Al Hammond - Chestertown Spy

The Digital Divide on the Eastern Shore — And How It Hurts by Al Hammond

January 27, 2021 by Al Hammond

A new report by the Community Development Network of Maryland, funded and published by the Abell foundation, documents the extent to which households in the state lack access to high-speed internet services or to the digital tools (computer, laptops) to make effective use of such services. Statewide, some 520,000 households—nearly one in four—do not have such services, either because none are available where they live or because they can’t afford them. About 390,000 households—about 18 percent—do not own a computer or a laptop.

The digital divide is even wider on the Eastern Shore: more than one in three households (36 percent) lack high-speed internet services (delivered over cable or fiber), and 23 percent of households lack either a computer or a laptop. The data show that lack of access is highest among low-income households and is also higher in minority households. The report also says that the gap in technology adoption affects many seniors, especially those over the age of 75.

Now, imagine that you want to get the covid vaccine as soon as possible, now that Governor Hogan has declared Stage 1-B for Maryland. But in most counties on the upper eastern shore, the only way to sign up for an appointment to get the vaccine is over the internet. That means many of the most vulnerable eastern shore citizens (older seniors, Afro-Americans) have no easy way to sign up and are likely to be left behind.

Or suppose that a loved one was diagnosed with symptoms of kidney failure or some other chronic (and deadly) disease, and you needed to see a relevant medical specialist—but found that those doctors were only doing telemedicine visit—something you could not do.

Also imagine that you have school-age children who must try to learn virtually, until schools reopen, but that you either lack internet access at home or don’t have the tools (computers, laptops, tablets) for them to do so. Driving your kids to someplace where they can get WiFi access from the car is not really a viable solution, even though that is what many families do.

So the digital divide is not some abstract problem. It hurts a large number of households on the eastern shore—one is three—in real ways. Both counties and the state have plans to address the problem. The Abell report mentions both accelerated network buildout of internet connections, but also tackling affordability through direct subsidies. Perhaps it’s time to kick those plans into high gear.

Al Hammond was trained as a scientist (Stanford, Harvard) but became a distinguished science journalist, reporting for Science (a leading scientific journal) and many other technical and popular magazines and on a daily radio program for CBS. He subsequently founded and served as editor-in-chief for 4 national science-related publications as well as editor-in-chief for the United Nation’s bi-annual environmental report. More recently, he has written, edited, or contributed to many national assessments of scientific research for federal science agencies. Dr. Hammond makes his home in Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

The Mid-Shore Slowly Begins the Great Vaccination by Al Hammond

January 6, 2021 by Al Hammond

The last two weeks of 2020 marked the effective start of vaccine administration for the Eastern Shore. Two different vaccines are in play: The University of Maryland’s Shore Regional Health hospital in Easton is administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, because they have the specialized sub-zero freezer required to store it; County health departments in Talbot, Caroline, Dorchester, Queen Anne, and Kent counties are administering the Moderna vaccine. Under Maryland’s distribution plan, both are focusing in Phase 1A on medical staff, nursing home residents, and first responders. All of those also have to have a second shot of the vaccine, 3 or 4 weeks after the first.

Because week to week deliveries of vaccine are still uncertain (Thank You, Operation Warp Speed not!), no one is certain how long phase 1A will last, but the best guess of county health officers is that phase 1B—people over 65 and those with underlying conditions that make them especially vulnerable—won’t start until about the third week in January, or maybe slightly sooner in smaller counties. And under Maryland’s plan, Phase 1B recipients will have to register online before they can get the vaccine, which will add delays and be difficult for those without internet access. So Phase 1B—which could include nearly a third of the population on the Eastern Shore, will last likely a month or more, even with adequate supplies of vaccine. Then Phase 2 (essential workers) and later still Phase 3 (general public) will get vaccinated.

Delays aside, the vaccines themselves are good news. Both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine are based on new technology (so-called messenger RNA vaccines). Your body uses RNA to messenger genetic instructions from your genes (DNA) on how to make proteins that your body needs. So unlike traditional vaccines based on weakened versions of the infectious agent, RNA vaccines don’t use the covid virus itself at all. Instead they consist of genetic instructions that allow your body to manufacture a protein that resembles the part of the virus (the spike) that attaches to human cells. That protein triggers your immune system to produce antibodies to fight the virus, protecting you if you were to become infected. The RNA vaccine itself—once it has delivered the genetic instructions—disappears from your body. So it’s impossible to catch the virus from the vaccine.

Moreover, RNA vaccines represent a new era of vaccine development. Moderna, for example, has been working in partnership with the US National Institutes of Health for several years on RNA vaccines. So when the CEO of Moderna received an email containing the genetic code for the virus, just a few days after the first Covid death in China, he immediately sent it on to his partners at NIH and proposed that they use their new RNA technology. Within 3 weeks, the Moderna/NIH scientists had created a candidate vaccine, and within 6 weeks they shipped the first samples to begin clinical testing—an unprecedented timescale. Scientists believe it is likely that, in future, RNA vaccines will be developed that protect against multiple diseases (by delivering genetic instructions for several different proteins) with a single shot.

Other vaccines are on the way. The J&J vaccine candidate, not yet approved, is a traditional weakened virus vaccine, but will require only a single shot. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is also a weakened virus vaccine, already approved in Britain, which doesn’t need refrigeration and is inexpensive to make. Still other covid vaccines are in development, including one based on injecting a protein (similar to the flu vaccine) by Novavax, a company based in Maryland.

Regardless of the type of vaccine, it takes several weeks before protection is fully effective—and that means several weeks after the second shot for Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. During that period, you could still become infected and could still transmit the virus to those around you. So even after you get your first shot, plan on wearing a mask and practicing social distancing for two months more. Moreover, covid cases are surging, and the impact of Christmas/New Year’s travel and gathering still to come. So January promises to be the most dangerous period of this pandemic, with hospitals and healthcare workers overwhelmed. Not a time to take risks.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Mid-Shore Science: Wetlands and Climate Resilience with Dr. Ariana Sutton-Grier

December 16, 2020 by Al Hammond

Ariana Sutton-Grier is a distinguished scientist with expertise in coastal ecosystems. In particular her research has focused on the role these ecosystems—both the coasts and associated wetlands—play as living infrastructure that improves climate resilience by helping protect against storm surges and rising sea-levels. These coastal ecosystems also turn out to be important in storing large amounts of carbon that would otherwise escape to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, accelerating climate change. In the Chesapeake Bay, they are also important for maintaining fisheries and as recreational assets. Dr. Sutton-Grier is a visiting professor at the University of Maryland and recently gave an invited lecture at that university’s Horn Point Laboratory, excerpted here by permission.

In a follow-up interview, Dr. Sutton-Grier made clear the importance of living or green infrastructure on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and preservation or restoration of wetlands. Not only do salt marshes and sea grasses and oyster beds help reduce wave energy and inland flooding, they survive extreme storm events like hurricanes better than bulkheads and stone riprap. Healthy coastal ecosystems also adjust better to rising sea levels by being able to grow and keep pace with rising waters. Moreover, these coastal ecosystems help slow climate change by capturing and storing large amounts of carbon for long periods of time. On a per acre basis, in fact, coastal ecosystems often store more carbon than the world’s tropical forests.

Restoring and protecting coastal wetlands—and potentially even creating new wetlands—could enhance carbon capture and storage, and might be able to be partially funded by carbon capture credits. Maryland has some 3100 miles of tidal shoreline around the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and along the Atlantic coast—a remarkable resource. Moreover, Sutton-Grier points out, the region around the Bay is mostly flat, meaning that as sea levels inevitably rise, coastal wetlands can potentially migrate inland, preserving both fisheries and recreational opportunities, and their unique carbon storage capabilities, for the long term.

Maryland Secretary of the Environment Ben Grumbles recently underscored the importance of green infrastructure on the Eastern Shore. In response to a question from the Spy, he identified the need for more such efforts as perhaps the most important step that Maryland could take in improving the resilience of the Chesapeake Bay and its surroundings to rising sea levels, storm flooding, and other impact of climate change.

Preserving and perhaps expanding coastal wetlands around the Bay might be the most significant green infrastructure opportunity. It would involve significant societal tradeoffs, but could provide a way to offset rising sea levels and storm surge flooding. Indeed, sea level rise is already causing salt water intrusion and frequent flooding in low-lying areas such as much of Dorchester and in other parts of the Eastern Shore, making farming difficult and threatening some residential and commercial areas. If such activities were equitably re-located, and replaced by tidal marshes and other wetlands, the entire Bay region would be better protected against rising waters, while enhancing fisheries and recreational opportunities and also helping to slow climate change.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

The COVID Third Wave: New At-Home Tests Could Help Keep You Safe

November 16, 2020 by Al Hammond

The combination of colder weather, more indoor living, and widespread exhaustion with preventive measures such as masks and social distancing is fueling an explosive third wave of the virus. Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are rising very rapidly across the U.S. So far, however, the Eastern Shore is a pretty safe place to be. Compared to North Dakota’s incidence of 171 cases per 100,000 people (highest in the U.S.), Maryland overall has just 24 cases/100k as of November 14. The Mid-Shore counties were lower still: Queen Anne 16.7; Kent 11; Caroline 10.3; Talbot 8.1 (all per 100k of population). Because populations are small, these numbers don’t translate into lots of cases: Kent, for example, is seeing about 2 new cases a day.

Still, things are likely to get considerably worse nationally over the next several months, if medical experts like Dr. Fauci are right. Numbers of new infections are rising even on the Eastern Shore. And vaccines won’t be available for most people until sometime next spring or summer, because health workers and first responders and possibly nursing home residents or other extremely vulnerable people are likely to have first priority. So the pandemic will likely get much worse before it gets better. To complicate matters, it’s also flu season, with overlapping symptoms making it initially hard to know what a fever or congested breathing really mean. As a result, gathering the family for Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays or New Year’s celebrations comes with higher risks—especially if some of those gathering come from places with higher Covid prevalence.

The good news is that testing is both more available and, soon, more convenient—even something you can do yourself at home, quickly and privately, like a pregnancy test. There are several kinds of tests, which differ in what they measure, accuracy, speed of results, and costs. So let’s sort them out and clarify the technical terms:

PCR test, which stands for polymerase chain reaction, is the gold standard for covid testing. It make millions of copies of any virus genetic material found in a test sample (usually collected with a nasal swab), allowing it to be sequenced and identified. The testing process, however, requires sophisticated laboratory equipment and usually takes several days for the sample to be sent to a lab and analyzed. It’s not cheap if you have to pay for it yourself.
Antibody tests, which are blood proteins generated by your body’s immune system to defend against a virus infection. However, it usually takes several weeks after infection for detectable levels of covid antibodies to show up in your blood, so while this test can confirm that you were infected, it’s not useful to detect a live infection, especially early on when a person is most likely to spread the disease to another.
Antigen tests, which detect a viral particle or other foreign agent that can stimulate an immune response. These tests are inexpensive, can be analyzed very rapidly, and do not require complex laboratory equipment, but they have lower accuracy than PCR tests. Nonetheless, they are especially useful in the early days of an infection, and for testing people who are infected but have no symptoms.

Several companies including major laboratory chains like Quest will send you a sample collection kit for a PCR test, which you collect at home and mail to the laboratory for testing; but it takes several days and may not be covered by insurance. Public health agencies also offer PCR tests. More convenient are rapid Antigen tests that give answers in about 15 minutes being manufactured by major companies such as Abbott and Roche. Antigen test kits for use at home by smaller companies such as Cellex and Orasure are still in process of being certified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; they will give you an immediate result and promise to be inexpensive. In principle, family members gathering for a holiday or business colleagues that wanted a face-to-face meeting could pre-test themselves, providing an additional layer of safety. These are also useful for healthcare workers, or for student populations, that need to be tested frequently.

But tests aside, the core measures to protect yourself and your loved ones remain the behavioral safety measures: wear masks, avoid crowded indoor situations, wash your hands.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

The Coming Medical and Agricultural Revolution—Genetic Editing

October 31, 2020 by Al Hammond

Some 6000 human diseases are caused by genetic errors—a mutation in a person’s genes that is inherited or caused by exposure to radiation or a toxic substance. Most of these are quite rare, but some affect large numbers of people. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. have inherited genes that cause sickle cell disease; 30,000 have genes that cause cystic fibrosis; there is no cure for either. Virtually all cancers involve genetic changes in individual cells, including some 275,000 new U.S. cases of breast cancer and 150,000 new colorectal cancers every year, for which surgery and chemotherapy are now the only treatments.

Scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry attracted attention in the press mainly because it was awarded to two women scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. Less covered was what the prize recognized—the discovery of a means of finding and editing genetic errors to correct them. Their technique, which goes under the awkward name of CRISPR-Cas9, is in effect a kind of genetic scissors. It can cut the DNA molecules of microorganisms, plants, animals, and people very precisely, remove a defective gene, and insert a corrected version. Some scientists have described the method as akin to “a software tool for hacking genes.” In the 8 years since its discovery, the technique has transformed the biological sciences, with potentially life-changing results.

Already clinical trials underway have shown promising results of not just treatments, but permanent cures for sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, and a rare form of inherited blindness. The treatments, which will initially be expensive, could be as simple as a few days stay in a hospital where some of a patient’s own cells—modified with the CRISPR-Cas9 system—are reintroduced to that patient: one treatment resulting in a permanent fix. Since most inherited genetic diseases have no cure at present, genetic editing promises to be transformative. But genetic editing can also fix point mutations, such as those involved in cancer. The result has been a tidal wave of investment into new biotech companies, funding clinical trials intended to cure many forms of cancer, including childhood leukemia, as well as inherited genetic diseases.

Genetic editing has also become the standard approach to plant breeding, enabling more rapid development of pest-resistance or heat tolerant varieties can could improve yields, reduce need for pesticides, or help agriculture adapt to climate change. Already plant scientists have modified the genes that enable rice to absorb cadmium and arsenic from the soil, thus producing a strand of rice free from these toxic metals. A similar approach to breeding livestock is expected to improve the health of livestock and thus aid meat and dairy production.

More recent research has led to an additional method of editing genes—a technique known as base editing—that also fixes point mutations or alters specific genes without cutting a patient’s DNA. One potential use of this approach is to disable genes that contribute to ill health. For example, research has shown that by disabling two specific genes, a patient’s risk of coronary artery disease can be reduced by almost 90 percent and the risk of heart attacks by more than 30 percent. For many individuals, such treatments could potentially extend lifetimes substantially.

The precision of CRISPR and related techniques is turning out to have additional uses. Last month scientists published a new test for Covid-19 that uses CRISPR techniques and that can detect the virus in just 5 minutes, without the use of expensive laboratory equipment—potentially easing the testing bottlenecks that hamper attempts to control the pandemic.

Over the next decade, as these novel therapies move out of clinical trials and into medical practice, they will enable what is called precision medicine. That is in part because the cost of scanning and mapping your genes—to establish your unique genetic identity and to detect unsuspected mutations—is now less than $800 per patient and is expected to cost as little as $100 within a few years. Already, some health insurance companies will pay for the scan. Such gene scans will allow potential genetic diseases to be diagnosed and treated early, in some cases even before symptoms appear. Knowledge of a patient’s unique genetic makeup will also eventually enable doctors to choose medicines for ordinary diseases that work best for that individual.

The power of genetic editing has raised concerns about potential future misuse—to create “designer” babies with blue eyes or to breed a super race of soldiers for some dictator. But such changes would be much more difficult than correcting a faulty gene and would only be possible if the editing was done on the eggs and sperm cells that come together to create a new life—activity banned by both the international scientific community and governments. And such speculative risks seem small compared to the enormous potential to relieve human suffering—especially to anyone with a crippling inherited disease or newly diagnosed with cancer.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Rising Waters: Climate Change and the Chesapeake Bay

October 14, 2020 by Al Hammond

Climate change can seem a little abstract, or at least causing problems comfortably far away–forest fires in California and the Pacific Northwest, or hurricanes on the Gulf coast. But new research makes clear that there will also be profound local impacts. Recent flooding on Maryland’s eastern shore—in Salisbury, Chrisfield, Cambridge—and in Annapolis and Baltimore on the western shore is “likely just a foretaste of what is to come,” says scientist Ming Li of the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory.

The earth’s atmosphere warms because of growing concentrations of gases—especially carbon dioxide and methane stemming from human use of fossil fuels—that trap reflected sunlight. Much of that excess warmth ends up in the surface layers of the oceans. And warm water expands—raising sea levels slightly each year. This process has been accelerating in recent decades, and in Chesapeake Bay the water level is rising at twice the global rate. So high tides are getting higher, and so is the risk of flooding.

Warmer waters also mean that there is more evaporation into the atmosphere, and hence the likelihood of more (and more intense) rainfall, which can add to flooding as rivers overrun their banks. And since it is the moisture in the air that fuels the intensity of a thunderstorm or a hurricane, it’s not surprising that we are seeing more intense storms that unleash unprecedented amounts of rain—like the 60 inches that Hurricane Harvey dumped in the Houston area of Texas in 2017. Intense storms also mean high winds, like the 150 mile-per-hour winds of Hurricane Laura that battered Louisiana earlier this year, and often violent storm surges like those from superstorm Sandy that wreaked havoc in northern New Jersey and New York City in 2012. The forecast is for an increasing number of such severe storms.

One instinctive response to such forecasts is to build up sea walls or levees to protect waterfront properties, but such hardened coastlines turn out to be very expensive—prohibitively so for the entire Bay. A second response is to create so-called “soft” coastlines—salt marshes or other low-lying areas that are allowed to flood and thus absorb much of the tidal or storm surge. A third response is to relocate threatened houses, roads, and other infrastructure away from the coastline—which is the policy increasingly being adopted for low-lying areas nationally by the Army Corps of Engineers and other federal and state agencies.

What actually happens when higher tides or a severe storm surge hits the Chesapeake Bay is fairly complex, however, and depends to a significant extend on what coastal management actions are taken. Ming and his colleagues have developed numerical models—based on the well-understood physics of how water flows and detailed mapping of the physical shape of the Chesapeake basin—of both tidal and storm surges in the Bay, using them to explore what happens under a wide range of conditions and coastal management strategies. One clear result is that while seawalls and other forms of hardened coastlines may protect some properties from higher tides, they also create peak tides that are dramatically higher, especially in the mid- and upper Bay. In effect, the tidal surge would propagate further up the Bay—to Baltimore and beyond. Soft coastlines, on the other hand, absorb much of the tidal energy, so that there would be a minimal increase in peak tides and much less impact in the upper Bay.

Most of the low-lying area appropriate for soft coastline management strategies lie on the eastern shore. So adopting that type of coastline management for the Bay would help prevent serious flooding in urban areas such as Annapolis and Baltimore, but at the expense of significant land-use changes and likely necessary relocation for some homes and facilities on the Eastern shore. Such a strategy would create serious equity issues, unless those impacted are fully compensated and perhaps incentivized.

The models show that storm surges pose an even greater—if more intermittent—risk than higher tides, promising both more extensive flooding and greater property loss. They are based on the impact of Hurricane Isabel, just a category 2 storm when it hit Maryland in 2003, but whose storm surge nonetheless damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings on the eastern shore and caused severe flooding in Baltimore and Annapolis. An equivalent storm hitting the Chesapeake Bay region in 2050 when the ocean is warmer and tides higher would be expected to cause far more damage on the eastern shore and to have a storm surge in Baltimore more than 10 feet high—and that’s with soft coastlines in place; with hard coastlines, the impact in the mid and upper Bay would be greater. Property losses are estimated to be 3-4 times higher than Isabel. Ming’s model does not estimate rainfall, which could add to the flooding throughout the region.

Model-based projections about the future don’t come with guarantees, of course, but the message of this careful, detailed Horn Point Laboratory research is clear. Rising waters are inevitable; the incidence of severe storms is increasing; there will already be significant impacts in the next decade or two; and the time to prepare for them is now. Moreover, that a coordinated regional approach to coastline management—as opposed to individual actions to harden their shoreline for those that can afford it—will both reduce overall risks and share the burdens more fairly.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

The Future of Finance…and much Else by Al Hammond

September 25, 2020 by Al Hammond

With mail-in voting poised to begin in Maryland next month, there have been concerns (mostly misplaced) about the security of that process. By the time of next presidential election in 2024, however, it’s likely that voting from home via a novel technology called “blockchain” will completely eliminate any chance of fraud. Blockchains are also poised to eliminate fraud from credit card purchases and simplify (as well as secure) cross-border financial transactions. So blockchains are likely to be part of your financial future. But what is this novel and still poorly understood technology and where did it come from?

The invention of the internet created a fundamental shift in how we access and share information. In effect, the internet digitized the sharing of information in ways that made email, web sites, and smart phone apps possible—in the process changing the way we live. Now another technological innovation, the blockchain, looks ready to digitize both how we store information safely and how we share value (via digital money or digital tokens that convey ownership of physical assets). Indeed, the CEO of IBM has said “What the internet was for communication, blockchain will do for trusted transactions.”

The first blockchain—the bitcoin blockchain—was created in 2009 by an anonymous inventor who was also a gifted programmer. A blockchain is just digital record of transactions that is stored in a global network of computers in such a way that each page or “block” of transactions is unalterably linked to the previous one—forming a continuous set or “chain” of blocks of data. The computer network operates under consensus rules written into the blockchain software, so that all nodes of the network have to agree before a new block of transaction data can be added to the records. Because the records are stored in multiple places (distributed across thousands of nodes in the bitcoin network) and protected by advanced cryptography, no one person or institution has control of the data. That makes the data virtually impossible to alter—an intruder would have to take over more than half of the nodes simultaneously—and therefore much safer than your data stored at a credit agency, a merchant, or a credit card company (all of which can and have been hacked).

The bitcoin blockchain was intended to create a store of value that could not be manipulated by governments (by, for example, printing huge sums of money). But its invention stimulated a flood of ideas about how to apply the blockchain idea to other problems or opportunities. These innovations—involving many different consensus rules, but all using linked blocks of data distributed across many nodes—now seem poised to transform banking, credit cards, real estate transactions, and many other financial activities. Blockchains could even enable secure, fraud-free voting from home, while keeping the information about how each individual votes completely anonymous: indeed, the U.S. Postal Service has been issued a patent for just such a voting system.

Major financial institutions are adopting blockchain technology at a rapid pace. Fidelity and Morgan Stanley are preparing to offer their customers access to bitcoin and other digital or “crypto” currencies as well as stocks. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates banks, has just approved U.S. banks to store digital currencies for their customers (many European banks already do). And virtually every major bank is exploring blockchain applications. Mastercard is developing a blockchain replacement for debit and credit cards that could eliminate the growing and costly incidence of fraud and theft. Square, a financial firm that services small merchants, also enables individuals that use its cash app to buy and sell bitcoin or use it to pay bills—resulting in $875 million of bitcoin revenue last year. Paypal is preparing to offer similar services to its 300 million users worldwide. Walmart and UPS are starting to use blockchains to track supply chains and facilitate cross-border transactions. At a global level, the Depository Trust Closing Corporation, which settles some $54 trillion in cross-border financial transactions a year, has already closed $10 trillion in transactions with a blockchain. China recently launched a national blockchain platform and with it a prospective national digital currency. So blockchains are rapidly going mainstream.

Much of the attention around these innovations has focused on digital or “crypto” currencies such as bitcoin, a form of digital money that is not issued by a government or managed by a financial institution and which can be instantly transferred from one person to another anywhere in the world. In effect, bitcoin is a kind of software, created by the consensus rules of its underlying blockchain. That blockchain permanently stores the complete history of every bitcoin transaction, and updates the information—verifying and adding new transactions on which all the nodes of the network agree—about every 8 minutes. The operators of the nodes are paid for their services by transaction fees charged those making transactions and by a block grant of new bitcoin—created by the network’s governing consensus rules. Those rules also dictate that the supply of new bitcoin is cut in half every 4 years and will never exceed 21 million bitcoin. (About three-quarters of that amount has already been created.) So if demand increases while supply is limited, the price of bitcoin will rise—which accounts for its growing attractiveness as an investment. For that reason, bitcoin is often described as a potential digital gold, a secure (if volatile) store of value—and indeed, since its creation, the value of bitcoin has risen faster than gold or any other asset class, including stocks. In contrast, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has declined 20 percent since 2008.

One limiting factor to widespread use of bitcoin and other digital tokens is that they are not yet exactly consumer friendly. They are mostly bought or sold on digital exchanges (some of which have been hacked) and are typically stored in digital wallets that can be intimidating to use (since sending bitcoin to a wrong address is not recoverable). On the other hand, you can trade or send bitcoin to a friend 24/7 and the transaction typically takes only a few minutes—compared to as much as several days and much higher fees to send money across borders through the banking system. And improvements are coming, both in ease of access and use, in faster transactions, and secure third-party custody.

Adoption and use of bitcoin and other digital tokens is also accelerating. About 10 percent of the U.S. population are now believed to own some bitcoin. One analyst—noting that it took 10 years for 10 percent of the U.S. population to use the internet, but then adoption reached more than 70 percent in a second 10 years—predicts that bitcoin is following a similar timeline, with adoption driven both by increasingly institutional use and by millennials and still younger generations (who tend to be more comfortable with digital objects). More fundamentally, blockchain innovations are nearing commercial use in many different sectors of the economy—in the U.S., in Europe, and especially in Asia.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Next Generation Wireless Networks—A Word of Caution for Rural Maryland

September 8, 2020 by Al Hammond

On September 20, Apple will announce its new iphones, making a big point about the fact that they are equipped to use 5G mobile wireless networks and, likely, WiFi 6 wireless networks. A major selling point will be that these phones (and ipads and laptops)—operating on these new networks—can receive data much faster, able to download a high definition movie in a few seconds. New 5G capable Android devices (some already available) will make the same pitch. But before you rush out to upgrade your devices, there are some things you should consider.

5G mobile networks will indeed be much faster than the over-burdened mobile networks we have now, as much as 100 times faster. But the catch is, when will such networks be accessible to you? If you live on the Eastern Shore, the answer is not soon, likely not for some years to come. That’s because building out these networks will be much more expensive than the existing cellular networks, and the number of customers in rural areas may not justify the cost without federal or state subsidies.

5G networks operate on newly leased, higher frequencies that can transmit much more data.

The tradeoff is that they can only transmit that data over a much shorter distance (so that many more antennae—micro cell towers–are needed). The higher frequency mobile signals also don’t penetrate through walls as well as current, lower-frequency mobile signals. In densely-populated urban areas, 5G networks will likely need antennas on almost every street corner and still may not penetrate into the interior of office or residential buildings on those streets. So it will take several years to build out these new mobile networks, even in urban and suburban areas. And in rural areas—well, let’s just say, don’t hold your breath, because each of those short-range 5G antennas needs to be connected to an optical fiber backbone network. (just as current cell towers are). That means the real cost of a 5G network includes the cost of laying a lot of new optical fiber.

So buying an expensive new 5G-capable phone, unless you intend to spend a lot of time in cities or airports or sports stadiums, may not be worthwhile. Meanwhile, your 4G phone will continue to work, and may even work better in urban areas once more of the calls and downloads are being routed over 5G networks.

On the other hand, the new advanced version of WiFi—WiFi6—could turn out to be an immediate benefit, if you have a good fiber or cable internet connection to your home or place of business. That’s because WiFi6 is faster (up to 10 gigabits per second), can penetrate much further inside a building, can carry multiple kinds of traffic (phone calls, streaming video, video games) without confusion or dropped signals, and uses less energy. So buying a new WiFi6 router will eventually make a lot of sense (you won’t get the full benefit of the improvements until your devices are also upgraded to WiFi6, but the connectivity inside your house or business will be much better). WiFi6 also comes with upgraded security features, making hacking of your home network less likely.

Both 5G mobile networks and WiFi6 networks need to connect to an optical fiber or cable network—that’s where the real data traffic flows, especially across country or across the globe. The wireless networks are just intermediaries between your devices and the fiber. And if 5G isn’t going to be available anytime soon in rural areas such as the Eastern Shore, then WiFi6 will be your friend—especially if your children are learning remotely and your spouse is on Zoom calls all day and you want to stream a video.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

By the Way, How Do You Predict the Behavior of Rockfish or Crabs? By Al Hammond

August 10, 2020 by Al Hammond

Kenny Rose is an applied mathematician and fisheries scientist by training and has worked on many ecosystems throughout the US and internationally. He has spent years studying the San Francisco Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and now focuses on the Chesapeake Bay at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Horn Point Laboratory near Cambridge, Maryland.

Mathematical models—like those used for weather forecasts or to predict storm tracks—are key to studying and predicting many environmental phenomena. They typically take in data about the current state of the environment, then use computerized versions of physical laws to calculate expected outcomes. And even though nature sometimes doesn’t behave as predicted, it’s still useful to know that rain is expected or if the tide in the Bay is going to be high.

Dr. Kenny Rose, the France-Merrick Professor in Sustainable Ecosystem Restoration at Horn Point Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

But what if there are no laws that apply, only some fuzzy rules of thumb? For example, what if you want to model the behavior of fish—not just how they move around, but how they respond to warmer water or a depleted food supply? For that matter, how would you model the behavior of people or of corporations? There are no physical laws for that, but scientists have developed a different type of model for just such purposes. Called an “agent-based model” or sometimes a “complex adaptive system” model, it creates a virtual world that can track the interaction of large numbers of agents (rockfish or blue crabs or people) with each other and with the environment around them. Such models depend on assumptions about the nature of those interactions, and if those are reasonably accurate, then what emerges from the model calculations is predictions or simulations of population-level behavior—for example, will there be plenty of crabs this year? Or how stable and resilient is the Bay’s rockfish population in the face of warming and more acidic waters (because of higher carbon dioxide levels) as a result of a changing climate.

Such predictions—often based on hundreds or thousands of simulations with varying assumptions—can be compared to observed behavior to test and refine the modeling assumptions. For many fish species in Chesapeake Bay, it turns out that the critical assumptions have to do with survival while they are larvae and juveniles (before they become full adults): most very young fish don’t survive. Is that because of food availability; or does it depend on whether they live near the bottom of the bay or near the surface; or does it depend on their risk of being eaten before they can reproduce? So modelers test these and other assumptions, while also testing such variables as temperature, salinity, and the type of bottom (does it offer good ways for a young fish to hide?).

These types of virtual world models have been used for simulating such things as how fish group together, population size under different harvesting plans, interactions between different species, and the sustainability of ecosystems. At the Horn Point Laboratory, one on-going application of such models is to simulate how fish group together—known as schooling—and to test different ways to set up underwater cameras (also simulated), in order to get the most accurate estimate of the number of fish. That’s because fisheries scientists are increasingly using waterproof cameras located on the ocean bottom or on underwater drones to track populations in locations that are difficult to sample directly. But calibrating what the cameras show is tricky, because they may miss some when underwater visibility is poor or count the same fish multiple times. So Rose helped build an agent-based model of fish movements and is using that virtual world to calculate correction factors for the camera and ideas about better camera placement, leading to more accurate population counts.

Understanding how fish school is important for a number of reasons, not just for improving population counts. For juveniles, being in a crowd is one of the best defenses against being eaten. And from a fisheries perspective, schools are often where the best fishing is to be found.

The models do provide insights into population size and the food webs that support it, which lets fishery managers know whether they should allow larger harvests or increase protections in a given location. And because rockfish move around—they might come into the Bay as youngsters, then leave later on—rockfish and many species are managed at regional (mid-Atlantic) scale. Crabs move outside the Bay as well.

This map identifies spawning ground sites for Shad or River herring across the Chesapeake Bay. River herring migrate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn, as do Striped bass, Hickory and American shad, Blueback herring, Alewife, White perch, and Yellow perch. Map produced by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources

Oysters, on the other hand, stay put and are managed locally. Another ongoing effort at the Horn Point laboratory, led by Dr. Elizabeth North, uses modeling to understand how temperature, salinity and circulation patterns in the Bay affect the transport of oyster larvae. That depends initially on models of tides and currents, which can be calculated from physical laws. Then agent-based models build on those results to help the scientists understand where the larvae end up—and where they don’t. This knowledge can be used to ensure oyster larvae have the right habitat in the right location to settle and grow.

The bottom line is that the health of the Bay and of its fisheries now depend on careful management, and today’s management practices in turn depend increasingly on detailed data collection and on sophisticated modeling—including modeling the behavior of fish. So remember to give a mental “thank you” to the modelers the next time you host a crab feast.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Why Farming Data, Not Soybeans, Might Be the Future by Al Hammond

July 20, 2020 by Al Hammond

In a remarkable event a few weeks ago, a majority of the Kent County Commissioners voted for zoning changes that would allow data centers in certain parts of the county. That may have been prescient, because data centers or “farms” are expanding rapidly and the Eastern Shore is potentially well-placed to benefit; at the least, it was a vote for strengthening Kent County’s economy. In addition, on May 7 a new Maryland law came into effect that gives data farms that locate in the state a tax incentive (forgiving sales and use taxes)—a change championed by Kent County’s Economic Development office.

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated an already strong trend for businesses of all kinds to move their computing, data storage, marketing, and transaction activities to “the cloud.” That means renting data storage and computing facilities in data farms—vast warehouses full of computers and data storage devices—instead of owning and maintaining the equipment themselves. Consumers are moving more activities on-line as well, working from home or chatting with friends and family with Zoom, streaming movies, and ordering from Amazon or Instacart.

All that online activity means more data generation, more storage and data processing needed, more data farms. Yet by some estimates, only about 20 percent of the business activity that could move to the cloud has done so, meaning there is plenty of growth to come. Spending on cloud-based services in the U.S. is expected to jump from $70 billion last year to nearly $200 billion/year by 2023.

The largest providers of such cloud-based services—and the dominant owners of data farms—are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, but there are lots of smaller providers as well. In particular, data farms at the “edge” of the global network—meaning close to users—are expanding rapidly, simply because consumers now expect a website to load within a couple of seconds and upcoming computing needs such as autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things (smart devices of all kinds) also demand very rapid responses. Such edge data farms will typically be built within 100 miles of every major urban area. Kent County (and other parts of the Eastern Shore) are thus within range of Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, and Philadelphia.

Because data farms use a lot of electric power to run the computers and data servers and for cooling, they tend to locate where low-cost power (and preferably renewable power) is available and land is not expensive. And that ties into another emerging opportunity for the Eastern Shore, which is the coming development of offshore wind farms. Offshore wind could potentially supply twice the generating capacity of all current U.S. power plants, so the resource is huge. And as wind turbines get larger, they become more efficient and the cost of power that they generate drops. New materials—such as carbon fiber blades—are twice as stiff as current fiberglass blades and weigh less, also lowering costs.

Current offshore turbines in Europe typically can generate as much as 8 megawatts, but the new, larger GE wind turbines identified for the proposed Maryland Skipjack wind farm will be rated at 12 megawatts each. Other manufacturers are designing still larger 15 megawatt turbines. So offshore wind power will be low cost. And if Kent County (or some other Eastern Shore county) was to follow the successful example of Easton Utilities and create its own utility that could contract in advance for some of that low-cost power, it would have all the ingredients needed to entice data farms, and could probably sell any excess power to other utilities at a profit.

Data farms are pristine if large structures. They consume a lot of electricity, and sometimes water for cooling, and they can emit an annoying humming sound, but they don’t generate a lot of vehicle traffic nor emit pollution. As such, they are likely ideal tenants of industrial land. Opposition to the zoning change in Kent County focused most heavily on concern that farmland would be converted to data center use, but the final language of the rezoning amendment does not appear to apply to farmland.

A typical data farm also would bring a dozen or so highly-paid, IT-savvy employees to a host county, and might attract related IT businesses as well. But their potentially most important addition to a county’s economy is the value of the land they occupy—which by definition becomes highly valuable industrial property and can be taxed as such: likely valued for tax purposes at $15,000/acre or more. Compare that with farmland—which, no matter how productive of soybeans or other crops, is valued for tax purposes at $500/acre or less under formulas set by the state of Maryland. Thus a 100-acre data farm would generate 30 times as much tax revenue as a 100-acre soybean farm.

No one is suggesting wholescale conversion of farmland to data centers—and the current rezoning does not allow it—but as Kent County Commissioner Tom Mason (himself a sophisticated, large-scale farmer) put it: “Agriculture is not the agriculture of 50 years ago. We need to generate more revenue.” Data farming may be one promising way to do so, if Eastern Shore counties can organize themselves to capture this novel 21st-century form of activity.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Sections

More