BBC News – The culture of behaving badly.
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Not quite the Deutscher Bauernkrieg. This one’s coming from 172 economists, led by Hans-Werner Sinn who published an open letter demolishing Angela Merkel’s economic policies in favour of a European banking union. The letter was published two days ago in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Is this an Economists’ Revolt, after the Manifesto for Economic Sense?
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Richard Layard has become (once again) something of a household name after the publication of the Manifesto for Economic Sense, which he wrote with Paul Krugman.
Baron Layard (he is a Labour peer) rose to prominence after having lobbied the Blair government to include happiness economics in its policies. The results have been mixed. But that is to be expected. The real world has a nasty habit of derailing the best-laid plans.
On the substance though, Layard is right.
Paul Krugman and Richard Layard have just published a Manifesto for Economic Sense which attempts to lay out the real causes of the current economic crisis, and spell out a solution.
Make of it what you will. The professional reputation of the two authors is beyond reproach.
But perhaps they err in their innate belief in limitless growth.
Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC
Thus spake the headlines. To be precise, it was a five-sigma detection. Of course cynics will say that we’d been using the Higgs boson in our calculations for half a century. Given enough energy, we were bound to observe it. And the Large Hadron Collider was built exactly for that purpose.
Expect torrents of commentary about “the god particle” over the next few weeks.
There’s a lesson for us here. If physics allows it, and if you throw enough money at the problem, it’s a piece of cake. The LHC is a very expensive bit of kit. So in the end it all boils down to money.
No technicolour here, but this is what it actually looks like.
‘Twisted light’ carries 2.5 terabits of data per second
Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and a team of colleagues in Italy recently demonstrated the encoding of data using the orbital angular momentum of light, sending two beams made of different OAM states across a canal in Venice. Casanova would have been delighted.
Radio spectrum policy groups should be delighted too. The two beams were in fact incoherent radio waves, with the same frequency, but with different OAM states. With the airwaves getting crowded, this could be the next big thing.
I endorse this radio message
Or is it?
Blade Runner: Which predictions have come true?
Futurology and futurism are only a couple of centuries old. Why? Because that’s when the first uncomfortable socio-economic shift occurred. Agrarian to industrial doesn’t really sit comfortably with human nature.
Attempting to predict the future is risky business. As someone pointed out:
I think the most telling technology in Blade Runner is the telephone. The flying cars landed to use payphones, no sign of a mobile anywhere from memory.
Chris Busby, Crawley, UK
On 17th April, the NASA space shuttle Discovery, piggy-backing on a modified Boeing 747, made a low flypast over the National Mall in Washington DC. The world’s media were gathered to record the event. Live footage was broadcast by the global news networks, including one shot where the shuttle is circling the Washington Monument. That shot captured the poignancy of the event, a silent valedictory as the veteran space shuttle headed to its final resting place at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
The shuttle programme ended in 2011. NASA no longer flies manned missions, the return to the Moon and the Mars missions are on hold, and the International Space Station programme is hanging by a thread. After the giant leap, mankind seemed to have moonwalked away from it all.
Until 22nd May, when SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 rocket carried the unmanned Dragon capsule into space, marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. This was hailed as the dawn of a new golden age of space exploration, with more affordable, more frequent missions.
But is this really space exploration? More importantly, can private enterprise do space science?
Perhaps it would make more sense to ask whether it should. The aim of any company is to generate profit within a foreseeable timeframe. Governments, on the other hand, can fund scientific research for its own sake, with no certainty of economic profit. Industry is then free to pick the fruits of scientific research if it so wishes.
The story of the decline of space science mirrors that of many other fundamental physical sciences. At the heart it of are misguided funding policies, the result of a confusion between scientific research and R&D.
There is a distinction between scientists and engineers, between biologists and bio-science entrepreneurs, between mathematicians and software engineers. Governments often blur this distinction and bow to the pressures of the strongest lobby, that of private enterprise. And real science is squeezed out of the picture.
Scientists are great visionaries. But they are not entrepreneurs. And they make lousy lobbyists.
Left to their own devices, scientists will struggle for funds. They will likely sell themselves out to any bidder, invariably private enterprise, which will then proceed to harness their skills not in science, but in R&D, creating new products for the market.
SpaceX will not carry out any scientific research, because its bottom line is immediate profit. It’s not as if its status has made it more open, either. Much as it tries to present itself as a private entity, it is intimately tied to the U.S. Government, and must “conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations”. The upshot? It only hires U.S. citizens.
So much for private space.
There is a way out of this. Governments should finance fundamental research. Industrial R&D should be financed by private enterprise.
By all means appoint non-scientists to manage scientists. Some of the greatest advances in science came about in this way. The Manhattan project was headed by a general – Leslie Richard Groves, Jr. – not a scientist. Hubble‘s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, bears the name of a NASA administrator.
But these administrators made sure funding was not frittered away on short-term, high-visibility market product development projects.
By definition, science operates at the boundaries of knowledge, where uncertainty is the order of the day and the usefulness of new results is not measured in jobs created or contributions to GDP.
The Knowledge Economy so often touted by governments means that knowledge is a measure of prosperity in itself, not just through the revenue it generates.
Perhaps some forward-looking companies like SpaceX will come round to this point of view and beat government agencies at their own game by hiring scientists and academics to do science. That will be a giant leap indeed. Until then, a privately-run delivery service in space is all we can hope for. Excellent, but not enough.
In Russia, 7th May was important for two reasons. Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as President for the third time. It was also the 20th anniversary of the official founding of the Russian Armed Forces.
Military reform is likely to feature near the top of Putin’s agenda. But not out of any desire for expansionism or aggressiveness, or any of the nefarious intentions identified by many Western pundits, who cite the tired cliché of the “riddle wrapped within an enigma”. Russia is no enigma. No more than any other nation.
A nation’s pageantry is its declaration of identity. Putin’s swearing-in took place in the magnificent Andreyevsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. After the ceremony, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox church, celebrated a prayer service at Moscow’s Cathedral of the Annunciation. This is the new Russia, re-united with its historic identity.
Some vestiges of the Soviet past linger on, out of habit more than anything else. The parade officer addressed the president as Tovarisch Prezident (literally “Comrade President”). But the President’s Guard wore their new uniforms, modelled on those worn by the Russian Imperial Guard until 1914.
Following the collapse of the USSR, it was in the pre-Soviet past that Russia sought its national symbols. All countries do it. Malta’s use of the eight-pointed cross as a brand logo does not mean it is a crusader state. Likewise, the use of imperial Russian symbols is no indication of Russia’s foreign policy intentions.
Putin’s Russia must be understood in the context of four centuries of history. It is neither a continuation of Soviet Russia, nor a young twenty-year old state. It is an old country, with an old civilisation, seeking its rightful place among the nations.
In the Western media, Putin received a great deal of bad press, especially during the election. Yet many ordinary Russians supported his aims, even though they may have questioned his methods. Some Russian commentators have described Putin’s leadership as an imperial understanding of national problems.
Take the way in which Putin dealt with oligarchs. Everyone in Russia felt that the Yeltsin-era privatisation was unjust. Those who got rich in the process began to rule Russia. Under Putin and Medvedev, a new middle class has appeared – small property holders. They appeared during a readjustment of the privatisation process, a new Perestroika, when the oligarchs were removed from the political arena, with many of their assets put back under government control.
Historically, reform in the Russian Federation, as well as its imperial and Soviet predecessors, took place in reaction to crises or defeats. Putin is likely to accelerate the planned reforms of the Russian Armed Forces. In the Five Day War with Georgia in 2008, the military performed well, but forces were slow to deploy. The command structure proved to be too cumbersome, and there were shortcomings in intelligence-gathering and communications.
Shortly after the war, the prime minister’s office and the president decided on a radical reform on the armed forces. The details have not been published, but we are likely to see an acceleration in the professionalisation of the army. The idea is to have a number of well-equipped, highly mobile brigades which can deploy and act rapidly in the regional conflicts which Russia is most likely to face. The army already consists of conscripts (with a reduced conscription period) and a cadre of professional soldiers, NCOs and officers. Some airborne units are now entirely manned by professional soldiers under contract.
What are we to make of these reforms? Nothing, beyond the desire to bring Russia closer to the Western model. Whereas many Western nations built geopolitical relations based on exports of goods or culture, Russia is a relative newcomer in this field. For much of its history, Russia’s engagement with its neighbours was military, either in the form of direct intervention (as in World War II), or in the form of exports of equipment and expertise (as in the post-war period). As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a country with a vast territory bordered by unstable regions, Russia is seeking to retain its global relevance. Not imperialism then, but simple pragmatism.
The post-Soviet period has added another dimension to Russia’s relations with Europe and the world: energy. Russian gas exports are the energy lynchpin of Europe. To the east, there has been a rapprochement with China in the form of energy deals.
Putin is sometimes accused of imitating Pyotr Stolypin, who tried to accomplish economic and social transformation through nonrevolutionary means in Imperial Russia. In 1907, Stolypin famously rebuked fellow Duma deputies with the words: “You are in need of great upheavals; we are in need of Great Russia.”
Stolypin’s reforms were brutally interrupted by revolutionary turmoil. Putin faces different challenges. But he too wants a great Russia, or at least one that is treated by the West not with condescension, but as an equal partner.