MITPressLog

Robots, Automation, and Alaska

Not all of us are as lucky as Ada Brunstein, our Senior Acquisitions Editor in Computer Science and Linguistics.  She goes to some very interesting locations for conferences.  Recently she attended ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation), which was held this year in Anchorage, Alaska. She was kind enough to tell (and show) us about it.

The city itself doesn’t have too much to recommend it but there were a few highlights. It has a couple of excellent restaurants, among them the Glacier Brew House for the seafood, homemade beer and homemade cream soda, and Snow City Café for the delicious Polar Bear Breakfast (among other goodies). There are a few good chocolatiers (apparently Alaska is big on booze and chocolate!). And the mother of all distractions: a fantastic shoe store with a fun name (ShuzyQ).

This conference is always more animated than most – the exhibit area is full of moving disembodied parts. Books look almost ancient in this context (though if we could get a robotic arm to turn the pages of a book one by one throughout the conference, that would be cool!). Gesticulating arms sit atop tables. Skinless (or in this case shell-less) robot bodies walk or stand on one leg to impress the crowd with their balance. Robo-critters often roam past the book exhibit – sometimes they’re boxes on wheels, other times they have arms or eyes emerging from wires … or even faces. Occasionally the machines talk to you though it’s not always clear what they’re saying. But sometimes that’s the case with roboticists too. 

There were roughly 1200 people in attendance. It’s worth noting that one of the best things about robotics conferences is that there’s never ever a line for the ladies’ room, but I do hope that will change in the future.

 

The highlight of the conference was the reception which took place on a 5-hour scenic train ride through the mountains, ending at Spencer Glacier. The mountainous and marshy landscape is extraordinary especially as the light changes. There were no moose sightings (though apparently it’s not uncommon to see them wandering around). The Alaskan sunset this time of year is about at 10:30 at night and until then the sun is so bright that you really do need to wear sunglasses at night. On the train we ate appetizers and drank Alaskan beer (delicious), so the accompanying pictures were taken through beer goggles and dirty windows. Still pretty spectacular though!

 

Creating life?

The big news in science over the past few days is the creation, by genome pioneer J. Craig Venter, of a bacterial gene that has been used to take over a cell. In other words, he and his team have created a living bacteria from non-living parts. Venter says that the achievement "is a philosophical advance as much as a technical advance," meaning that it brings up and reinforces profound questions about the essence of life and the distinction between the living and the non-living.

A few of our authors have discussed the implications of Venter's achoevement in an online piece for the journal Nature. Among those weighing in are: Mark Bedau ("Although these questions are controversial and difficult to resolve, society will gain from the effort"): Steen Rasmussen ("But the radical ‘top-down’ genetic engineering that Venter’s team has done does not quite constitute a 'synthetic cell' by my definition); and Arthur Caplan, who coedits our Basic Bioethics series ("Venter and his colleagues have shown that the material world can be manipulated to produce what we recognize as life").

The whole thing is worth a read, as is a recent edited collection on this general edited by Bedau and Emily Parke called The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory.

Russia's Domestic Debt Default - What Greece Can Learn

 

Martin Gilman, author of the forthcoming No Precedent, No Plan shares some of his thoughts on the recent financial crisis in Greece. 

The economic turmoil unfolding in Greece, as financial markets turn against the sovereign debt issued by the Greek Government, seems unprecedented.  Of course Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff in their 2009 book, This Time is Different, analyze cases of financial crisis in 66 countries stretching back some 800 years including problems with locally-issued foreign-currency debt.

Greece is different though in at least one key respect – the sovereign debt in question is not foreign debt or foreign-currency debt, but rather domestic debt issued in its domestic currency.  Countries rarely default on domestic currency debt since they usually have the option of printing more money.  In fact, with minor exceptions, you would need to seek analogies harking back to the 1930s.

However, one such example happened in our recent past.  Twelve years ago this summer the Russian Federation defaulted on its domestic debt obligations denominated in domestic currency.  The parallels are striking.  Both Russia and Greece took advantage of a benign global environment to issue large amounts of debt in the local market on the assumption that it could always be rolled-over; the issues were in local currency; among the largest buyers of the sovereign securities were local and foreign banks; the International Monetary Fund was called in to do the heavy lifting once trouble developed; larger and more extensive “bail-out” packages were announced to an ever skeptical market in the absence of convincing austerity policies to restore financial discipline; and the markets persisted in the belief that politics would never allow a default until the inevitable actually happened.

Of course, Greece has two advantages over Russia in 1998: it is a member of the Eurozone and can benefit, however reluctantly, from massive support of its partner countries; and the world has a generally positive disposition toward the country.  However, Greece also has the Euro as an albatross – devaluation is not an option as it turned out to be for Russia (Greece can only act in conjunction with the other 15 members of the Eurozone) . 

As described in my forthcoming book, No Precedent, No Plan, in August 1998, the Russian Government chose default as presumably the lesser of two evils (the other being monetization of the debt) because it did not want to risk an inflationary explosion.  The devaluation of the ruble that followed in the aftermath was not immediate, but effective by the end of 1998 in helping the economy to recover its competitiveness.  The choice faced by Greece is more stark.  In both cases a critical role is played by the IMF, often behind the scenes.  As we learned the hard way in the case of Russia, the IMF can help with money, advice, and public confidence, but in the end it can only help to buy time.  Greece, unlike Russia, would be advised to use it well.

The Gulf spill and the Hobson's choice of oil production

The ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a catastrophe that seems to be occurring in slow motion. Oil continues to pour forth from the oceanic well with little, it seems, to be done to prevent the flow into the Gulf waters and threaten further the ecosystems that lie around them. Meanwhile, a massive oil slick inches towards the Louisiana coast and threatens Florida and Alabama as well. The president has called it a "potentially unprecedented environmental disaster."

A string of questions looms, not just about how the spill happened but about the reaction to the crisis, both by BP and the federal government, and well as the oil industry's requirements for readiness and prevention. These are issues that Thomas Beamish knows well. A sociologist at the University of California Davis, Beamish wrote his 2002 book Silent Spill about a California oil spill that went unattended for 38 years. In his research he became intimately familiar with the regulatory and organizational issues that go into oil production.

We asked Beamish for some thoughts on the Gulf spill, and he sent us one of the richest and most detailed posts we've hosted on this blog. His thoughts - focusing on delayed response, the oil industry's priorities, and the future of 'normal accidents' - follow after the jump