Lifeboat Foundation

Prefatory Note: Our usual policy at The Threepenny Review is to assign one book to one author. But in this case two of our longtime writers—P. N. Furbank, an essayist, critic, and biographer who lives in London, and Louis B. Jones, a novelist and essayist who lives in the Sierra foothills—both wanted to review the same book. So we let them. We think the results are instructive: not oppositional, not mutually contradictory, but very different approaches to the same subject. We are also pleased that neither Jones nor Furbank trained as a professional philosopher. (After all, philosophical theories, if they bear on reality, should be meaningful to the rest of us.) So here they are—first Jones, then Furbank—commenting on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, out in the fall of 2012 in both America and England from Oxford University Press.

My stranded trailer in the woods looks onto a clearing where wild sweet pea vies with starthistle, fescue with blue-eye grass and miner’s lettuce, all competing as they’ve done, possibly, since the Sierra first crumbled into soil and started inviting plants to colonize. It is a patch of ground, then, that existed through the geologic ages in the peculiar twilight oblivion of being unwitnessed—until the first Maidu people came along, probably climbing up from the creek below. Before the Maidu, the witnesses of the place were the animals. And now these days I’m here, to substantiate this little clearing’s existence. It’s almost a weary old joke in philosophy, but still a surefire, hard-to-retire joke—that I’m necessary to this clearing’s existence. My mind. The joke, however, is making a serious, small comeback in this century.

The three final algorithms, which have now been released, are ML-KEM, previously known as kyber; ML-DSA (formerly Dilithium); and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+). NIST says it will release a draft standard for FALCON later this year. “These finalized standards include instructions for incorporating them into products and encryption systems,” says NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who heads the PQC standardization project. “We encourage system administrators to start integrating them into their systems immediately.”

Duncan Jones, head of cybersecurity at the firm Quantinuum welcomes the development. “[It] represents a crucial first step towards protecting all our data against the threat of a future quantum computer that could decrypt traditionally secure communications,” he says. “On all fronts – from technology to global policy – advancements are causing experts to predict a faster timeline to reaching fault-tolerant quantum computers. The standardization of NIST’s algorithms is a critical milestone in that timeline.”

India has edged past the United Kingdom by delivering more cutting-edge critical technology research during the period between 2019 and 2023, data published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Wednesday (August 28) showed.

The institute updated its critical technology tracker this week by focusing on high-impact research or 10 per cent of the most highly cited papers, as a “leading indicator of a country’s research performance, strategic intent, and potential future science and technology capability”

The tracker covers 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials, and key quantum technology areas.

Sometimes leaving well-enough alone is the best policy. Ask Teja Santosh Dandibhotla.

Upset that a paper of his had been retracted from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Santosh, a computer scientist at the CVR College of Engineering in Hyderabad, India, contacted us to plead his case. (We of course do not make decisions about retractions, we reminded him.)

Santosh’s article, “Intelligent defaulter Prediction using Data Science Process,” had been pulled along with some 350 other papers in two conference proceedings because IOP Publishing had “uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

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Strengthening Public Health Systems For Healthier And Longer Lives — Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/ab…).

Continue reading “Dr. Ashwin Vasan — Commissioner — NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene — Strengthening Public Health” »

Even if we can dodge a disaster in orbit by responsibly de-orbiting derelict satellites, many scientists are concerned that the number of objects circling our planet could still do harm: When they deorbit, they could deposit a significant flux of metals that could alter the chemical makeup of Earth’s atmosphere.

“Effects on astronomy are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Barentine, who says we may be fast approaching a turning point where tragedy becomes imminent, either in space due to a collision or on the ground from falling debris. “Space policy-making moves far too slowly to effectively deal with all of this.”

“Right now, there’s not a lot to look forward to that is positive,” he added. “If the New Space Age goes badly in the end, history will not look favorably on it.”

Ancient Chinese society was dominated by feudalism. The economy was dominated by agriculture, and the development of science and technology was slow or even suppressed. The main achievements of this era were the four major inventions of China: papermaking, gunpowder, the compass, and printing. Why was this so? For an ancient civilization with a history of several thousand years, why was the development of science and technology so backward? The fundamental reason was the idea of imperial power. Ancient China was centered on the emperor, and everything on the Chinese land was owned by the emperor, including the farmers on that land. The emperor was afraid of a peasant revolution and was afraid that others would take the emperor’s place, and as a result successive emperors would use the policy of fools. Instead of allowing farmers to read books, the emperors just wanted the farmers to plant the land every day, like slaves, so that the farmers would have no ability to overthrow the rulers. This idea of imperial power had greatly suppressed the development of science and technology.

In 1949, Mao Zedong established the first democratic, self-improving, unified China in Chinese history: The People’s Republic of China, a stable country; a country without feudal ideas; and a country that serves the people. Only then did China begin to truly develop its own education, technology, and industry. It was aimed for ordinary people to have food to eat, houses to live in, and books to read, and it was also intended for them to be more involved in technology and democracy. However, Chinese politics had hindered the development of science and technology (superhuman science), such as the Great Leap Forward, which severely reduced China’s productivity and starved many people; the Cultural Revolution had destroyed China’s economic development, education, and technology, bringing China back to pre-liberation overnight. These events were relatively unfortunate. Political struggles have severely hindered the development of science and technology (superhuman science) in China.

In 1978, China began reform and opening up. This phase of reform and opening up was China’s greatest era. China has changed from a closed country to an open country. Deng Xiaoping formulated a basic national policy centered on economic construction, which has enabled China’s economy to develop rapidly. At this time, China attaches great importance to the development of education, science and technology, and the economy. At the same time, special attention is also paid to foreign exchanges, and advanced education and technology have been introduced from abroad. In education, a large number of international students are sent to study in developed countries such as the United States, which has cultivated a large number of scientific and technological talents for China; economically, a large number of foreign companies have been introduced to optimize state-owned enterprises and support for private enterprises, so China’s economy has developed rapidly.

As the Iraqi army retreated at the end of the first Gulf War, they took the term “scorched Earth policy” quite literally. Kuwaiti oil wells were set alight en masse, creating towering infernos that blackened the sky.