Notes Part 1
21 Jul 2020
I sold my Mac computer recently and accessing iCloud from a Windows pc is cumbersome enough to not bother. So I decided to import my notes here. This is part 1.
Jump to related section from anchor links.
Why 1984 Isn’t Banned in China
The fractured future of browser privacy
Uyghur Part 1
Muslims are being held in internment camps in China
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bhop3g/a_million_muslims_are_being_held_in_internment/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/world/asia/china-xinjiang-un-uighurs.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmvyjwLxC5I
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/township-08062018145657.html
China’s Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ
Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm - ICIJ
###What has the global response been?
Much of the world has condemned China’s detention of Uighurs in Xinjiang. The UN human rights chief and other UN officials have demanded access to the camps. The European Union has called on China to respect religious freedom and change its policies in Xinjiang. And human rights organizations have urged China to immediately shut down the camps and answer questions about disappeared Uighurs.
Notably silent are many Muslim nations. Prioritizing their economic ties and strategic relationships with China, many governments have ignored the human rights abuses. In July 2019, after a group of mostly European countries—and no Muslim-majority countries—signed a letter to the UN human rights chief condemning China’s actions in Xinjiang, more than three dozen states, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, signed their own letter [PDF] praising China’s “remarkable achievements” in human rights and its “counterterrorism” efforts in Xinjiang. Earlier in 2019, Turkey became the only Muslim-majority country to voice concern when its foreign minister called on China to ensure “the full protection of the cultural identities of the Uighurs and other Muslims” during a UN Human Rights Council session.
In October 2019, the United States imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials “believed to be responsible for, or complicit in” the detention of Muslims in Xinjiang, marking the toughest step by any major government to date. It also blacklisted more than two dozen Chinese companies and agencies linked to abuses in the region—including surveillance technology manufacturers and Xinjiang’s public security bureau—effectively blocking them from buying U.S. products.
Human Rights Watch has advocated other actions the United States and other countries could take: publicly challenging Xi; sanctioning senior officials, such as Chen; denying exports of technologies that facilitate abuse; and preventing China from targeting members of the Uighur diaspora. Activists have also called on the United States to grant asylum to Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang.
source: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-repression-uighurs-xinjiang
The campaign, which the Chinese government says exists to combat extremism and “reeducate” the population, has been condemned by the US, the EU parliament, UN authorities, and global human rights organizations.
source: china-uighur-xinjiang-kazakhstan
Uluslararası tepkilere bakıldığında: Birleşmiş milletler insan hakları konseyi bir kararname imzalayarak(aralarında Türkiye mevcut değil) kamplara incelenme için erişim sağlanmasını, Avrupa birliği uygulanan politikanın değiştirilmesi istedi. ABD bazı Çin yetkililerine vize kısıtlaması getirdi, 28 şirketi kara listeye ekledi ve senato S.178 nolu kararı onayladı ve son olarak başkan Trump’a sunulacak. Türkiye tarafında ise yapılan baskılar hakkında Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu’nun endişelerini dile getirmesi dışında TBMM’de görüşülen araştırma önergesi oy çoğunluğuyla reddedildi. https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/meclis_arastirma_onergeleri.onerge_bilgileri?kanunlar_sira_no=250813
Covid-19 Part 1
SARS-CoV-2
Bu notun açılma tarihi 21 Mart
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-showed-america-wasnt-task/608023/
The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff
MARCH 15, 2020
This story has been told repeatedly—and correctly—as an illustration of what’s wrong with the Chinese system: The secrecy and mania for control inside the Communist Party lost the government many days during which it could have put a better plan into place. But many of those recounting China’s missteps have become just a little bit too smug.
The United States also had an early warning of the new virus—but it, too, suppressed that information. In late January, just as instances of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, began to appear in the United States, an infectious-disease specialist in Seattle, Helen Y. Chu, realized that she had a way to monitor its presence. She had been collecting nasal swabs from people in and around Seattle as part of a flu study, and proposed checking them for the new virus. State and federal officials rejected that idea, citing privacy concerns and throwing up bureaucratic obstacles related to lab licenses.
Finally, at the end of February, Chu could stand the intransigence no longer. Her lab performed some tests and found the coronavirus in a local teenager who had not traveled overseas. That meant the disease was already spreading in the Seattle region among people who had never been abroad. If Chu had found this information a month earlier, lives might have been saved and the spread of the disease might have slowed—but even after the urgency of her work became evident, her lab was told to stop testing.
Look at Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to speak honestly and openly about the disease—she predicted that 70 percent of Germans would get it—and yet did not crash the markets.
Timeline: The early days of China’s coronavirus outbreak and cover-up
Mar 18, 2020
Why it matters: A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.
How Long Will Coronavirus Live on Surfaces or in the Air Around You?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/health/coronavirus-surfaces-aerosols.html
The new study, published Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests that the virus disintegrates over the course of a day on cardboard, lessening the worry among consumers that deliveries will spread the virus during this period of staying and working from home.
When the virus becomes suspended in droplets smaller than five micrometers — known as aerosols — it can stay suspended for about a half-hour, researchers said, before drifting down and settling on surfaces where it can linger for hours. The finding on aerosol in particular is inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s position that the virus is not transported by air.
Coronavirus can persist in air for hours and on surfaces for days: study
The tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours. On plastic and stainless steel, viable virus could be detected after three days. On cardboard, the virus was not viable after 24 hours. On copper, it took 4 hours for the virus to become inactivated.
https://twitter.com/Emrah_Altindis/status/1238666136818003974?s=20
On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwaa036/5775463?searchresult=1
The SARS-CoV-2 epidemic started in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has since impacted a large portion of China and raised major global concern.
Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses evolved into two major types (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date. Although the L type (∼70%) is more prevalent than the S type (∼30%), the S type was found to be the ancestral version. Whereas the L type was more prevalent in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, the frequency of the L type decreased after early January 2020. Human intervention may have placed more severe selective pressure on the L type, which might be more aggressive and spread more quickly. On the other hand, the S type, which is evolutionarily older and less aggressive, might have increased in relative frequency due to relatively weaker selective pressure.
A study recently published in the National Science Review showed the SARS-CoV-2 “L” type evolved from the SARS-CoV-2 “S” type, which is less aggressive.
Cancel Everything
MARCH 10, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-cancel-everything/607675/
The first fact is that, at least in the initial stages, documented cases of COVID-19 seem to increase in exponential fashion. On the 23rd of January, China’s Hubei province, which contains the city of Wuhan, had 444 confirmed COVID-19 cases. A week later, by the 30th of January, it had 4,903 cases. Another week later, by the 6th of February, it had 22,112. The same story is now playing out in other countries around the world. Italy had 62 identified cases of COVID-19 on the 22nd of February. It had 888 cases by the 29th of February, and 4,636 by the 6th of March.
The second fact is that this disease is deadlier than the flu, to which the honestly ill-informed and the wantonly irresponsible insist on comparing it. Early guesstimates, made before data were widely available, suggested that the fatality rate for the coronavirus might wind up being about 1 percent. If that guess proves true, the coronavirus is 10 times as deadly as the flu.
But there is reason to fear that the fatality rate could be much higher. According to the World Health Organization, the current case fatality rate—a common measure of what portion of confirmed patients die from a particular disease—stands at 3.4 percent. This figure could be an overstatement, because mild cases of the disease are less likely to be diagnosed. Or it could be an understatement, because many patients have already been diagnosed with the virus but have not yet recovered (and may still die).
When the influenza epidemic of 1918 infected a quarter of the U.S. population, killing hundreds of thousands nationally and millions across the globe, seemingly small choices made the difference between life and death. As the disease was spreading, Wilmer Krusen, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, allowed a huge parade to take place on September 28; some 200,000 people marched. In the following days and weeks, the bodies piled up in the city’s morgues. By the end of the season, 12,000 residents had died.
In St. Louis, a public-health commissioner named Max Starkloff decided to shut the city down. Ignoring the objections of influential businessmen, he closed the city’s schools, bars, cinemas, and sporting events. Thanks to his bold and unpopular actions, the per capita fatality rate in St. Louis was half that of Philadelphia. (In total, roughly 1,700 people died from influenza in St Louis.) In the coming days, thousands of people across the country will face the choice between becoming a Wilmer Krusen or a Max Starkloff.
I Make Coronavirus Test Kits for a Living—We Are All Working in a Frenzy
Mar 13 2020
Elif Akyuz, Ph.D, is a founding partner and R&D Director for Reagents for Anatolia Geneworks , a molecular diagnostics manufacturing company in Istanbul, Turkey.
Within weeks, we had sold more than 150,000 tests to Italy, U.K., France, Poland, Ukraine, Portugal, Bangladesh, UAE, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Jordan, Egypt, Canada, Georgia, and Moldova.
In January, the Poland Ministry of Health contacted us, desperate for tests. We have been supplying other products to them since 2012, and they knew they could count on us for quality test kits. We told them of course we could get them kits. It would take three to four days to ship them, and they would then have to spend about two days going through customs before they could be transported to Poland. But they needed the tests so urgently, they obtained special diplomatic permission to bypass customs by sending a private jet to our lab to pick them up.
‘If I Caught the Coronavirus, Would You Want Me Making Your Next Meal?’
March 19, 2020
…a shift manager at a McDonald’s restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., asks why a company that earned $5.3 billion last year can’t guarantee paid sick leave for all of its workers, especially during the coronavirus outbreak.
How to Solve the Ventilator Shortage?
March 22, 2020
On March 15, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that there are only 12,700 ventilators in the national strategic stockpile.
Ventilators are mechanical breathing machines that are the crucial lifesaving tool when a patient’s lungs fill with fluid, making it very difficult for the lungs to oxygenate blood. In one of the first large-scale studies of the characteristics of the coronavirus in Wuhan, 5 percent of patients required the intensive care unit and 2.3 percent required a ventilator. Now imagine 2.3 percent of the perhaps millions of Americans who are expected to become infected with Covid-19 over the next three months. There simply will not be enough of these machines, especially in major cities. (Hospitals in the country have some 160,000 total; New York has 6,000 at most.)
European countries are paying to preserve jobs during the coronavirus crisis.
March 26, 2020
A number of European countries, after similarly failing to control the spread of the virus, and thus being forced to lock down large parts of their economies, have chosen to protect jobs. Denmark has agreed to compensate Danish employers for up to 90 percent of their workers’ salaries. In the Netherlands, companies facing a loss of at least 20 percent of their revenue can similarly apply for the government to cover 90 percent of payroll. And the United Kingdom announced that it would pay up to 80 percent of the wage bill for as many companies as needed the help, with no cap on the total amount of public spending.
Some countries only pay employers for workers who aren’t working. Under Germany’s Kurzarbeit scheme, the government chips in even for workers kept on part time. The German government predicts that 2.35 million workers will draw benefits during the crisis. In either case, the goal is to preserve people in existing jobs — to preserve the antediluvian fabric of the economy to the greatest extent possible, for the benefit of workers and firms.
Boeing 737-MAX 1
The accidents befell Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019.
In November 2018, in response to the first accident, Boeing issued a service bulletin referring pilots to an existing recovery procedure, and the FAA published an emergency airworthiness directive mandating revisions to the crew manual, which did not explain MCAS.
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight control law was introduced on the 737 MAX to mitigate the aircraft’s tendency to pitch up because of the aerodynamic effect of its larger, heavier, and more powerful CFM LEAP-1B engines and nacelles. The stated goal of MCAS, according to Boeing, was to make the 737 MAX perform similarly to its immediate predecessor, the 737 Next Generation.
What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html
Aerodynamic stalls are central to the Boeing 737 saga, so let’s explore them briefly now. Airplanes fly because their wings greet the oncoming air at a positive angle, known as an angle of attack. The faster an airplane flies, the lower the angle of attack needs to be to generate the necessary lift. Conversely, the slower an airplane flies, the greater the angle of attack needs to be. But at some point, the angle of attack becomes too great for the oncoming air to negotiate smoothly. As the airplane approaches that critical angle, the first event is a stall warning in the cockpit. In the 737, it is a rattling “stick shaker” that vibrates the control columns and is meant as an urgent warning to lower the nose. If the pilot does not respond, the airflow starts to boil across the top of the wings, sometimes causing buffets that shake the airplane, before separating from the wings conclusively at the moment of the stall. At that point, the wings’ effectiveness is hugely degraded, roll control becomes difficult and the nose drops unavoidably in what is known as a G-break, so called because it may be felt as a brief lessening of the normal (unaccelerated) 1-G pull of gravity.
Some at Boeing argued for an aerodynamic fix, but the modifications would have been slow and expensive, and Boeing was in a hurry. Its solution was to create synthetic control forces by cooking up a new automated system known as the MCAS to roll in a burst of double-speed nose-down stabilizer trim at just the right moment, calculated largely by angle of attack.
…
After some initial tweaking, the system produced control forces that closely mimicked those of the earlier 737 models, allowing the Max to avoid onerous recertification. Indeed, on initial impulse the artificial forces were so realistic that Boeing convinced itself (and the F.A.A.) that there was no need to even introduce the MCAS to the airplane’s future pilots.
Omission - ihmal
One of Boeing’s bewildering failures in the MCAS design is that despite the existence of two independent angle-of-attack sensors, the system did not require agreement between them to conclude that a stall had occurred.
The story is complicated because the counter-trim that Suneja had been thumbing to beat back the dog was working, and with greater effect at higher speeds, to the point that full nose-down trim would have been avoidable even if the cutout switches were not thrown, so long as the pilots stayed in the fight. But panic was growing in the cockpit. What little the Indonesian investigators have said about the voice recordings, they have described that much. The air-traffic control record shows the same. Suddenly it was the captain, Suneja, who was on the radio, and his transmissions made little sense. Apparently he had taken over the desperate search through the checklists and handed the flying to Harvino. This was a mistake, because Harvino was in no condition to fend off the MCAS attacks. He gave a few feeble inputs of nose-up trim with his thumb switch and began calling on God for a miracle. The MCAS ignored his entreaties and pitched the airplane into a steepening dive at airspeeds that quickly exceeded the engineered limits. Harvino stopped even trying to thumb the trim. Suneja hauled his control column all the way back, giving full up elevator to no avail. The nose dropped farther as the stabilizer prevailed. The crew of an offshore oil platform saw the airplane in a nearly vertical dive before it hit the water.
The second accident occurred when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a 737 Max bound for Nairobi with 157 people aboard, hit the ground near Addis Ababa in a screaming dive. The airplane was captained by a 29-year-old pilot named Yared Getachew, who had graduated from the airline’s production-line academy 10 years before and had accumulated 8,122 hours of flight time. His co-pilot was a 25-year-old named Ahmed Nur Mohammod Nur, who had graduated from the academy just a few months before and had started serving as a 737 co-pilot
10 March 2019 the flight crashed near the town of Bishoftu six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard
Both men were aware of the Lion Air tragedy. They had been briefed on the MCAS system and knew the basics
This airplane had heavy pressures on the controls — remember, Getachew was muscling his control column halfway back. Now, in apparent desperation to persuade the autopilot to engage, Getachew did the unthinkable and released his pressure on the control column. The column snapped forward, and the airplane responded by violently pitching down, 20 degrees below the horizon. Just then, with the stick shaker still rattling, the MCAS kicked in and achieved full nose-down trim, doubling the angle of the dive. As the speed shot through 450 knots, the pilots hauled back on their control columns to no effect. Six minutes after takeoff, the airplane hit the ground doing approximately 600 miles an hour. It buried itself into a 30-foot-deep crater in farmland about 32 miles southeast of the airport. Within a week, the Boeing 737 Max was grounded worldwide.
What we had in the two downed airplanes was a textbook failure of airmanship. In broad daylight, these pilots couldn’t decipher a variant of a simple runaway trim, and they ended up flying too fast at low altitude, neglecting to throttle back and leading their passengers over an aerodynamic edge into oblivion.
How Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/business/boeing-737-accidents.html
A Decade Later, Dutch Officials Publish a Study Critical of Boeing
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/business/boeing-737-crashes.html
Boeing Refuses to Cooperate With New Inquiry Into Deadly Crash
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/business/boeing-737-inquiry.html
Why 1984 Isn’t Banned in China
Censorship in the country is more complicated than many Westerners imagine.
JANUARY 13, 2019
Last winter, after the Chinese Communist Party announced the abolition of presidential term limits, Beijing temporarily moved to censor social-media references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.
When a book crosses some lines but not others, censors generally use a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. That explains the status of Brave New World Revisited, Huxley’s nonfiction work in which he argued that autocrats in the Soviet Union and China were combining the rule-through-distraction techniques outlined in Brave New World and the rule-through-fear methods detailed in 1984. Chinese readers on the mainland can find copies of this highbrow book by a foreigner pretty easily—but censors have surgically excised all direct references to Mao’s China.
These patterns may suggest that censors take a rather dim view of their audiences’ abilities—that they believe Chinese citizens are unable to draw a connection between the political situation Orwell described and the nature of their government (unless prompted to do so by a rabble-rouser on the internet). More likely, they’re motivated by elitism, or classism. Analogously, in the United States the MPAA slaps movies with an R rating if they depict nudity, but there’s no warning system for museums that display nude sculptures. The assumption is not that Chinese people can’t figure out the meaning of 1984, but that the small number of people who will bother to read it won’t pose much of a threat.
Western commentators often give the impression that Chinese censorship is more comprehensive than it really is, due, in part, to a veritable obsession with the government’s handling of the so-called three T’s of Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. A 2013 article in The New York Review of Books states, for example, that “to this day Tiananmen is one of the neuralgic words forbidden—not always successfully—on China’s Internet.” Any book, article, or social-media post that so much as mentions these words, the conventional wisdom holds, is liable to disappear.
The fractured future of browser privacy
https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-firefox-edge-browser-privacy/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/the-fractured-future-of-browser-privacy/
