One Of Harvard University's Darkest Hours In Recent Times

Posted: 5/31/2019

How can one of the most recognized U.S. elite universities and one with the largest endowment have almost at the same time have the German chancellor Merkel and former Vice President Gore speak at Harvard University to the students?

Thus, Harvard University invited two of the perpetrators and promoters of the greatest hoax of our time, i.e. Global Warming (a.k.a. Climate Change). There is not much Veritas in that!

Absolutely incredible! What an enormous embarrassment! Can a U.S. ivy league university even stoop lower than that!

Al Gore a convenient and intemperate liar! Do I need to say more about this pompous man!

Angela Merkel, a very controversial chancellor from the former German Democratic Republic, who should have resigned years ago, has made so many egregious political mistakes that absolutely boggle the mind (e.g. ad hoc and permanent shut down of German nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima; introduction of federal minimum wages; crazy Energiewende and more)! She has turned a once traditional centrist-christian party into a green party on steroids!

What did this moronic Merkel mean when she encouraged Harvard students by “But if we break down the walls that hem us in, if we step out into the open and have the courage to embrace new beginnings, everything is possible”. Has she called for permanent social unrest?

Not to mention this metaphor eerily reminds one of the famous speech Ronald Reagan gave. Only Reagan got it right, Merkel is preposterous!

Sources:

1. Gore decries attacks on facts, science, reason (published 5/29/2019
2. Merkel advises graduates: Break the walls that hem you in (published 5/30/2019)
3. „Reißen Sie die Mauern der Engstirnigkeit und Ignoranz ein“ (published 5/30/19)

The Guardian Uncovers Google Sweatshops

Posted: 5/31/2019

The hot off the press story: Google Assistant 'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft Interpreting a spoken request isn’t magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguists to make the technology possible

When a leftist media outlet uncovers such a story, then you know immediately take it with a big grain of salt.

Not to be outdone, the MIT Technology Review immediately jumped on this story by disseminating and commenting on it in their daily email blast (5/31/2019) “The Algorithm”. Their story was titled “Invisible labor”. Plus, it added an interview with anthropologist Mary Gray, who co-authored a book with the title “Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass”

Wonderful these ideological and deeply flawed perspective on labor exploitation by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels is living on! Like superstition, this myth does not die!

The Guardian & MIT Technology Review are also strongly implying that AI (here specifically machine translation and natural language processing is all smoke & mirrors. What a bad joke especially coming from MIT Technology Review!

Could Delivery Drones Reduce Traffic Jams? Indeed!

Posted: 5/30/2019

Just read this article: DHL drones make package deliveries in southern China

Yes, drones have the potential to reduce the delivery of goods by trucks. “Ehang’s drones for DHL ... travel between smart outdoor lockers, picking up and dropping off packages that are then carried by DHL workers to their final destinations”

And this is only the beginning ...

Google Scholar Annoyances

Posted: 5/30/2019  Updated: 12/19/2019, 6/10/2019, 6/9/2019, 6/6/2019, 6/4/2019

More annoyances

1. Just tried to access my library at Google Scholar using Google Chrome browser and being logged in with my main Google account (I am a paying customer for Google Drive for years)
   
   Google Scholar challenges me to prove that I am not a robot! This is so ridiculous! (12/19/2019)
2. Image classification tasks (Google Mechanical Turk without pay) now also effective when using incognito window in Google Chrome Browser (6/10/2019) EXTREMELY ANNOYING!
3. Google Scholar is biased against research papers provided by CiteSeerX, although latter is a very good source for AI related research papers in electronic form before roughly 2010 (6/9/2019)
4. Search function fails when you enter a paper title Google Scholar does not recognize even though the 2017 paper is available on arXiv. Worse Google Scholar would engage me in its extremely annoying Mechanical Turk image classification tasks (blogged about this here). No helpful feedback at all! (6/6/19) 
5. Search function fails when you enter a arXiv identifier, but Google Scholar has only the NIPS paper (6/4/19)

Original Post

Before I gripe about the annoyances, I want to state that Google Scholar is a great tool and I am very grateful for it. In particular, I appreciate that U.S. patents by scholars are also included. 

My (incomplete) list of annoyances (in no particular order):

1. The scholar profile pages itself are kind of hidden. To navigate to the scholar profile pages is not very intuitive
2. It is not possible to drill down/filter the publications of a scholar by publication year
3. The search function for publications is often not very useful when entering the title of a publication. It returns often a large number of irrelevant search results
4. When a paper has changed its title (which actually happens quite often) it should be clearly marked and presented
5. There appears to be no easy way to contact Google Scholar to inform it of issues etc.
6. There appears to be a very narrow limit on how many alerts you can define. I guess, it is around 40-50 alerts. I have easily hit the limit! Now, I am forced to make decisions which one to keep and which ones to eliminate

More annoyances will be added!

The Incredible Comeback of Nigel Farage

Posted: 5/27/2019  Revised/updated: 5/27/2019

Just checked the election results of the European Parliament Elections of 2019 : It appears Nigel Farage has won 31.6% of the electoral vote in the UK with a party that did not even exist six weeks ago. Great news! Brexit may now finally become reality! The awakening or reckoning of the wannabe hegemon and increasingly unitary EU has come!

The voter turnout for this election were the second highest since 1979 at 37%!

Even in Scotland, about 15% voted for the Brexit party!

The endless and needless debate in the UK over a second referendum ought to be closed by now! This European Parliament Election of 2019 was the 2nd referendum! The voters have spoken again!

The political career of Prime Minister May is now long overdue, but finally finished, long overdue! In July of 2016, shortly after her election, I have already had a hunch that this new Prime Minister was not up to the job (see here)!

The Slow Demise Of The Cato Institute

Posted: 5/25/2019

Caveat: I am not familiar with the internals nor the staff of the Cato Institute located in Washington D.C.

Once, not long ago, the Cato Institute was for decades one of the leading think tanks in the U.S. regarding classical liberalism. I used to be a member years ago. I have also attended a few of their events in the past. Cato used to be about: “The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank — dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace” and “Founded in 1977, Cato owes its name to Cato’s Letters, a series of essays published in 18th- century England that presented a vision of society free from excessive government power. ”

However, over the past two years or even longer, perhaps intensifying with the election of Donald Trump as president, the output of the Cato Institute has become shrill; often very naive, moronic, and ridiculous; and sometimes very counterproductive to the cause.

Here is a very recent, but symptomatic example of what I mean: Today (5/25/2019), the Cato Institute advertised following article on their Facebook page, which ended up on my Facebook page as well. The article featured in this post was Building a Wall around the Welfare State, Instead of the Country (originally published in 2013)

Just the headline itself is so moronic that it leaves one speechless! Any classical liberal minded individual must be immediately cringing when reading this!

The welfare state is an unconstitutional disgrace that should be largely dismantled and replaced by private initiatives etc.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend the staff from the top down read the Cato letters again and start over!

Native Americans Owned Many Black Slaves

Posted: 5/25/2019

Here is some history they usually do not tell you about because it does not fit the narrative, we are made to believe every day!

I was just listening to the Larry Elder radio show while driving on a highway, when he discussed the absurdity of reparations for slavery. My jaw dropped several times and I said what!

Among other astonishing things that I do not remember ever having been aware of was that there were about 2,000 black slaves on the infamous Trail of Tears owned by American natives.

Here is a pertinent article by the Smithsonian Institution about the subject of American natives owning black slaves: How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative The new exhibition ‘Americans’ at the National Museum of the American Indian prompts a deeper dive for historic truths (published 3/6/2018). Unfortunately, this article is mute on numbers of slaves etc. Here are some pertinent quotes:

1. “... Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross ...”
2. “.... numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters ...”
3. ““The Five Civilized Tribes [Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole] were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.””
4. “Perversely, Native American ownership of black slaves came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to white settlers.” [Sounds like historical revisionism or to invent excuses]

As an aside the Wikipedia article on the Five Civilized Tribes does not even mention slavery and slaveholding by these tribes.

This is just one of the many horrible facets of the history of slavery!

More Underwater Seismometers Are Finally Coming

Posted: 5/24/2019

Much to my surprise, I learnt today that, after decades of trying, finally submarine seismometers are going to be deployed in larger numbers.

Here is the article: Deploying seismometers where they’re needed most: Underwater Geophysicists hope to use some combination of three approaches to remedy the dearth of seismic data from the oceans.

Quotes from the above article (emphasis added):

1. “Whereas about 1900 seismometers have collected data in the ocean over the past 20 years, the nongovernmental International Seismological Centre lists about 11 500 active sensors on land globally” [Shocking!]
2. “The engineering of a modern-day ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) ... “They’re basically like robots that don’t talk to home for a year, ...” [What? For a year?]
3. “... high-quality OBS costs about $100 000 to build, whereas a land-based seismometer is about one-fifth of that price”
4. “Over the past several years, …. scientists have shown that it’s feasible to attach seismic sensors to fiber-optic cable with a negligible effect on the cable’s reliability. Seismometers known as SMART sensors would collect seismic data using a small fraction of the cable’s power and bandwidth”
5. “ It’s a floating network of seismometers known as MERMAID, or Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers. The instruments are mobile, are about a third as expensive as OBSs, and can be deployed in remote locations without the need for a return trip to collect data. They drift and float in the water column listening for earthquakes. Each time they sense one, they record the data, move to the surface, and transmit the information to a satellite. ... This map shows the location in the Pacific of the 25 currently deployed MERMAIDs.” [Only 25 deployed?]

Perhaps, these seismometers will shed more light on e.g. sea level rise in some coastal areas of our globe!

This tidbit confirms once more that Global Warming (a.k.a. Climate Change) is the greatest hoax perpetrated on humanity in generations! We still know so little about the sun and the oceans that this constant indoctrination with the climate religion is unbearable!

On The Disastrous Steel Policy Of The EU

Posted:

A bit of history: European governments have been obsessed with and have managed the steel industry since the early 20th century. The earliest predecessor of the European Union was the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) created by the Treaty of Paris in 1951.

Caveat: I am not an expert of the steel industry nor the steel policy pursued by the EU and its predecessors

Today (5/22/2019), we learn that the second largest steelmaker of the UK, i.e. British Steel, went bust and will be put under government administration. Of course, this steelmaker was in trouble for years. However, as was pointed out (emphasis added): “The final trigger for British Steel’s collapse into administration, however, was not low steel prices but arguably a demand from the EU for £120 million worth of payments under its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – which is supposed to provide an incentive for heavy polluters to cut their carbon emissions.” (Source 1)

The other, very recent news was that the merger of ThyssenKrupp steel manufacturing and Tata failed. Again, reports suggest that the EU is to be blamed as well. “[T]he tie-up has been subject to an in-depth European Commission (EC) competition investigation.” (Source 2)

What about energy prices for businesses in the EU? Do EU consumers subsidize lower business energy prices by paying higher consumer prices? Or have the EU and member countries (particularly Germany) driven up energy prices for business by pursuing outrageous Climate Change policies? I am afraid, the latter is the case! Few examples: Why is fracking not more developed in the EU? Why are nuclear power plants not more developed or even shut off?  

So while in the past the EU and its predecessors emphasized the strategic importance of steel production in the EU and tried to manage the steel industry, in more times, preoccupied with environmental and antitrust zealotry, the EU is killing heavy industries like steel. In a global market of steel with cut throat competition, the EU Commission is doing obviously the wrong thing!

Always a huge mistake, when politicians try to manage businesses!

Sources:

1. The EU’s role in the demise of British Steel (dated 5/22/19)
2. Thyssenkrupp expects EU to block Tata steel merger (dated 5/10/19)

How Trump Disinfects The Administrative State

Posted: 5/17/2019

Here is one of the latest examples how President Trump is tackling Big Government or the administrative state (or drains the swamp):

Trump Administration to ‘Shed Light’ on Secretive Practice That Costs Taxpayers Millions

“The Interior Department will publicly list attorneys’ fees paid out, often to environmental activist groups, for legal settlements, according to a recent memo from Principal Deputy Solicitor Daniel Jorjani. ... the Interior Department will develop a webpage within 30 days to publicly list details of legal settlements and cases, which the agency says is a big step in bringing sunshine to a non transparent practice that the public is largely unaware is happening.” (emphasis added)

These dubious practices under particularly the Obama administration have also become known as “sue and settle”. How many of these environmental activist groups are financed by leftist billionaires and there are more questions ...

By far not only big businesses or well organized business interests receive lavish patronage by Big Government!

Remember the famous Louis D. Brandeis Quote (emphasis added): "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." (I do disagree with Brandeis on his support for labor laws and the welfare state)

Bravo President Trump! Keep up the good work!