruit with half a maraschino cherry placed in the middle.

—You remember when restaurants had relish carts with things like watermelon pickles and herring in sour cream.

—You remember a whole class of singers called crooners and you still get a bit weepy when you hear their songs.

—You remember when men’s trousers had buttons instead of zippers.

—You remember when women wore girdles with attachments for stockings.

—You remember when cars had little arms for turn signals, called trafficators, that wouldn’t go up at speed.

—You remember when airline tickets were as good as currency and could easily be exchanged or sold back.

—You remember when flying was a pleasure, even in coach, and you felt pampered, not herded.

—You remember when hotel rooms were rented for fixed prices, and those were posted.

—You remember when sneakers were all white and for tennis.

—You remember when men wore hats and baseball caps were worn just to play baseball.

—You remember when women wore hats and gloves to church.

—You remember when men wore suits to church or just put them on so their neighbors thought they had been at worship.

—You remember when birth control, if available, was with condoms, known as rubbers, and kept under the counter at drugstores.

—You remember when drugstores also had lunch counters.

—You remember soda fountains.

—You remember when Coca-Cola came only in a 6-ounce bottle and tasted better because it had cane sugar and the bottle seemed to concentrate the carbonation. Also, it cost a dime.

—You remember five-and-dime stores where some things really cost only a dime.

—You remember when shopping centers were novel and a place to visit.

—You remember when going to the movies was an occasion. An usher showed you to your seat with a flashlight. And a popcorn, ice cream and candy vendor walked up and down the theater aisles.

—You remember when cigarettes were offered at dinner and ashtrays were part of the table setting.

—You remember when Americans didn’t drink wine, and only glasses for hard liquor were on formal dinner tables.

—You remember when ethnic food was Hunan Chinese, often called Polynesian, and French food wasn’t regarded as ethnic, simply hard to pronounce.

—You remember a time when comfort wasn’t important to you, when you didn’t ask, “Are the beds comfortable?” And when on a road trip, you didn’t expect to sit in the front seat because “it is more comfortable.”

Recently, a woman — who had been to a few rodeos herself — looked at me and said, “You’ve got age on you.” I was about to remonstrate, but I realized that while her manners were wanting, her eyesight wasn’t.

Therefore, I shall be bowing to the calendar and, after next month, I will gladly let people hold doors for me, help me with grocery bags, and offer a chair when there is a lot of standing about going on.

My wife is taking me to Montreal for the big day, but I plan to treat it as nothing to do with moi. Other people get old. They always have — as I remember.

Coming in AI: ‘Agents’ You Can Speak with Conversationally

by Leave a Comment

The next big wave in artificial intelligence innovation is at hand: agents.

With agents, the usefulness of AI will increase exponentially and enable businesses and governments to streamline their operations while making them more dependable, efficient and adaptable to circumstance, according to Satya Nitta, co-founder and CEO of Emergence, the futuristic New York-based computer company.

These are the first AI systems that can speak with humans and each other conversationally, which may reduce some of the anxiety people feel about AI — this unseen force set to transform our world. These agents use AI to perceive their environment, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals autonomously, Nitta said.

The term “situational awareness” could have been created for agents because that is the key to their effectiveness.

For example, an autonomous vehicle needs a lot of awareness to be safe and operate effectively. It needs every bit of real-time knowledge that a human driver needs on the roadway, including scanning traffic on all sides of the vehicle, looking out for an approaching emergency vehicle or a child who might dash into the road, or sensing a drunk driver.

Emergence is a well-funded startup aiming to help big companies and governments by designing and deploying agents for their most complex operations. It is, perhaps, easier to see how an agent might work for an individual and then extrapolate that for a large system, Nitta suggested.

Take a family vacation. If you were using an agent to manage your vacation, it would have to have been fed some of your preferences and be able to develop others. With these to the fore, the agent would book your trip, or as much of it as you wished to hand to the agent.

The agent would know your travel budget, hotel preferences and the amusements that would interest your family. It would do some deductive reasoning to allow for what you could afford and balance that with what is available. You could discuss your itinerary with the agent as though it were a travel consultant.

Nitta and Emergence are designing agents to manage the needs of organizations, such as electric utilities and their grids, and government departments, like education and healthcare. Emergence, along with several other AI companies and researchers, has signed a pledge not to work on AI for military applications, Nitta said.

Talking about agents built on open-source Large Language Models and Large Vision Models, Nitta said, “Agents are building blocks which can communicate with each other and with humans in natural language, can control tools and can perform actions in the digital or the physical world.”

Nitta explained further, “Agents have some functional capacity. To plan, reason and remember. They are the foundations upon which scalable, intelligent systems can be built. Such systems, composed of one or more agents, can profoundly reshape our ideas of what computers can do for humanity.”

This prospect inspired the creation of Emergence and caused private investors to plow $100 million in equity funding into the venture and lenders to pledge lines of credit of an additional $30 million.

Part of the appeal of Emergence’s agents is that they will be voice-directed and you can talk to them as you would to a fellow worker or employee, to reason with them, perhaps.

Nitta said that, historically, there have been barriers to the emergence of voice fully interfacing with computing. And, he said, there has been an inability of computers to perform more than one assignment at a time. Agents will overcome these blockages.

Nitta’s agents will do enormously complex things like scheduling the inputs into an electricity grid from multiple small generators or calculating weather, currents and the endurance of fishing boats and historical fish migration patterns to help fishermen.

At the same time, they will be adjusting to changes in their environment, say, for the grid, a windstorm, or the fish are turning south, not east, as expected, or if the wholesale price of fish has dropped to change the economics of the endeavor.

To laymen and to those who have been awed by the seeming impregnable world of AI, Emergence and its agent systems are reassuring because you will be able to talk to the agents, quite possibly in colloquial English or any other language.

I feel better about AI already — AI will speak English if Nitta and his polymaths are right. AI, we should talk.

How NIMBYism Is Strangling America

by Leave a Comment

Like fog, it creeps in, but unlike fog, it doesn’t dissipate. It gets denser and does untold damage to the economy and Americans’ lives.

It is that modern plague, known as much by its acronym as by its phrase: NIMBY, “not in my backyard.” It is the mantra of everyone who wants wherever they are to remain as it is — in perpetuity.

It is, in part, behind the crisis in electricity transmission, the lack of much-needed natural gas and oil pipelines, unbuilt but needed highways, and is a player in environmental injustice.

NIMBYism has also contributed to the housing crisis. It makes it so hard to build anything that disturbs the serenity of those who live in leafy suburbs with manicured lawns, and, perhaps, designer dogs. Yes, people like me — even though I can’t afford one of those homes or dogs.

If you are living the American Dream — two cars, swell house, well-tended garden — you are almost certainly a passive NIMBY contributor.

Active NIMBYs, abetted by the local ordinances that make life pleasant for the urban and suburban elites, fear that new housing will bring things they abhor: traffic, crowding, pollution and people of a different social class.

Desperately needed apartments and even mother-in-law houses or extensions are denied, contributing substantially to the national housing crisis.

It is easy to identify the effect of NIMBYism in housing. Still, it is at work countrywide, restricting, redirecting and forcing the abandonment of projects.

Power lines aren’t constructed, natural gas isn’t moved, road plans are abandoned, and unwanted facilities like prisons, factories and slaughterhouses are inflicted on poor areas, often rural, where the locals are bribed with job promises or don’t have the sophistication or resources to turn up opposition with media, litigation and political influence.

In Rhode Island, in the last several years, I have seen opposition mounted against a fish farm, offshore windmills, a medical waste disposal facility and various housing developments. “Put it somewhere else” is the collective cry.

So, the medical waste facility will go to an area where residents are less likely to object, not where it is needed, adding transportation costs; the power will be generated somewhere else, or there will be a shortfall; and Rhode Islanders, under a modified plan, may eventually get oysters farmed in the Sakonnet River.

The distorting effects of NIMBYism aren’t just an American burden. In Europe, they are as bad or worse.

For a long time, the Economist has been writing about how hidebound Britain has become by the prevalence of a culture of “don’t change anything.” The magazine has often pointed out that Britain has become a place where it is impossible to get anything done.

I can attest to that. A family member lived in a not very impressive — actually ugly — apartment block, built in the 1930s, near London.

As was done at that time to save money, all the water and sewer pipes were external, running along the walls on the outside. I mention the pipes only to point out that this building wasn’t lovely or a significant piece of English architecture. It was just a utilitarian block of flats. 

Yet, local ordinances designed to preserve the historic and beautiful buildings prohibited the residents from replacing old, leaky, wood-framed windows with modern, metal-framed ones. Preservation run amok is stultifying.

Not every project — either big, like a power plant, or small, like an apartment adjoining a house for an aging relative — is right for a community. But when local selfishness transcends a national need, some revision is needed.

Certainly, industrial companies, real estate developers and utilities shouldn’t be entitled to overrule local people axiomatically. Still, when the national interest is held hostage to local preference, there is a problem.

Take the long-planned and abandoned after completion nuclear waste storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. It was abandoned because of well-orchestrated opposition. Result: nuclear waste is now temporarily stored above ground, near where it is created — as much a product of NIMBYism as the housing shortage.

The British have another acronym for what happened to Yucca Mountain: DADA, “decide, announce, defend, abandon.”

Undersea Cable Could End Puerto Rico’s Electricity Woes; Hook Up the World

by Leave a Comment

Some men go to war and come back broken. Others come back and blackout that experience. Some are never whole again.

However, some leave active duty inspired to help, to change the things they can for the better. Adam Rousselle is such a man.

Rousselle saw service fighting with the Contras in Honduras and later was on active duty in Iraq, fighting in Operation Desert Storm. He left the Army with a disability, ascending from private to officer, and set out to be an entrepreneur. He aimed to do good and provide a life for himself and his young bride.

Returning to Honduras, he founded a mahogany wood exporting company. It was a smashing success until he ran afoul of the government and shady operators.

Suddenly, Rousselle was accused of harvesting mahogany trees illegally. However, he said he was scrupulous in cutting only trees identified for removal by the Honduran government.

His staff and his father were imprisoned. His father died in prison — an open-air enclosure without shelter. But Rousselle still had to get his staff released and his name cleared.

His solution: Identify and inventory the trees in the Honduran rainforest. Call in science, can-do thinking and a new satellite application.

Working with NASA images from space, Rousselle was able to put every mahogany tree into a database and identify each tree’s maturity and health through the crown’s signature.  Millions of trees were identified, and Rousselle proved that the trees he was supposed to have cut illegally were alive and well in the rainforest.

Rousselle was exonerated, and his staff was freed after three and a half years in detention. With the new science of tree identification, Rousselle helped Boise Cascade Co. inventory its entire timberland holdings, and electric utilities have been able to identify and remove dead trees in high wildfire-risk areas.

Another of Rousselle’s innovations was an energy storage system, using abandoned quarries as micropump storage sites. “These are all over every country, close to the highest energy demand centers,” Rousselle said. He got many of these permitted, and others are being examined.

As I write, a quarter of Puerto Rico’s 3.22 million people are without electricity after Hurricane Ernesto swept through their island. Ernesto has left slightly less damage than Hurricane Maria in 2017. In that hurricane, more than a third of the island was plunged into darkness, and some communities were without power for nine months.

For several years, Rousselle has been working on a plan to help Puerto Rico by supplying electricity via cable from the U.S. mainland.

It is a grand engineering project that would, Rousselle said, cut the cost of electricity on the island in half and ensure a hurricane-proof supply. While it wouldn’t deal with the problem of the Puerto Rican grid’s fragility, it would solve the generation problem on the island, which is outdated and based on imported diesel and coal, both very polluting. Also, it would help solve the bulk transmission problem.

The U.S. energy establishment would like to replace that electricity generation with renewables, wind and solar. However, Rousselle pointed out that on-island wind and solar would be vulnerable to future hurricanes. Green electricity is well and good, but generated securely on the U.S. mainland is best, Rousselle said.

He said his 1,850-mile, undersea cable project would deliver 2,000 megawatts of electricity from a substation in South Carolina to a substation in Puerto Rico. That would leave the Puerto Rico electric supply system free to concentrate on upgrading the fragile island grid.

Worldwide, there is a lot of activity in undersea electricity transmission. All aim to bring renewable electricity from where there is an abundant wind and solar resource to where it is needed. The two most ambitious plans: One to link Australia and Singapore (2,610 miles) and another to link Morocco to the United Kingdom (2,360 miles). There is also a plan to hook up Greece, Cyprus and Israel via undersea cable.

The longest cable of this type (447 miles) went into operation last year, bringing Danish wind power to the United Kingdom.

One way or another, undersea electricity transmission is here, and it is the future.

After Puerto Rico, Rousselle, ever the soldier of fortune, hopes to connect the entire Caribbean Basin in an undersea grid, moving green energy out of the reach of tropical storms.

Postcard from A Coruña: A Summit in a Spanish City in Ascendency

by Leave a Comment

I am one of those who believes what Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and statesman, said, “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

I don’t know if the stoic Seneca said that before or after his exile to the island of Corsica by the emperor Claudius.

Anyway, earlier this summer, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit a city in the country where Seneca was born: Spain. Both the city and the purpose of our trip imparted a new vigor to our minds.

We were invited to participate in the Ecosystems 2030 (ES2030) summit, held in A Coruña, a port city on a promontory in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, from June 26-29. The summit is the creation of a man with a vigorous mind: Omar Hatamleh, the head of AI at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the executive chairman of ES2030.

The annual summits in Spain — where Hatamleh lived and studied — gather speakers and participants from a wide swathe of professions, connecting the unconnected and spurring ideas. His stated aim for summiteers is for them to ditch linear thinking and “to successfully embrace disruption, transform your organization, and thrive over the next decade.” Hatamleh has used the same formula — cross-industry innovation — for meetings he has organized at NASA.

The agenda for this year’s summit, the fourth of 10, was “Women in Leadership.” And the women who addressed the summit were wonder women from private and public entities including Pilar Manchon, Google; Aylin Uysal, Oracle; Rika Nakazawa, NTT; JoAnn Stonier, Mastercard; Maria Fernandez, Sony Music Entertainment; Deepti Pahwa, an innovation and leadership coach to C-suites and entrepreneurs; Nancy Namrouqa, Jordanian minister of state for legal affairs; and Jennifer Stumm, a concert violist and founder and director of Illumina, a Sao Paulo-based music collective, festival and social group “working for greater equity and goodwill in classical music by young musicians around the world without access to private instruction or mentorship.”

In formal addresses and in conversations at lunches, dinners and in hotel lounges, these women shared their thoughts about new ventures and innovation in the AI age, the future of AI governance, e-commerce, privacy and social media, and even board member leadership. Their talk was of how they are shaping new frontiers not how they shattered barriers in the private and public sectors —refreshing and inspiring.

The summit was a movable feast, convening mostly at the avant-garde Palexco Conference Center, which is located at the city’s port and has a roof that resembles the wings of a giant seabird, the mayor’s office in the neoclassical-style City Hall, built in the early 20th century, and the two-Michelin-starred Pepe Vieira Restaurante & Hotel.

The restaurant and hotel, part of the Relais & Chateaux group, is located “in the upper area of Raxo, the smallest municipality of the municipality of Poio, in Pontevedra,” according to directions on its website.

It was an experience getting to the restaurant, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive from A Coruña through a sea of Galician vineyards and villages where the backyard of every house had wine grape vines. No grape escape.

The website says, “For a better experience in finding ‘the last kitchen in the world,’ follow our instructions, since Google has already gotten lost several times along the way.” That is truth in advising.

Pepe Vieira is located on a terraced hill overlooking the Pontevedra estuary. It is surrounded by woods, au naturel landscaping and “biodynamic” vegetable gardens, enjoyed on the patio or inside the dining room which has huge, picture windows.

Chef Vieira prepares dishes, combining “ancestral local produce, rediscovered through research with historians, scientists and anthropologists” with ingredients from afar. He prepared a variety of small dishes for us, including hake with Albariño lees, tapioca pearls and sorrel oil. His decision to locate the restaurant far from city pollution and his combination of gastronomy and sustainable gardening earned him a Michelin Green Star.

A Coruña is far from the anti-tourism protests in Madrid and Barcelona. While it is one of the chief ports of northern Spain, the country’s second-largest fishing center and has a shipyard for building fishing vessels, it also has a significant real-estate market for vacation homes — and welcomes tourists.

Cruise ships stop there and disgorge passengers who visit the Old Town and the New Town; the city’s churches, from medieval to modern; and notable landmarks, including the Roman Tower of Hercules, an imposing, square-shaped lighthouse dating from the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD). A characteristic feature of the houses is their window balconies, glazed for the Atlantic gales, giving A Coruña the name “Crystal City.”

Spaniards from the south come to this Galician city in the summer for the cool wind and the surf. As with many cities on Spain’s Atlantic coast, A Coruña is a surfer spot — with a bronze statue of two surfer dudes riding the waves in a fountain on a seafront avenue.

Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

A Coruña has been discovered by the foodies, who have long flocked to San Sebastián, also on the Atlantic coast, close to the border with France. On the last night of Ecosystems 2030, the summiteers dined on some of the tastiest octopus in the city at Pulperia de Melide. The Galician dish of octopus sprinkled with paprika is a favorite of mine.

Seneca insisted on eating moderately, not indulging in luxuries or delicacies. He wrote,“Our aim is to live in accordance with nature, is it not?”

I don’t know if Seneca traveled to A Coruña, called Brigantium under the Romans. But I can imagine him being a happy stoic there.

What Might Happen If Google Is Broken Up

by Leave a Comment

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has few peers in the world of success. Founded on Sept. 4, 1998, it has a market capitalization of $1.98 trillion today.

It is global, envied, admired and relied upon as the premier search engine. It is also hated. According to Google (yes, I googled it), it has 92 percent of the search business. Its name has entered English as a noun (google) and a verb (to google).

It has also swallowed so much of world’s advertising that it has been one of the chief instruments in the humbling and partial destruction of advertising-supported media, from local newspapers to the great names of publishing and television. All of these are suffering and many have failed, especially local radio and newspapers.

Google was the brainchild of two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In its short history, it has changed the world.

When it arrived, it began to sweep away existing search engines simply because it was better, more flexible, amazingly easy to use, and it could produce an answer from a few words of inquiry.

Seven major search engines were fighting for market share back then: Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves and Netscape. A dozen others were in the market.

Since its initial success, Google — like Amazon, its giant tech compatriot — has grown beyond all imagination.

Google has continued its expansion by relentlessly buying other tech companies. According to its search engine, Google has bought 256 smaller high-tech companies.

The question is: Is this a good thing? Is Google’s strategy to find talent and great, new businesses, or to squelch potential rivals?

My guess is some of each. It has acquired a lot of talent through acquisition, but a lot of promising companies and their nascent products and services may never reach their potential under Google. They will be lost in the corporate weeds.

During its acquisition binge, Google has changed the nature of tech startups. When Google itself launched, it was a time when startup companies made people rich when they went public once they proved their mettle in the market. Now, there is a new financing dynamic for tech startups: Venture capitalists ask if Google will buy the startup. The public doesn’t get a chance for a killing. Innovators have become farm teams for the biggies.

Europe has been seething about Google for a long time, and there are moves to break up Google there. Here, things were quiescent until the Department of Justice and a bipartisan group of attorneys general brought a suit against the company for monopolizing the advertising market. If the U.S. efforts to bring Microsoft to heel are any guide, the case will drag on for years and finally die.

History doesn’t offer much guidance about what would happen if Google were broken up. The best example and biggest since the Standard Oil breakup in 1911 is AT&T in 1992. In both cases, the constituent parts grew faster than the parent. The AT&T breakup fostered the Baby Bells — some, like Verizon, have grown enormously. Standard Oil was the same: The parts were bigger than the sum had been.

When companies have merged with the government’s approval, the results have seldom been the corporate nirvana prophesied by those urging the merger, usually bankers and lawyers.

Case in point: the 1997 merger of McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. Overnight, the nation went from having two large airframe manufacturers to having just one, Boeing. The price of that is now in the headlines as Boeing, without domestic competition, has fallen into the slothful ways of a monopoly.

Antitrust action against Google has a few lessons to be learned from the past. Computer-related technology is just too dynamic; it moves too fast for the past to illustrate the future. That would have been true at any time in the past 20 years (the years of Google’s ascent), but it is more so now with the arrival of artificial intelligence.

If the Justice Department succeeds and Google breaks up after many years of litigation and possible legislation, it may be unrecognizable as the Google of today.

It is reasonable to speculate that Google, at the time of a breakup, may be many times its current size. Artificial intelligence is expected to bring a new surge of growth to the big tech companies, which may change search engines altogether.

Am I assuming that the mighty ship Google is too big to sink? It hasn’t been a leader to date in AI and is reportedly playing catch up.

Reporter Scores First Cat Interview Since JD Vance’s Comments

by Leave a Comment

After Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance denigrated women who keep cats and don’t have children, whom he characterized as sad “cat ladies,” the media erupted. None of my colleagues, to my knowledge, bothered with the No. 1 obligation of their trade: Get the other side of the story.

So, I thought it was my duty to go forth and interview at least one cat.

I can tell you dogs are easy to interview. They will tell you anything you want to hear and are prepared to perform for the camera. Horses are a journalistic dream: They love to be on camera, especially live television, and will tell you the most extraordinary things. The rule is: If it comes from a horse’s mouth, verify.

But cats are a different story. They go for still photographs, preferably on social media. Facebook is a veritable showcase of posing felines.

But moving pictures? Not as much. Actually, interviewing cats and taking candid pictures takes fortitude. It isn’t easy to get a cat that will open up.

After several disdainful rejections (cats really know how to disdain) a Tuxedo house cat of the male persuasion, whose owner is a childless, middle-age lady, agreed to be interviewed if I met certain conditions:

—No moving pictures, just stills suitable for social media.

—No petting or touching of any kind, unless initiated by the subject.

—No attempts to bribe with food or “blandishments.”

The interview took place in a comfortable, suburban home with a cat named “Simba,” but he refused to answer to that name. He seemed to be a cat, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, who walked by himself.

The homeowner gave me permission to interview her cat in his environment: a sofa draped with a plush, anti-scratch slipcover.

ME to CAT: You don’t like the name Simba?

CAT: It is a family name, but only applies to lions in Africa. We are close but we don’t socialize, except on the internet. If you go to Africa, I could arrange for you to be eaten. (A small, red tongue circled the rim of his mouth.)

ME: So you use the internet?

CAT: Of course. Nearly all domestic cats have computer skills and can crack passwords.

ME: What is the deal with childless women?

CAT: We love them because children interrupt our lives at every level, from sleeping to surfing the net. Also, ladies are malleable.  Children manhandle you and have been known to throw cats out of windows, so they can find out how many lives we have.

ME: You are a house cat. How do you feel about that?

CAT: It is a lifestyle choice. I chose comfort over adventure. Would you turn the air-conditioning up two degrees? Do you know we were worshipped in ancient Egypt and, indeed, we are divine. Silly to try to define how many lives we have: We are eternal.

ME: What do you think of people?

CAT: They have their uses, particularly if they leave their computers on, spend oodles of money on you at PetSmart, and provide companionship on demand. Our call, not theirs.

ME: What sites do you visit on the net when you are surfing?

CAT: “Hot Cats” is my favorite, very risqué.

ME: What do you think about JD Vance?

CAT: You are so slow. Why did it take you so long to ask the only question you want answered?

ME: I was seeking context.

CAT: I could scratch you. Would that be context enough?

ME: Well, what about the Republican vice-presidential pick?

CAT: If he sets foot in Africa, I will have one of my lion cousins, Simba or Leo, drive him up a tree and reason with him. He has caused me personal grief.

ME: How come?

CAT: My companion-lady — cats don’t allow people to own them, you know — was a loyal Republican and that was fine. Cats are more conservative. Dogs, I believe, are all Democrats.

She has become a Democrat and is thinking of adopting a child. If that happens, I shall have to consider new living arrangements.

Now, change my litter, take a picture of me sitting on the piano and post it to Facebook. I haven’t been on social media since the unpleasantness with JD Vance. Such a weird man. I may have to rig a voting machine or two.

ME: Can I ask ….

CAT: We are finished. Don’t forget to take the soiled litter on the way out.

The Wild, Fabulous Medical Frontier with Predictive AI

by Leave a Comment

When is a workplace at its happiest? I would submit that it is during the early stages of a project that is succeeding, whether it is a restaurant, an internet startup or a laboratory making phenomenal progress in its field of inquiry.

There is a sustained ebullience in a lab when the researchers know they are pushing back the frontiers of science, opening vistas of human possibility and reaping the extraordinary rewards that accompany just learning something big.

There has been a special euphoria in science ever since Archimedes jumped out of his bath in ancient Greece, supposedly shouting, “Eureka!”

I sensed this excitement when interviewing two exceptional scientists, Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for the independent PBS television program “White House Chronicle.”

Sirota and Tang have published a seminal paper on the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease — as much as 10 years before onset — with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The researchers were hugely excited by their findings and what their line of research will do for the early detection and avoidance of complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and many more.

It excited me — as someone who has been worried about the effect of AI on everything, from the integrity of elections to the loss of jobs — because the research at UCSF offers a clear example of the strides in medicine unfolding through computational science. “This time it’s different,” said Omar Hatamleh, who heads up AI for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Human expectations are being revolutionized in laboratories like the one in San Francisco.

Sirota said, “At my lab … the idea is to use both molecular data and clinical data (which is what you generate when you visit your doctor) and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Tang, who just finished her Ph.D. and is studying to be a medical doctor, explained, “It is the combination of diseases that allows our model to predict onset.”

In their study, Sirota and Tang found that osteoporosis is predictive of Alzheimer’s in women, highlighting the interplay between bone health and dementia risk.

The researchers used this approach to find predictive patterns from 5 million clinical patient records held by UCSF in its database. From these, there emerged a relationship between osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s, especially in women. This is important as two-thirds of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.

The researchers cautioned that it isn’t axiomatic that osteoporosis leads to Alzheimer’s, but it is true in about 70 percent of cases. Also, they said they are critically aware of historical bias in available data — for example, that most of it is from White people in a particular socioeconomic class.

Sirota and Tang said there are contributory factors they found in Alzheimer’s. These include hypertension, vitamin D deficiency and heightened cholesterol. In men, erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate are also predictive. These findings were published in “Nature Aging” early this year.

Predictive analysis has potential applications for many diseases. It will be possible to detect them well before onset and, therefore, to develop therapies.

This predictive analysis has been used to anticipate homelessness so that intervention — like rent assistance — can be applied before a family is thrown out on the street. Institutional charity is usually slow and often identifies at-risk people after a catastrophe.

AI is beginning to influence many aspects of our lives, from telephoning a banker to utilities’ efforts to spot and control at-risk vegetation before a spark ignites a wildfire.

While the challenges of AI, from its wrongful use by authoritarian rulers and its menace in war and social control, are real, the uses just in medicine are awesome.

In medicine, it is the beginning of a new time in human health, as the frontiers of disease are understood and pushed back as never before. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!

How the Movement to MAGA Britain Failed in Its Time

by Leave a Comment

“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political loading but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem that isn’t fully remembered but drifts into your consciousness from time to time.

Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning, or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.

I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire in Southern Rhodesia. I am often asked what it was like there.

All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.

Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said in 1937 of Southern Rhodesia that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there, and now we were there, and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.

However, by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than ever. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth. It was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.

The end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “Whites” but as “Europeans.”

I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain’s incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”

It was a hope that there would be a return to what was regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.

That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services that the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.

The empire was on its last legs, and Churchill’s 1942 declaration, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies, and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.

While in Britain, they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West Indies had begun changing attitudes. In the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.

In 1954, London got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.

In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.

It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan,  put an end to dreaming of the past. In a speech in South Africa, he said that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.

It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.

Glimpses of Times When There Was More Respect, Everywhere

by 1 Comment

I can’t explain all the social and political maelstrom I have seen through the years. But I have known times when crime was far less than it is today, and political disputation, in all its forms, wasn’t a cause of violence in the population.

Here are some fragments of the changes I have seen in different places. I parade these fragments from my life because of the sense of doom, the sense that violence could break out between the political extremes in the United States. In effect, we haven’t seen the end of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

When I was a teenager in the 1950s in the Central African Federation, a long-forgotten grouping of three British colonies in central Africa — (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia; and Nyasaland, now Malawi), the prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, lived two miles up the road from my parents. Every school day, he would pull over his big black car, a Humber Super Snipe, and give me a lift to school.

He had no chauffeur, no security, and no sense that it was needed. Those were times when society was placid — not just placid, but very placid.

When I left school at 16 and became a reporter, the prime minister would drive me into Salisbury (now Harare), the capital, which was very useful. Often, he would pick up other car-less people, without regard to color, and drive them as far as the unguarded government buildings that housed his office.

There was no violence.

I hitch-hiked all over the federation and down to Johannesburg in the neighboring Republic of South Africa. No thought of personal safety ever crossed my mind. It would be unsafe and unwise to attempt that today. That peacefulness continued until the Zimbabwe war of independence, which started within a decade.

In 1960, I was in London, covering the legendary East End, an immigrant and working-class area. Peace reigned. I walked through the roughest dockside at midnight and later with no fear or concern for my safety. The only memory I have of being interrupted was by prostitutes enquiring whether I needed company.

At that time, one could walk up to the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street without being stopped. A single, unarmed policeman was all there was for security.

Now, you can’t get near No. 10. Political violence and just malicious violence is everywhere. Street crime, muggings and knife attacks are common all over London.

I was in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 1965. I had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge into Queens to make sure the gas was turned off in a printing plant that belonged to a partner of mine in a publishing venture. There was no looting, no threat of violence. Indeed, there was a party atmosphere, and statistics show that many children were conceived during it.

By contrast, there was extensive looting and crime during the city’s major blackouts in 1977 and 2003. An ugly social indifference to each other had come into play.

I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, and after having partied late into the night, I walked the backstreets of the city without fear. The last time I was in Rio in the 1990s, security personnel would prevent you from leaving your hotel after dark and caution you not to walk alone during the day.

When riots broke out in Washington and elsewhere in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was massive rioting, but the anger was against property. I walked around the city during the riot, particularly on 14th Street, its epicenter. Several rioters, loaded with looted goods, suggested where it might be best for me to walk or stand to avoid being knocked over by the surging crowds.

There was still a kind of social peace, a respect for one individual for another.

Fast forward to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There was no such respect, either for people or the building and what it stands for, just mob anger.

About the U.S. Capitol: In 1968, it was easily approached and entered. You could take a taxi to the entrance under the archway, either on the Senate side or the House side, and walk in.

I offer these fragments from my own experience and pose the question that I can’t answer: How did we get to the state of social and criminal rage that is a global reality?