Saturday, January 25, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day




Swarms of drones could be the next frontier in emergency response – NBC
Nidhi Subbaraman NBC News


Robot swarms flying high over a rescue crew in remote locations could give the first responders a communication network to keep them connected.

Robots that can buzz, whir, and clamber into some of the most dangerous crime scenes and disaster zones are coming to the aid of police officers and other first responders who put themselves in harm’s way.

In October 2013, a parolee barricaded himself in a Roseville, Calif., suburban home of a young couple and their toddler, taking mother and child hostage. A SWAT team from the local police station captured the alleged offender and took him in, but not before gunfire ripped through the one-story home and injured officers.

Law enforcement officers on the ground had help from bomb squad robots, that helped push aside the furniture the suspect had piled up as a barricade. But two detectives believe that a bit of unmanned aerial backup would have made a big difference.

Carnegie Mellon University
Pei Zhang;s lab is crafting algorithms that can help miniature helicopters work together to explore and map out an unknown building, giving first responders a jump start on a mission.

“Just knowing what’s going on inside a house that we would go into cold — [we could] potentially save officers’ lives and victims’ lives,” Phil Mancini, a detective on the Roseville police desk, told NBC News. Mancini has been advising a group at Carnegie Mellon University that is building a swarm of cheap, small flying helicopters that could come to the aid of officers across the country who find themselves facing off against suspects they can’t always see.

A crew of ten rotors would move and think one, as if a single robot was “chopped into pieces with a knife,” said Pei Zhang, associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon. Technology being developed at Zhang's lab will allow tens of robots to explore different parts of a new environment and make sense of the information they each collect.

“I can see the thing deployed almost on every call, every type of EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) or SWAT call,” Pat Zeri, the bomb squad commander at Roseville in charge of the robots. His ground robots are useful, sure, but they’re slow to get moving, and if the robot has a problem, “there’s a 900 pound block of metal for the SWAT team to negotiate around.”

Zhang says robotic insects like the RoboBee from the Wyss Institute at Harvard or cyborg beetles that carry sensors on their backs could be future foot soldiers in a networked system, crawling into a burning building to find the hottest zones, or using motion sensors to locate a missing person.

Small drones, flying solo, have helped first responders in exactly these ways. In May last year, the Royal Canadian Mountain Police used a quadcopter carrying an infrared camera to find an injured person after his car flipped over in the snow in Saskatchewan. In Grand Forks County, North Dakota, the sheriff’s office used drones last season to check on flooded farms. The Mesa County Sheriff’s office in Colorado regularly sends their camera-equipped Draganflyer X6 and a slightly larger Falcon on missions, and the bots have helped locate missing people, and assisted firefighters by surveying a burning church.

Drones can cut costs and help emergency responders be more efficient, said Benjamin Miller, the director of Mesa County’s unmanned aircraft program. Miller has testified before Senate committees on the responsible use of robotic technology for law enforcement.

With a swarm of bots on hand, “I can't think of a reason why remote sensors in hazardous situations would not be useful,” he told NBC News, but added that such a system must be easy to deploy, and simple to maintain.

Say, throw ‘em into the air, and let them soar? That’s the approach one group aof researchers in Switzerland is taking in building a swarm of cheap fixed-wing drones that clump together like a flock of mechanical birds.

For rescue workers combing the Swiss mountainside for lost hikers, keeping in touch with one another is a challenge. With this in mind, the Swiss government contacted Dario Floreano, a roboticist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, to ask if his swarms of flying robots could set up an instant communication net, sort of like an instant local Wifi network, that could hover high over the rescue mission and keep the people on the ground connected.

“The idea was you’d throw up one robot after the other and they would organize among themselves,” said Sabine Hauert, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She used design principles from flocking birds, which use a “couple of simple rules” to stick together as a group and not crash into each other.
Hauert’s system was tested in open fields, with ten drones. The system is being developed to be used in denser, more congested environments like cities.

On the sea, on the land, in the air
A project headed up at the University of Pennsylvania hopes to redesign standardized shipping containers so that they can click together like LEGO blocks, forming bridges, helipads, runways, and other much-needed temporary infrastructure as relief workers arrive at disaster zones. The blocks could provide landing bases for responders at a quake-hit island or oil spill on the open ocean.

The containers, which today sit perfectly still, would be equipped with motors and on-board computers that will let hundreds of them quickly arrange themselves into temporary, useful structures.

“It’s going to be much faster than building an offshore platform,” said Mark Yim, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
In demonstrations using mock-ups one-twelfth the size of real-life containers, researchers have demonstrated how the bots can be used to build bridges across a university pool, form a landing pad for a remote-control helicopter, and simulated how the structures would respond to the crash of waves in a turbulent sea.
“The algorithms of who moves where and when, to form a large conglomeration of even hundreds of them, is almost there,” said Yim, who will present the system for the first time at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong in June 2014.

Eventually, Yim says, it could be possible to assemble a temporary airstrip on the open ocean. He agrees, that’s kind of a “crazy” idea – but may well be possible in the not too distant future.


Robotics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The concept of creating machines that can operate autonomously dates back to classical times, but research into the functionality and potential uses of robots did not grow substantially until the 20th century.[2] Throughout history, robotics has been often seen to mimic human behavior, and often manage tasks in a similar fashion. Today, robotics is a rapidly growing field, as technological advances continue, research, design, and building new robots serve various practical purposes, whether domestically, commercially, or militarily. Many robots do jobs that are hazardous to people such as defusing bombs, mines and exploring shipwrecks

The word robotics was derived from the word robot, which was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which was published in 1920.[3] The word robot comes from the Slavic word robota, which means labour. The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, creatures who can be mistaken for humans – similar to the modern ideas of androids. Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother Josef Čapek as its actual originator.[3]

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. In some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942).[4][5] However, the original publication of "Liar!" predates that of "Runaround" by five months, so the former is generally cited as the word's origin.

Fully autonomous robots only appeared in the second half of the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Commercial and industrial robots are widespread today and used to perform jobs more cheaply, or more accurately and reliably, than humans. They are also employed in jobs which are too dirty, dangerous, or dull to be suitable for humans. Robots are widely used in manufacturing, assembly, packing and packaging, transport, earth and space exploration, surgery, weaponry, laboratory research, safety, and the mass production of consumer and industrial goods.[6]



Even though every nuance of modern technology doesn't necessarily attract me – I don't need a new model of “smart phone” every year as it comes out – I have always been interested in robots. The use of drones, which probably came from war scenarios, as a tracking tool for rescue workers is a strong step forward. Perhaps police could stop pursuing speeding cars down the highway at 100 mph and endangering citizens, if a drone were assigned to follow the car and relay its location to police. The progress that has already been made, as delineated in this news article, is very impressive. I'm glad to see wartime techniques used for peacekeeping and rescue.

The fact that many local police departments and the Federal government have helicopters equipped with spying technology makes some people very uneasy, especially a group of mainly rural people called the Patriots who see the Federal government as their enemy. A few years ago here in Jacksonville a woman was telling me with great tension about “black helicopters” being seen in the area. I am not worried about those kinds of activity by government, because I think they improve the ability of Federal or local officers to enforce the law, and since I am not breaking the law I want them on my side. If I have been kidnapped I want officers to be able to track down the perpetrators and intervene.

One interesting thing in this news article is the statement that the flying patterns of flocks of birds was used to study how to program the “swarm” of drones so they don't crash into each other. This is a clear example of how a piece of “pure science” research which Congress doesn't always want to fund, because its practical uses are not immediately obvious, has turned out very useful. I see increased development of information of all kinds as a positive thing. Sometimes a scientific report will be published years before its practical application to daily life is discovered. On with science!





Supreme Court offers nuns a birth control 'out' – NBC
Pete Williams, Justice Correspondent, NBC News


The Supreme Court extended a hold Friday on a part of the Obamacare contraceptive requirement that applies to groups with religious affiliations.

The order offers an alternative to the Little Sisters of the Poor, Catholic nuns who operate nursing homes in Denver and Baltimore and who are suing over the new health care law's requirement that employers provide coverage for contraceptive care.
The court said the order was "based it on all of the circumstances of the case" and should not be construed as an expression of its views on the legal issues involved.
All new insurance plans, including those provided by employers, must provide free birth control as part of a list of essential benefits, including vaccinations and cancer screenings.

Churches are exempt from the law and don't need to take any action. Religiously affiliated non-profit groups -- like the nuns -- may also get an exemption, but it isn't automatic: they must fill out a form stating that providing contraceptive coverage would violate their religious principles. If they don't seek the exemption and refuse to provide the coverage, they face big fines.

The nuns say the very act of filling out the form violates their religious beliefs because it frees up the administrator of their health care plan to step in and provide the contraceptive coverage. The sisters say signing the form, in essence, deputizes their insurance provider to offer the coverage, making them part of a process they find objectionable.

On New Year's Eve, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor barred the government from enforcing the law against the nuns. Her order was temporary, to be in effect until she had a chance to hear the government's side.

On Friday the full court gave groups like the nuns an out: if an employer informs the government in writing that it is a non-profit, religious organization with religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, they do not have to fill out the government form and do not have to provide the coverage. The order will apply while the case is on appeal in the lower courts.

The administration says the group is already exempt from the law, because their insurance is provided by Christian Brothers Services. As a church organization, it’s excused from the law’s requirements.

When some religious groups objected, the Obama administration provided exemptions. And an older law, the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act, exempts church plans from regulation anyway.



This clip is just to note the progress on the argument about birth control. I think the Catholics would like to prevent all insurance coverage from including birth control, but they won't be able to do that, I feel sure. I understand their stand on abortion, though I disagree with it, especially in some hardship cases, but I don't understand the Catholic and Evangelical Christian opposition to birth control. We need to reduce our birth rate worldwide, and many families are reduced to poverty by the number of children they have. Birth control is good. Children should be planned whenever possible and “wanted” wholeheartedly when they come into the world.





Florida teen sold deadly toxin abrin online, US says – NBC

By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer
NBC News

A Florida teenager nabbed in an undercover sting sold and delivered deadly toxins on the Web, federal agents said in court documents this week.

Jesse William Korff, 19, of LaBelle, in southern Florida near Fort Myers, was arrested last weekend and charged with possession and transfer of a toxin for use as a weapon and smuggling goods from the U.S. Authorities said Korff tried to sell abrin — a highly noxious toxin similar to ricin — to an undercover federal agent.

Federal prosecutors said a search of Korff's home found a shotgun with a silencer, two meth labs, both abrin and ricin and a pipe bomb, which officers detonated at the scene.

He was ordered held Friday pending transfer to New Jersey for trial on the charges, which could bring a life sentence if he's convicted.

In documents made public in connection with the detention hearing, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security detailed the sting by which they nailed Korff.
Trading in Bitcoin on the website Black Market Reloaded, or BMR — a competitor to Silk Road, the underground drug and hacking site that federal authorities shut down in October — Korff offered illegal and dangerous goods for sale, according to the affidavit.

Like Silk Road, BMR was accessible only through the anonymity-shielding proxy network Tor. (BMR has since said it has closed for "security" reasons and refers would-be customers to Silk Road, which has already re-emerged.)

Customers sophisticated enough to tame the not-so-user-friendly Tor Project software and network could find user profiles on which black market entrepreneurs sold biological agents; abrin, ricin and other toxins; firearms; explosives; counterfeit goods and documents; and illegal drugs, the government said.

Korff was selling abrin, and in the transaction with the undercover agent, he provided instructions for how to use it, specifying that "the oral dose would be 150mg of abrin that is enough for a 330 pound target" and that "it is not a pill it comes in a liquid to put in a drink or in food like the bun of a cheeseburger," according to transcripts of the negotiations attached to the affidavit.
If it was to be used in a drink, Korff helpfully suggested light rum or whiskey, the messages showed. The victim should "die by the forth [sic] day," he allegedly wrote.



This is sophisticated in the pursuit of evil for a nineteen year old. Most people at that age are still at least partly innocent, or would have been in 1964 when I was nineteen. I do hope this young man is convicted, unless by some chance he has been “framed” and is innocent, and life in prison seems like a good sentence for his crime.

Florida seems to get more than its share of criminals, along with California and New York. Maybe there are too many wealthy people with spoiled children down here, or the life style is too free and easy on everyone. I'm glad this is a Federal crime – the local governments sometimes go easy on wealthy people and their children because those people have strings that they can pull to get away with things. If I see a followup on this article I will clip it.






As Arctic ice melts, polar bears switch diets to survive, studies say – NBC
John Roach NBC News


Arctic polar bears may be adjusting their eating habits as their sea ice habitat melts and the furry white predators stand to lose the floating platform they depend on to hunt seals, their primary food. According to researchers, however, the bears are displaying flexible eating habits as their world changes around them.

Indeed, scientific studies indicate polar bear populations are falling as the sea ice disappears earlier each spring and forms later in the fall. But a series of papers based on analysis of polar bear poop released over the past several months indicate that at least some of the bears are finding food to eat when they come ashore, ranging from bird eggs and caribou to grass seeds and berries.

"What our results suggest is that polar bears have flexible foraging strategies," Linda Gormezano, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a co-author of several of the papers, told NBC News.

Quinoa, a Dutch shepherd who was trained to sniff out polar bear scat, sits next to find. Analysis of the polar bear scat reveals the animals have a flexible foraging strategy.

The results stem from research in western Hudson Bay, near Chruchill, Manitoba, Canada, which is in the southern extent of polar bear habitat and serves as a harbinger of what the animals are likely to face throughout their Arctic range as the climate continues to warm and sea ice breaks up earlier and earlier each spring.
The flexible foraging strategy of polar bears "means that there may be more to this picture in terms of how polar bears will adjust to changing ice conditions" than indicated by models based on the spring breakup date of the sea ice and thus their access to seals, Gormezano said.

She added that nobody knows for sure how well polar bears will adapt to the changing food supply, but a big step toward an answer is to study what they eat on land "rather than assume that they may just be fasting." 

Let them eat car parts
In addition to berries, birds and eggs, Andrew Derocher, a University of Alberta polar bear biologist who was not involved with the recent studies, said people have seen a polar bear drink hydraulic fluid as it was drained out of a forklift, chomp the seats of snow machines, and eat lead acid batteries.

"Polar bears will eat anything," he told NBC News. "The question is: Does is it do them any good? And everything we can see from what bears eat when they are on land is it has a very, very minimal energetic return relative to the cost."

Gormezano said the plants found in any given pile of poop were usually the same, suggesting the bears eat whatever they find in their immediate surroundings — they don't spend a lot energy searching for food. Mothers and cubs, who wander farthest inland, feast on berries found there. On the coast, where adult males linger, the poop is predominantly shoreline grass seeds.

Animal remains, however, showed no pattern, which fits with a landscape rich with nesting birds and caribou and polar bears opportunistically eating whatever crosses their path, according to a paper Gormenzano and colleague Robert Rockwell published in BMC Ecology in December 2013.

In a paper published in Polar Biology in May 2013, the researchers report observations of polar bears chasing and capturing snow geese with the efficiency of a skilled hunter — snagging one right after the other.

A polar bear eats a caribou on land. Recent studies suggest polar bears have a flexible foraging strategy, which help them survive as they come ashore earlier due to melting Arctic sea ice.

"Previously, it had been thought that that would not be a very energetically profitable thing for a polar bear to do because they expend more energy in the chase than they get from consuming the food," Gormezano noted. 

The biologist stressed that polar bears have always exhibited a flexible foraging behavior. In a study published in Ecology and Evolution in July 2013, she and Rockwell compared scat collected in recent years with scat collected 40 years earlier. "The diet overlapped tremendously," Gormezano noted.
 
The bears do, however, eat more migratory snow geese now, whose Hudson Bay population exploded from 2,500 nesting pairs in the 1960s to more than 50,000 today due to a boost in their food supply further south.

What's more, the polar bears come ashore a few weeks earlier due to the melting ice, which aligns with the nesting period for the geese, meaning more eggs to eat. "That's a very easy food source because they don't need to expend much energy in order to get it," she said.

No seals, no polar bears
Gormenzano said she hesitates to speculate about how the polar bears will fare if the sea ice completely disappears — "that's a long way off," she noted, but added the flexible foraging they observed "could compensate for some energy deficits stemming from lost seal (hunting) opportunities."

Derocher, the polar bear biologist, said the only reason these polar bears are eating the snow geese and other plants and animals is that they still have sea ice in the winter to hunt seals and pack on the fat. Once on shore, his and other studies show, polar bears lose about 1.5 pounds per day. 

"We've got bears that are dying of starvation on land in the Churchill area at the end of the ice free period. These are bears that don't have enough energy coming off the sea ice. So any resources that they by default have got while they are on land haven't been enough to change that trajectory," he said. 

The most recent published population estimates for Hudson Bay polar bears is 935 as of 2004, down from 1,194 in 1987. Unpublished estimates put the current population at around 800, Derocher said. Climate models indicate that the region will be free of suitable ice for polar bears to hunt seals by the middle of this century, perhaps sooner.

"You can't just push polar bears on shore and expect them to do just fine," Derocher said.



This is the most hopeful article I have seen so far on the plight of the polar bears. The melting of sea ice may cause a “bottleneck” in the survival of polar bears, which will cause some evolutionary changes as they follow out their alternate instincts and vary their diet. I suspect some will survive even after sea ice is no longer available for them, and those few will propagate a modified bear that can put on enough fat without access to as many seals. Some people are more prone to putting on fat than others are, and I suspect there are some bears who because of the same thing can manage to survive without the sea ice. Maybe there are salmon or some other prey up there which will add to their body fat.

Polar bears – especially those seen eating grass and berries and chasing successfully after geese and caribou – are showing a wider variety of talents than we thought they had before. Brown bears and black bears eat “anything” as the scientist here said and are major predators, managing to put on sufficient body fat to survive, and as polar bears learn to find more types of food I think they will tend to survive and grow more intelligent. Those that eat car parts and poisonous fluids, etc. will not survive long, of course. I expect they will become a greater threat to livestock and even become predatory on people as they expand their food sources – I assume Alaskans raise some sheep or cattle. It would be interesting to see if they develop dark coats like other bears when the ice and snow diminishes. Bears are intelligent and flexible. I think they have a good chance to survive. At least I hope so.






New Madrid fault zone could spawn huge quakes in U.S. Midwest, South
Alicia Chang The Associated Press


LOS ANGELES — The New Madrid fault zone in the nation's midsection is active and could spawn future large earthquakes, scientists reported.

It's "not dead yet," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough, who was part of the study published online Thursday by the journal Science.
Researchers have long debated just how much of a hazard New Madrid (MAD'-rihd) poses. The zone stretches 150 miles, crossing parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

In 1811 and 1812, it unleashed a trio of powerful jolts — measuring magnitudes 7.5 to 7.7 — that rattled the central Mississippi River valley. Chimneys fell and boats capsized. Farmland sank and turned into swamps. The death toll is unknown, but experts don't believe there were mass casualties because the region was sparsely populated then.

Unlike California's San Andreas and other faults that occur along boundaries of shifting tectonic plates, New Madrid is less understood since it's in the middle of the continent, far from plate boundaries.

Previous studies have suggested that it may be shutting down, based on GPS readings that showed little strain accumulation at the surface. Other research came to the same conclusion by blaming ongoing quake activity on aftershocks from the 1800s, which would essentially relieve strain on the fault.

"Our new results tell us that something is going on there, and therefore a repeat of the 1811-1812 sequence is possible."

The latest study suggests otherwise. Hough and USGS geophysicist Morgan Page in Pasadena, Calif., analyzed past quakes in the New Madrid region and used computer modeling to determine that the continuing tremors are not related to the big quakes two centuries ago.

"Our new results tell us that something is going on there, and therefore a repeat of the 1811-1812 sequence is possible," Hough said.
The USGS estimates there's a 7 to 10 percent chance of that happening in the next 50 years.

Arthur Frankel, a seismologist with the USGS in Seattle who had no role in the study, said the latest results seem plausible. His recent field work using GPS shows significant movement of land along the fault in the past decade, indicating a buildup of strain that could lead to potentially dangerous quakes.

Others said this won't end the debate about the hazards on the New Madrid seismic zone.

Andrew Newman, a geophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the method used in the study works well for faults along plate boundaries, but he's unsure if it applies to enigmatic faults like New Madrid. 



So maybe the fault will shift again and maybe it won't. I just hope it doesn't, because of the increased population in the midsection of our country now. There are minor earthquakes in the central part of the US from time to time. When I lived in Chapel Hill, NC in the late 1960's there was a very small earthquake felt there. I heard a strange deep sound and went to the front door, but could find no source for it. My husband then came home from the lab and said that up on the 10th floor the things on shelves there shook. That gave us a little excitement on a quiet summer night.





China's official crackdown on graft brings a happy New Year – for sharks – NBC

By Ian Williams, correspondent, NBC News

BEIJING – As China prepares to celebrate the beginning of the Year of the Horse, conservationists are hoping it may also turn out to be the Year of the Shark.
The predator seems to be getting a break thanks to the most unexpected of reasons – the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on corruption.

"It’s going to have a great impact," according to Hong Kong conservationist Alex Hoffman. "It doesn't really matter if it’s for environmental reasons or for curbing official extravagance, as long as it gets the job done."

Chinese government officials need little excuse for a good banquet at public expense, and the run up to Chinese New Year, which falls on January 31 this year, is traditionally the time for gift-giving and particularly lavish receptions.

But the Party has outlawed both. Shark fin soup, along with bird's-nest soup, and what Xinhua calls "other wild animals," have been explicitly barred from the menu.

Demand for shark fin is down 70 percent in China, according to official government statistics. Those stats aren't always reliable, but traders in Hong Kong, the hub of the world's shark fin trade, are hurting, with imports down around a third year-on-year.

Shark finning kills an estimated 100 million sharks worldwide each year, and the soup – which experts say has no nutritional value – is brewed from fins frequently sawed off live sharks before their bodies are dumped back into the ocean to die.
There are other reasons for the decline: Shark fin has been removed from Hong Kong government receptions, and a celebrity-endorsed campaign to persuade hotels not to serve shark fin soup – and airlines not to carry the fins – has produced some high-level converts, notably the Shangri-La hotel chain, Qantas, Air New Zealand and Cathay Pacific Airlines.

A growing environmental awareness among younger Chinese has also helped. Photographs of thousands of shark fins drying on the roof of a Hong Kong building in January 2013 went viral in China and triggered widespread revulsion.

But it’s the Communist Party's campaign to impose a more frugal lifestyle on officials that appears to be having the biggest impact. The campaign against “formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance,” in the snappy language of the Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, was first rolled out a year ago, but has been growing in scope and intensity.

This New Year, government officials are even forbidden from buying postcards and fireworks, and giving or receiving gifts.

Officials have been disciplined for purchasing luxury vehicles, using public funds to play golf and for travel. The construction of frequently over-the-top local public buildings – there have been copies of the Capitol Building in D.C., and even the Palace of Versailles – has been suspended for five years.

The campaign has even gone beyond the grave, with new rules outlawing extravagant funerals and encouraging Party members to choose cremation over burial. Funerals are frequently used as a way of showing off a family's wealth and connections.

Officials whose spouses have moved overseas will no longer be promoted. Corrupt officials frequently send family members overseas with ill-gotten gains ahead of their own flight, Ren Jianming told the China Daily. He holds the distinctive title of Professor of Clean Government Research at Beihang University.

The government says last year 182,038 officials were punished under the clean governance rules, including 17 at the ministerial level. Addressing the party's discipline inspectors this month, China’s President Xi Jinping said, "The regulations should not become paper tigers or scarecrows."

And that is perhaps the most shocking thing for China's beleaguered officials – that Xi seems to mean it. In the past, many of these campaigns, notably under Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao, have been brief and half-hearted, a crackdown for a few weeks and then business as usual.

Xi, who is also Party chief, clearly sees graft and extravagance as an existential threat to the Communist Party. He told those inspectors that the battle against corrupt officials takes courage, "like a man who severs his snake-bitten hand to save his life."

It also seems to capture the public mood of massive distrust of officials, a mood embodied by an online game posted on the website of the People's Daily, the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, which is usually more noted for its tedious official ramblings.

The game, called "Hit the Greedy and Corrupt," involves players being awarded points for hitting corrupt officials with an electric baton when they pop up in the window of a jail.

A pedestrian walks past a luxury watch shop in a major shopping district in Shanghai in December 2013. Luxury watch sales fell in the Chinese market during 2013 in the face of a crackdown on corruption and extravagance, a global consultancy said.
There are other signs that the campaign is having an impact: Travel agents say business class seats (from which officials are now barred) have fallen in price, and hotels are looking at other ways to market their banquet halls. The growth in sales of luxury items, such as top-end suitcases and watches, already under strain from a slowing economy, has taken a hit.

"Some companies used to give out high-end bags or watches to my supervisors," one former government official was quoted as saying by the China Daily. "Nowadays none of them dare to receive gifts."

The authorities have also targeted high-end private clubs, where companies wine and dine officials in order to get favors.
It’s a measure of just how much money was squandered by (or on) officials, that the crackdown is having such a big impact on the real economy.

It all makes for a less-than-happy New Year for government officials, but they are unlikely to find too much sympathy from a public that would rather like to see their officials thrown to those sharks, who can perhaps afford themselves a jagged-tooth smile this New Year.



I am relieved to find that the Chinese government is doing something about the slaughter of sharks. Some species have become endangered. I hope that rhinoceros horn, tiger parts and bear parts will also be included in this ban. Its a step away from superstition and thoughtless practices that shows greater enlightenment among the populace in China, as well as the government.