Use Your Computer’s Spare CPU Cycles to Help Researchers Study the coronavirus

This coronavirus pandemic has been very difficult for everyone. I think it’s safe to say that we all want to do whatever we can help, because we share a common goal: vanquishing the coronavirus, ending the suffering, and finally, reclaiming our lives.

Today’s undisputed heroes are the health care workers, who put their lives at risk every day for our benefit. Our future heroes are those with specialized knowledge: medical researchers and epidemiologists. They are the ones who are studying this virus and learning all they can about the nature of the beast. This is done to develop an effective vaccine, but it’s also done in the true spirit of Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.“

If we hope to win this battle, then we need to understand our enemy… and that’s where you can help. Seriously! You can help scientists understand the inner workings of the coronavirus, which will accelerate the development of a vaccine.

Stanford University, working with medical researchers across the United States, has launched a global distributed-computing project called Folding@Home. This is a large-scale computational biology initiative that simulates protein folding on a computer.

Proteins are surprisingly versatile and can perform a lot of different roles within our bodies: they can regulate cells, act as enzymes, or function as antibodies. However, before they can do any of these things, proteins must first fold into the proper three-dimensional structure. This is usually done automatically, and the specific shape will depend on its particular sequence of amino acids. Sometimes, proteins can fold in undesired ways, and this mis-folding can be a cause of a number of serious diseases: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Creutzfeldt–Jakob, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia, Type II diabetes, some forms of cancer, and as of March, 2020 – the coronavirus. Simulating protein folding on a computer can help researchers understand under what conditions a protein misfolds and (ideally) what can be done to prevent this from happening.

The computing power required to simulate protein folding is prodigious, and is far, far beyond what is available to any university. Stanford University is assisting in this effort with their Folding@Home initiative. They are breaking down the work into millions of bite-size pieces, called work units, and inviting anyone who owns a computer to join the project. Those who sign up will use their computer to process some of these work units, and in return, act a catalyst in this massive protein folding undertaking.

This video explains, in a simplified way, Stanford’s Folding@Home distributed computing project.

When you sign up for Folding@Home, you will be pushing coronavirus research forward. After installing the folding program, it will download a work unit from Stanford, and your computer will begin processing it as a background task. A work unit will take between four hours and two days to process, depending on the size of the unit and the speed of your computer’s CPU. When the processing is complete, the results will be sent to Stanford automatically, a new work unit will be downloaded, and that first work unit will be credited to your account.

As the work unit is being processed, you can enable the animated screen saver and view the protein that your computer is currently working on. Below is a sample image. As you can see, there is a world map behind the protein. Each white pixel on the map represents a computer that is processing a work unit at this moment. As of this writing, there are over 3.8 million active CPUs in this project, with a combined processing power of 1.3 million teraFLOPS (trillions of floating-point operations per second).

Stanford University’s Folding@Home project has been studying the diseases mentioned above, but in March 2020 they pivoted, and shifted their focus to the coronavirus. Coronavirus research has been now given priority over the other diseases, so the work units you download will (unless you specifically indicate otherwise in the program settings) be devoted to coronavirus research projects. There are a number of projects being worked on simultaneously. Here are summaries of some of the projects that my computer has worked on during the past week:

Video Card Owners
If you have a video card in your PC, then you can be an elite folder! You will be able to process between 5-50 times as many work units as you would using only a CPU. That’s because the Folding@Home software is written to make full use of the the prodigious parallel processing power in video cards (also known as Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs). A CPU may have two, four or six cores, but a video card typically has hundreds of cores (called CUDA cores. High-end video cards have over 2,000 CUDA cores). While individually, these aren’t nearly as powerful as CPU cores, their sheer numbers mean that even a modest video card will far outdistance the processing power of high-end CPUs.

We all want a vaccine to be developed as quickly as possible, but there’s a lot of research that needs to be completed first. If you’d like to shorten the development time, then please consider signing up for Stanford’s Folding@Home initiative. There’s no compensation offered, but I can guarantee that you will receive a warm, fuzzy feeling – from the heat generated by your computer, and the knowledge that you are doing something tangible and measurable to help humanity in this time of crisis.

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How The Internet Is Ruining Brain Teasers

A few years ago, I was watching an episode of The Outer Limits called Stream of Consciousness. This 1993 episode depicted an ostensibly Utopian future society in which all citizens were plugged in (via a neural link) to a global repository of knowledge called The Stream. It was an extension of your brain. If you wanted to know something, you could simply – with a single thought – access The Stream’s knowledge base, and recall it instantly, as if you already knew it.

In those pre-Internet days, this was an intriguing concept: visualizing what a society might be like if we all had instant access to a central repository of humankind’s collected knowledge. Just imagine the great things that we could accomplish, the dots that we could connect and the ways that an individual from any stratum of society – armed with this playing field-leveling hardware – could improve not only their circumstances, but perhaps even the entire planet! Surely the average IQ in all cultures would increase significantly.

I know that you’re already comparing that Outer Limits storyline with the development and pervasiveness of the Internet since 1995 (when it was streamed into the public consciousness). We may not have a subcutaneous neural link, but most of us are carrying, in our pockets, a portal to this knowledge repository, which we can access anytime we like, and almost as quickly. However, unlike the (initial) Utopian promises in The Outer Limits, I believe that in some ways, we are moving in the opposite direction. The Internet is actually making our brains less agile than they used to be only a generation ago.

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Birthdays and Phone Numbers

When I was a kid (well before cell phones, and even speed dial) I had the phone numbers and birthdays of all of my friends and family members memorized. I didn’t need to write anything down. Today, I would be hard-pressed to recite the cell phone numbers of even my immediate family members or any of my friends’ birthdays. These dates and numbers seem to have been purged from my brain. I could blame 10-digit dialing, but I can’t even recall the seven-digit portions of the phone numbers anymore. Thanks to contact lists and calendars, there is no longer a need to remember these things; since we no longer access them regularly they are no longer committed to memory.

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Song Lyrics

My first office job was back in the late 1980s, and one of my co-workers, Terry, was a walking rock music encyclopedia. He seemed to know every rock band, album and song, and even the career arcs of each band member. Terry and I used to play a little game to challenge our respective musical knowledge. Early in the day, I would wait until he was concentrating on something, then walk over to his desk, lean in and recite a couple of lines from a rock or pop song. At first, he had no problem identifying the song and artist, so I started selecting more obscure tracks. What made this game fun was hitting the proverbial sweet spot: a song that he’s heard before, but not anything current; I didn’t want the lyrics to be fresh in his mind. The goal was to create what psychologists call a TOT – tip-of-tongue phenomenon, in which you know the word(s) but your brain can’t quite access them. Terry and I were essentially trying to mentally torture each other, before finally (and mercifully) revealing the answer at the end of the day.

Early one day, I walked up to Terry’s desk and whispered “The albatross and the whales, they are my brothers“, and then walked away. This song used to be played on the radio a few years earlier, and if I had gauged everything properly, Terry would no longer be able to concentrate on his work, because he would be just on the verge of connecting those lyrics to the song name. The next day, Terry would do the same thing to me – it was great fun!

Obviously, this game could not be played today, unless you stated “No Googling”. Back then, there were no search engines or Internet. We needed to rely solely on our gray matter and its accumulated storehouse of knowledge. Today, you can just type those lyrics into any search engine and the answer will pop up instantly.

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Where In The World

Back in the 1980s, a local newspaper published a visual puzzle each weekend called Where In the World. They printed a photograph of a famous (or not-so-famous landmark) and you had to send a postcard to the newspaper with your guess. I thought it was a lot of fun. More recently, I was the organizer of a similar game on Mensa Canada’s web site. Each month, I would search for fiendishly difficult, Mensa-worthy photographs of places from around the world, and post them on the web site. The members would e-mail their guesses to me, and those who sent in correct guesses would have their names published on the web site the following month.

After a few months, I noticed that I was receiving a handful of correct guesses within 10-15 minutes of posting the monthly photo. At first, I thought that these people must be off-the-chart geniuses for guessing correctly so consistently. As it turned out, they were nothing but cheats. They has simply dragged the image in to Google Image Search, which then identified the location. I tried to circumvent this by using Google Earth’s satellite imagery, but the screen captures were nowhere near as interesting as photos taken at ground level. Once again, the Internet had ruined what was once an enjoyable brain-teaser.

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Music Montage

In my spare time, I like to create and post music montages on my blog – little 1-2 second snippets of songs that visitors have to guess. These were patterned after the radio station contests from my youth. A few years ago, I had an idea for a new montage theme, called “I know that riff!”. The idea came to be when I was listening to the radio in the car. I can usually identify a pop or rock song within five seconds, but occasionally I’ll turn on the radio and catch a snippet (usually during the bridge or the instrumental) and I’ll have to listen to it for 10-15 seconds before I can come up with the title. Over the next few months, whenever this happened I would write down these songs with the aim of creating a music montage – filled with music samples that will be difficult to guess.

Unfortunately, I had to abandon this idea because of the emergence of song identification apps like SoundHound. You simply launch the app, and then play a few seconds of a song into your phone’s microphone, and it will identify the title and artist. Once again, you no longer have to probe the deepest corners of your mind to extract audio information – technology now does this for you.

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Social Media Puzzles

I’ve seen a few brain teasers posted on social media, but even these are not immune to the helpfulness of the Internet. I remember a popular riddle a few years ago: “There are three words in the English language that end in ‘gry’: angry and hungry are two of them. What is the third?”. If you don’t want to stretch your mental muscles, then you can simply use a wildcard dictionary. Just type in: *gry and select the “common words and phrases” option, you will see the results.

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The Danger of Technological Convenience

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” – John F. Kennedy

On the surface, Internet-related conveniences are wonderful, and in some ways they have delivered everything that was promised in that episode of The Outer Limits. However, they are still a concern for me because we aren’t using our brains to look up information as much as we did a generation ago. Why is this important? A while ago I read a book called The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle and while it doesn’t address the effects of technological change specifically, it does offer – indirectly – some insight into what is happening.

To understand the book’s premise, you’ll need a basic familiarity of the brain, and how our neurons function. At the risk of oversimplifying things, our neurons are connected to each other via long, stringy nerve cells called axons. Signals travel from one neuron to another along the axons. These axons are surrounded by a myelin sheath, which speeds up the signals significantly. In fact, one of my university professors told us that without the myelin sheath, our cerebral processing would be so slow that we humans would be the mental equivalent of slugs.

According to Daniel Coyle, repeating or practicing an action or behaviour thickens the myelin sheath around the axons of the associated neurons. The thicker the myelin sheath, the more efficiently the signals travel between the neurons, and the less effort is required to perform the behaviour. That, in essence is why our skill level increases as we practice something repeatedly. Conversely, if we stop practicing, then the amount of myelin starts to decrease. The phrase “if you don’t use it, you lose it” encapsulates this phenomenon.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, devotes an entire chapter to Anders Ericsson’s 10,000-Hour Rule. His argument is: if you want to achieve mastery in a certain activity, then you need to devote at least 10,000 hours of practice to it.

Technology now performs many mental tasks for us, and as a result, our ability to perform them well (or at all) decreases over time.

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GPS and Map Reading

With the advent of GPS, map reading and navigation will also become a more esoteric skill. When I was in grade six, our class went on a field trip that involved orienteering. We were given a map and a compass and (after being taught how to use them) we were sent into the woods to locate a bunch of markers attached to trees, and write down the messages written on them as proof that we found them. Then, we had to make our way back to the starting point. Just imagine if a group of teachers sent a bunch of grade six students into the woods without a cell phone or GPS – no form of communication at all – and asked them to find their way around using only a map and a compass…

Of course, you could argue that with the popularity of online maps and GPS, we’re doing more map reading than ever. This may be true, but a generation ago we didn’t have a marker to show us our location on the map, a compass to help us get our bearings, or a voice assistant to give us turn-by-turn directions to our destination – we had to figure all of that out ourselves.

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The End of Cursive Writing

Cursive writing is another example of a low-tech skill that is being coerced into retirement by online technology. I can understand the reasoning, since the vast majority of our written communication is now done at a computer keyboard. However, like an untrained orienteering student, I think the educators who are making this decision are missing the proverbial forest for the trees. They need to zoom out and look at the big picture.

Cursive wiring is more than a form of communication; it’s a way for children to develop their fine motor skills and manual dexterity. If we don’t encourage them to learn and practice cursive writing, then unforeseen problems may manifest themselves when they become adults. The inability to sign one’s name legibly – and thus sign any legal documents – is just one thing to consider.

In the movie The Karate Kid, I’m sure that you recall the classic scene in which Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel to “wax on, wax off”. Daniel didn’t see the utility in this exercise at the time, but the repeated motions were the same motions used in defensive moves, and were building his muscle memory. From The Talent Code angle, Daniel was strengthening the myelin sheath around the axons that connect the neurons responsible for this movement, and thus was helping his brain to perform a certain range of motions quickly and effortlessly.

Now let’s look at the demise of cursive writing from The Bob Angle. I believe that a sharp, nation-wide reduction in the number of children learning cursive writing may result in a corresponding reduction of manual dexterity in the next generation of adults. This will lead to a shortage of qualified candidates for positions requiring fine motor skills and superior hand-eye coordination: surgeons, dentists, commercial pilots, electronic technicians, auto mechanics and car detailers, tailors, makeup artists, tattoo artists, and watch repair specialists. Of course, we won’t know if my hypothesis is correct until it’s too late…

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Closing Thoughts

“In the year 5555, your arms hangin’ limp at your sides.
Your legs got nothin’ to do. Some machine’s doin’ that for you.“
— Zager & Evans, In The Year 2525

Long-term predictions of a future society often tout convenience as a major selling point. Most of us are never without our smartphones, and it’s now difficult to contemplate life without them. However, as our dependence grows on the multitude of services that these gadgets provide, we should consider the long-term effects of this dependence. Muscles atrophy after a prolonged period of inactivity, and I believe that our mental acuity will also diminish unless we make a concerted effort ensure that our brains do more of the proverbial heavy lifting.

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It’s Time To Start Digitizing Our Lives

The recent news stories of the California wildfires were difficult to watch. Residents of the cities of Paradise and Malibu had to evacuate on a moment’s notice. Some residents of Paradise, had to escape by driving along roads surrounded by flames, not knowing if they would live or perish. Many were not able to escape, and for those who did, there may not be anything left to return to. One resident told a reporter that she doesn’t feel devastated about the possibility of losing her home because “I made sure that everything with a heartbeat was out of that house“.

It’s an admirable philosophy, because this, ultimately, is what’s important: living a life in which you are completely detached from your possessions and indifferent to the accumulation of wealth.

During the past week, I’ve been wondering what I would do in a similar situation, assuming that I had the luxury of time, and had a few hours to pack as much as I could into a car or SUV before evacuating. What would I bring with me, knowing that everything left behind might be gone?

It’s easy to be philosophical, but let’s face it – even if we eschew conspicuous consumption, we still love our stuff. A lifetime of exposure to advertising has created an indelible bond between our possessions and our sense of self. Our possessions often define us, and tell others about the kind of people we are. They broadcast our tastes, and even our levels of sophistication and education. Items with a low monetary value often have a very high sentimental value. We keep and cherish these items because they evoke happy memories even decades later, and often mark the milestones of our life’s journey. Obviously, everything meaningful that we’ve spent a lifetime accumulating is not going to fit in a car.

We now have the ability – through inexpensive personal scanners – to digitize any printed material. While the chances of losing your home and all of its contents to wildfires, arson, or a natural gas explosion are very small, I think it’s time for us to consider digitizing as much of our lives as we can. The primary benefit of storing things digitally is that multiple copies can be made quickly and effortlessly, those copies can be stored anywhere, and they take up very little space.

I’d like you to take a moment and think about the contents of your home – specifically, the items that hold the most sentimental value for you. These would probably include: jewelry, photo albums, slides, important documents, love letters, kids’ drawings, diaries and journals, newspaper clippings, recipes, scrapbooks, concert tickets and symphony programmes, and home movies on video tape. Except for the jewelry, all of these items can be digitized and stored safely offsite.

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Analogue Preparations

Obviously a digitizing initiative isn’t going to solve everything – there have to be some standard preparations as well. One of the most cited items is a 72-hour survival bag. There are many web sites and YouTube videos that will explain exactly what you need to do to prepare for an emergency. Just Google “emergency preparedness” or, if you’re really hard-core, “doomsday prepper” for ideas and tutorials.

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Digital Photo Home Inventory

One of the first things you should to do is take an inventory of your possessions, so that you can file an insurance claim. There are numerous guides on the web to help you get started. Now that we all own digital cameras, the cost of taking photos is almost nothing. If you haven’t done so already, grab your digital camera and take a photo of everything you own, including your CD/DVD collection and every book in your bookcases. Add a descriptive label to each of the pictures (including the brand name and model number of all your consumer items), and then copy them onto a CD or a USB flash drive. Keep one copy at home, and at least one other copy offsite – either at a family member’s house or in your bank’s safe deposit box. Don’t give your offsite copy to your next-door neighbour – if a wildfire destroys your neighbourhood, then you’ll understand why.

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Digital Scanning

Over the years, I’ve seen numerous news reports of wildfires encroaching on urban areas. The reporters always speak with the evacuees and ask them to talk about the experience and their losses. Invariably, the items that are mentioned most are ones that hold sentimental value, including (and especially) family photos and photo albums. Buy or borrow a scanner, and scan the following items:

• All of your government-issued documents: passport, driver’s license, birth certificate, health card, and any other form of identification.
• Any other documents, such as your will, bank statements, income tax returns (if you don’t file online)
• All of your family photos (in frames and in albums). If you have slides, there are 35mm slide scanners that will digitize them. This may take a while – photo scanning is fairly labour-intensive – so consider doing it first as an ongoing project in your spare time.
• Your (paper) awards, diplomas, certificates and degrees hanging on your walls. These can always be printed again with a colour laser printer.
• Anything else that has sentimental value: children’s drawings, love letters, diaries and journals, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, family recipes, old concert tickets etc.

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CD and DVD Collections

I realize that physical CDs and DVD aren’t quite as popular these days – young people now watch Netflix and stream much of their music – but for those of us who still have a CD and DVD library, it’s worth the effort to digitize those as well. Rip your CDs and convert them to MP3 files (or FLAC files, if you want a lossless conversion). Rip your DVDs to ISO image files and then store everything on an external hard drive. A 4-terabyte external USB drive costs less than $150, and will store 940 dual-layer (8.5 GB) DVD images or 1700 single-layer (4.7 GB) DVD images. Your CD collection will be 350 MB per disc using FLAC compression, and about 90 MB per disk using a 192kbps MP3 compression) – which will be 45-350 GB for a 500-disc collection).

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Books

If you have one or more bookcases at home, teeming with books, then buying digital versions of everything you own is both expensive and unnecessary. However, you could buy a handful of e-books and either a dedicated e-book reader or an application that will allow you to read them on your laptop or tablet. Most libraries now have modest (but growing) e-book collections that you can sign out, just like print books. If you’re stuck in a school gymnasium waiting until it’s safe to return home, a tablet full of e-books is a great way to pass the time.

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Home Movies

If you have old home movies on VHS, Beta or even Super 8 film, digitize those. There are services that will do this for you, or if you have the time, you can buy a machine and do it yourself. This also applies to any treasured audio tapes. If you already have a VCR, then all you need is a video digitizing cable and the associated software, which is relatively inexpensive.

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The 3-2-1 Computer Data Backup Rule

I’m sure that you already back up your computer data regularly, either to the cloud to to external drives, but if you don’t, then now is a good time to start. Once everything has been done, consider adopting the 3-2-1 Backup Rule.

3. Have at least three copies of your data. The primary copy will be on your computer itself. The second copy will be somewhere else in your house (or in the cloud) – if your hard drive fails, then you will always have a rapidly-accessible copy available.

2. Store the copies on different media. Don’t make two backup copies of your data in different directories on the same hard drive – if that drive fails or is damaged, then they will both be lost. Different storage types doesn’t necessarily mean different storage formats (DVDs, CDs, hard drives, USB sticks etc.) but they should be on different media.

1. Keep (at least) one backup copy offsite. If your house burns down, your backup will not miraculously survive unscathed.

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Create a Mobile Office

Last year, when I was shopping for a new laptop bag, I first did a little online research. I was impressed – not just with the number of YouTube review videos, but also with the way that laptop bags and backpacks were marketed. These weren’t simply laptop bags (or backpacks) – they were presented as “your office in a bag”, or “your mobile digital office” with everything that today’s “coder on the move” needs to set up shop wherever s/he happens to be. I like this approach – if you work in the IT field, you should be able to set up a mobile office anywhere there’s electricity and a WiFi (or cellular) signal, and continue earning your living.

I can get you started with the following list, but in order to cover all of the bases, go to YouTube and search for “What’s in my tech bag / tech backpack / gadget backpack?”. There are also a lot of backpacks specifically designed for tech and gadgets, and some even include USB ports, and wiring for headphones and backup battery packs. A couple of the better YouTube bag review channels are Chase Reeves and UrAvgConsumer.

• Laptop computer, tablet, mouse
• AC adapters, charging cables
• External hard drive
• USB flash drive(s), SD cards
• USB wall charger, USB cables
• Backup battery pack, with cable
• Headphones, earbuds
• Travel router, Cat 5 cable
• Luggage lock, pens, paper notepad
• Small LED flashlight, rechargeable batteries
• USB battery charger

In this case, redundancy is important – buy duplicate cables, external batteries, chargers, earbuds, USB flash drives and SD cards. Then, if the need arises, then all you need to do is grab your, smartphone, tablet, laptop / ultrabook (and its charging block), slide them into the bag, and off you go.

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As more of our life is lived online, more of our possessions are becoming digital. A wildfire or other catastrophic event no longer means a total loss of everything we own (along with their memories). With a bit of judicious preparation, it can be much easier to rebuild much what was lost, and minimize the emotional toll of a disaster.

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The Porch

One of the longstanding criticisms of social media is that there seems to be a dearth of critical thinking, both in the posts and and in the comments. I agree, and after wasting many hours browsing my Facebook news feed, I now understand why.

At the risk of sounding polarizing, I’ve noticed that most posts fall into one of two categories: they either appeal to our intellect, or to our emotions. Unfortunately, it’s not a 50/50 split – the vast majority of what I see is designed to elicit an emotional response, rather than convey information. Whether it’s tugging at our heartstrings, appealing to our nurturing instincts, or evoking a sense of nostalgia, when we are emotionally engaged, our critical thinking skills seem to fade away.

Here is a recent post from my Facebook news feed:

This is a lovely photo, with a heartfelt sentiment. For those of us of a certain age, it’s obvious that this photo takes a direct aim at our collective sense of nostalgia. In a society where everyone is staring incessantly at their phone, and few of us even know the names of our neighbours, who wouldn’t long for a return to a simpler time, free of these modern, inward-looking distractions? Neighbours walking down the street would see you sitting on your porch, and then stop by to chat, while you offer them a glass of lemonade. This is also a magnificent porch, large enough for a family and a few neighbours, in a serene, pastoral setting. This photo, to me, symbolizes Norman Rockwell’s America – a happier, stress-free time, when people understood the importance of forging relationships. However, before you are tempted to like or share this photo, let’s examine it with a critical eye.

First, let’s look at the obvious errors in the description. This isn’t a front porch, it’s a backyard porch. A front porch would have a walkway adjacent to it. In order to see your neighbours, it should be also visible from the road. This porch looks like it’s in someone’s backyard. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend walking onto someone’s property and suddenly appearing unannounced at their back porch… in fact, in some states, this might even get you shot!

Next, let’s examine the statement itself, which employs a Field Of Dreams sentiment “If you build it, they will come“. It’s a lovely intention, but building more porches will not change society. In fact, a little research will uncover the events that led to changes in residential architecture and the disappearance of porches.

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The Gradual Disappearance of the Front Porch

Cars: According to Renee Kahn, author of the book Preserving Porches, cars are to blame for the demise of front porches “The front porch was no longer an idyllic setting where one could relax and commune with nature” for the “exhaust fumes and the noise of a steady stream of cars and trucks had rendered it inhospitable and unhealthy.”

Air Conditioning: Danielle Keperling, in an article entitled Historic Porches: Their Evolution, History and Significance, suggests that the air conditioner was a catalyst of their decline, especially in the southern states, since one no longer needed to go outdoors in order to stay cool on a sweltering day.

Radio: The front porch used to be the focal point of the evening’s entertainment for many families. After the radio became commonplace, family members could entertain themselves indoors, listening to a wide variety of radio programmes.

Television: The increasing popularity of television sealed the demise of the front porch, by shifting the entertainment indoors. According to the book Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture, Americans watch about 1,000 hours of television each year, and combined with air conditioning, the family’s evening entertainment is now firmly entrenched in the living room.

These technologies eventually influenced the architecture. After the entertainment moved indoors, people no longer needed a a house with a front porch, and fewer home builders were including them. Technology not only moved the family indoors, but also changed the way we interact from person-person to person-machine. House designs were merely a response to this technological and social change.

Even if we could resurrect the front porch, it won’t change anything. In addition to television and radio, we now have DVDs, home theatres, video games and computers to keep us indoors and interacting with machines instead of people. During the past two generations, our neighbourhood networking has also deteriorated to the point where many of us aren’t well-acquainted (or in some cases, don’t even know) the people on our street, or even our our next-door neighbours. This makes serendipitous foot traffic highly unlikely.

The porch photo is still a lovely sentiment, but it’s just not going to happen. Technology has changed moved our entertainment indoors, changed the way we interact with our neighbours and ultimately, influenced house design. Unless we can rid ourselves of these distractions and spend more time interacting with people face-to-face, then the front porch will remain a wistful memory.

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The Apollo Code Redundancy Speculation

About 12-15 years ago, some friends and I were discussing Moore’s Law, but from a slightly different angle. While we’ve enjoyed exponential increases in computer memory memory and storage space over the past couple of decades, we were nevertheless impressed by the programmers of the early personal computers. They were able to write useful programs and very enjoyable games that were less than 64K in size. I don’t think that any of today’s programmers would have the talent or resourcefulness to do something like that now – packing that much functionality into such a small space requires not only proficiency in a low-level programming language, but also an intimate knowledge of the computer hardware itself (along with its limitations and idiosyncrasies).

Apollo Mission Control Center

One of us then took the comparison a step further and said “What about the Apollo engineers during the 1960s? They had even less memory, and their code had to send men to the moon and back!”. Another friend added “Did you know that 90% of the computer code used during the Apollo missions was redundant? Only 10% of the the code was needed to run the computer – the rest was used for error checking and to ensure that the computers never crashed”.

I can usually identify an urban legend or a hoax fairly quickly, but this one – despite the lack of references or source material – actually sounded plausible. The thought of a computer miscalculation, crash, or the Apollo equivalent of the dreaded Microsoft Windows BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) would be simply terrifying! It seemed reasonable to me that the Apollo engineers would add as much extra error-trapping code as necessary to ensure that the onboard computers never crashed.

So I filed that story away in the back of my mind as something that would likely remain one of life’s great mysteries.

Serendipity

Fast forward to July, 2017. I was attending the American Mensa Annual Gathering, and deciding which lecture to see next. There are typically 6-7 simultaneous lecture streams, and naturally, I think they’re all interesting; it’s exceedingly difficult to settle on just one. For the 10:30 a.m. slot, I finally decided to go with the one billed as “A Behind-The-Scenes Look at the Apollo Moon Landing“. The lecturer was Martha Lemasters, who was a member of IBM’s Launch Support Team as a PR writer during the Apollo missions (IBM was a NASA contractor). After the end of the Apollo program, she worked on the Skylab and Soyuz programs.

Martha Lemasters’ Mensa lecture.

Lemasters had also written a book about her time at IBM, called The Step: One Woman’s Journey to Finding her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program. Her engaging, 75-minute presentation included numerous facts and trivia about NASA and the Apollo missions, stories about her job and the working conditions, excerpts from her book, and a slide presentation filled with photos that I had never seen before. The room full of Mensa members enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Lemasters is a natural storyteller, and she effortlessly took the audience with her on a journey back in time, to a challenging, fast-paced working environment, but also one that may seem insufferably chauvinistic by today’s standards. For example: women were not allowed to wear dresses on the launch platform because it would be too much of a distraction for their male coworkers. Of course, that’s not quite how NASA phrased it – they said that dresses were a “safety hazard” because a distracted male working on an elevated platform might drop a wrench and injure someone working below.

Personally, I found this directive puzzling: IBM employs only intelligent, educated, ambitious, disciplined and professional people – the best of the best. Surely these men wouldn’t be reduced to salivating teenagers at the sight of a woman in a dress.

Lemasters finished her presentation with a Q&A session, which was an unexpected surprise and a wonderful opportunity – a chance to speak with someone who actually worked on the Apollo mission and who was embedded with its engineers. As she pointed out during her lecture “There aren’t too many Apollo veterans left”. I raised my hand, recited my friend’s claim about the redundant computer code, and asked her if this was actually true.

Unfortunately, she didn’t know the answer. Now most presenters, when faced with a similar question, would simply say that they don’t know, and then move on. However, she then did something that really impressed me. She replied that she didn’t know the answer herself, since she didn’t work directly with the computer systems. However, she added that she still keeps in touch with many of the engineers on the Apollo project, and that if I’d like to write down my question and give her my e-mail address, she’ll forward my question to them.

Well, this was much more than I could have hoped for! I never thought that the redundant code story would ever be verified, and now my question was about to be forwarded right to the source – engineers and programmers who actually worked on Apollo 11 (the first moon landing)!

A few days later, I received e-mail messages from Martha Lemasters, and two former Apollo Mission veterans, James Handley and Kenneth Clark (both of whom Lemasters described as “geniuses”). They not only answered my question, but were kind enough to send several e-mail messages over the next few days, containing an incredible amount of detail. I was impressed with the amount of information they provided, and also astounded that they were able to recall these technical details so vividly after almost half a century.

Pedigrees

James Handley was in charge of the design and programming effort for the SLCC (Saturn Ground Computer Launch Checkout System) in Huntsville, Alabama, and then transferred to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to oversee the installation and maintenance of the software. Using one the first IBM 360 mainframe computers, Handley and his team developed the SIRS (Saturn Information Management System), a workload management system. He also headed the NASA Flight Crew Training Directorate contract. Handley eventually managed a staff of 90, and was responsible for all Saturn programming efforts, the facility computer, and all new business activities. Later in his career, Handley worked on the design, development and installation of the Space Shuttle Ground Checkout System.

Kenneth Clark summarized his role in the Apollo / Saturn project as follows: “I was a programmer and launch team member for IBM’s part of the project at the KSC (Kennedy Space Center). My earliest job was writing programs to check out the Saturn IB & V launch vehicles. I later became a member of the launch team and the ‘go to’ guy for anything bad that happened to the software in the Ground Launch Computers (RCA 110As). Later I was the leader of the design / development team for the Space Shuttle Launch Processing System.”

NASA Code Redundancy – The Real Story

Here is their response, pieced together from our e-mail conversations:

The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC), made by IBM in Owego NY, was called a Triple Modular Redundant (TMR) computer. That meant that the guidance equations (or code) were simultaneously being solved by three different circuits then compared and voted on so if there was a single point failure in the computer, two answers would agree and the third would be discarded. This was done to achieve the close to the 100% reliability desired. So this meant the computer was like three computers plus circuits to compare. On the issue of code redundancy I think there was only one set of code in the computer and the TMR logic all operated on that set of code. Therefore the code itself was not replicated, although I think there were checks and balances in the code also but I don’t think the 10% vs 90% is true.

The term “code redundant” implies that there is code that recomputes a value for which the answer is known, in order to verify correctness. There were two Apollo Guidance Computers in the spacecraft. One in the Command Module and one in the Lunar Module. I doubt there was any of that in the flight computers and know for a fact there was none in the ground computers. The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer used Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) logic, but I don’t believe the code was replicated. The Saturn Ground Launch Computers were not TMR. However the Mobile Launcher Computer did contain redundant set of code which was switched to if the primary memory encountered a parity error, or if there was a no instruction alarm during execution.

On the subject of error checking, not even close to 90% of the code would be allocated to that task. The amount of memory in any of the computers made it absolutely impossible for there to be much if any code in the computers to be used for error checking. During the Apollo era memory was big, bulky, and most of all, heavy. They just couldn’t afford to launch much of it. Having redundant code would require redundant memory. The error checking that existed was to determine if an operation requested or commanded by a program completed successfully. There were some checks even in the Lunar Lander to report on unexpected errors. An example of this was the Lunar Module program alarms minutes into the landing sequence (Error codes 1201 & 1202).

The memory used in the computers was mostly magnetic core. Here are some examples of the memory sizes used in the computers:

• Saturn Ground Launch Computers (RCA 110A) – 32 K 24-bit words + 1 parity bit
• Instrument Unit Launch Vehicle Digital Computer – 32 K 28-bit words including 2 parity bits
• Apollo Guidance Computers — 2048 K words of erasable magnetic core memory and 36 K 16-bit words of read-only core rope memory.

Apollo Guidance Computer

The Space Shuttle Program carried redundancy to the ultimate level. The computers on the Space Shuttle were AP-101s manufactured in Owego by IBM. They were called the Space Shuttle General Purpose Computers or GPCs for short. There were five GPCs on board the Space Shuttle. During launch, four of the GPCs were executing 100% redundant code programmed by IBM Houston. Each output from this “Redundant Set” was voted by hardware logic. If one of the computers came up with a different answer it was voted out by the hardware. The fifth computer was running software programmed by MIT Labs. The backup flight computer could take over if the “Redundant Set” experienced multiple failures or some other failure took out the “Redundant Set”.

There you have it, right from the source. An urban legend debunked with a mixture of curiosity, serendipity and the graciousness of some people who actually worked on NASA’s Apollo mission. Thank you so much Martha Lemasters, Kenneth Clark and James Handley!

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The Hidden Life Lesson In The Shawshank Redemption

“So oftentimes it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key.” – The Eagles, Already Gone

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I thought that The Shawshank Redemption was an outstanding movie – not just for the story or the acting, but for the subtle, yet profound message that it delivered to the audience.

I wanted to discuss this allegory a little further, so I decided to take an informal poll among my friends. Most of them have seen The Shawshank Redemption – some multiple times – and all of them told me that they enjoyed it immensely. However, when I asked them what they got out of the movie, no one extracted the same life lesson that I did. However, I saw this as a good thing; I could now argue that The Shawshank Redemption is a work of art, since art affects different people in different ways.

If you’ve never seen The Shawshank Redemption, then stop reading this blog post and watch it now. Get what you can from it and then come back. If you’ve already seen the film, then I’d like to encourage you to watch it one more time – but first allow me to tell you what I gained from it, after viewing it from (what else) The Bob Angle.

As I’m sure you recall, one of the characters, Brooks Hatlen, is released from prison after completing his sentence. Unfortunately, after being in prison for 50 years, he is unable to adjust to society again and eventually commits suicide by hanging himself.

Before his sentence Brooks was able to function fairly well in society… except, of course, for his inability to stay on the right side of the law. So what happened to his ability to cope? The answer is: Brooks’ universe shrank. While he was serving his sentence, his universe slowly started to contract, and eventually the prison walls functioned as the boundaries of his new existence. For all intents and purposes, there was nothing – or at least nothing attainable by Brooks – beyond those walls. Once his sentence was over and he was forcibly pushed past those boundaries and into the universe that we inhabit, life became too much for him to bear.

The lesson, as I see it, is this: The more boundaries there are in your life, the smaller your universe becomes. While you may be content living a circumscribed existence, you will not be able to see and enjoy all that life has to offer.

At this point, you may be thinking “I’m sorry, but this doesn’t apply to me. I’m not living inside a prison, real or self-imposed. I function well in society and there are no boundaries whatsoever in my life!“

Are you sure? I’d like to propose to you that your universe is also shrinking. Not through any physical constraints such as the prison walls in the movie, but by barriers that you have unwittingly created yourself. Most of us have invisible boundaries in our lives, and we aren’t even aware of the limitations that they are imposing on us. Let me give you a few examples:

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The Transportation Universe

First of all, I must admit that I am also susceptible to these boundaries. Before I bought my first car, I used to take the bus everywhere, and began to know most of the bus routes in the city. Shortly after getting my car, I was driving to the grocery store and, without even thinking about it, I took the same route as the bus (which wasn’t the fastest or most direct way to get there). Midway through my journey I suddenly exclaimed out loud “What am I doing? Why am I driving on this street? I have a car now – I can drive on any street I like!“

Years of riding the bus had made me assume that the only way to get from Point A to Point B was by travelling along the bus routes. All of the other roads in the city were purged from my consciousness. My transportation universe had shrunk, and I hadn’t even noticed.

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The Employment Universe

Years ago, I had a contract job working at a government ministry. One day, my manager confided to me that he wasn’t really happy in his job, but couldn’t identify another position within the ministry where he would be happy. So I helpfully suggested that he should consider extending his search to the private sector, which was where I was working previously. He had been working in the Ministry for so long that his employment universe was limited not only to the public sector, but to a single ministry within it. It never occurred to him to look beyond it.

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The Culinary Universe

When you go grocery shopping, how many items are on your list? Probably 20-30. During an average month, that list may vary and you might buy 40-50 different items. If you buy groceries for your entire family, then you might buy 80 different items each month. How many items do you think an average-sized supermarket stocks? The answer I found online is: 50,000 different SKUs. You can choose from 50,000 different items, yet you buy only 50-80 different items each month, and likely the same ones month after month. Even if you bought 100 different items each month, that’s still only 0.2% of the store’s inventory. Think about that for a second – when you walk into a supermarket, you are deliberately ignoring 99.8% of the merchandise. Nobody is forcing you to do it. This, too, is your own self-imposed limitation.

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The Digital Universe

If you’re a software developer and you want to spruce up your application, the best way to do this is to ask for suggestions from someone outside your company – preferably, someone who’s never used the software before. In my experience, the best and most innovative ideas come from new employees. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it actually makes perfect sense.

I’ve written software, and after a while, you become so intimately familiar with the code that it feels as though you’re actually living inside the application. Each screen is a different room. However, just like Brooks Hatlen, the software slowly begins to impose its own barriers. Over time, my ideas become less grandiose and are eventually limited to minor enhancements or bug fixes. I no longer consider radical changes or bold, new directions. The code has become my prison, yet I am blissfully unaware of it.

New employees (or new users) have no such boundaries, and aren’t afraid to ask “Why don’t we do it this way?” or “Wouldn’t this approach be more intuitive?“.

Back in 2006, Microsoft developers were considering making the Windows Vista startup sound mandatory. Predictably, users were not too enthused with this loss of control. However, Steve Ball, Microsoft’s Group Program Manager for Vista, was unrepentant. When asked why he was imposing his will on the users, he explained that the startup sound was actually “A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now conscious and ready to react. You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in.“

What Ball didn’t consider were the myriad real-world situations in which any sound is not desirable. For example, if you’re studying for an exam in your university library, the last thing you need is to have your train of thought broken by a Windows startup sound every time a student turns on their laptop. This is obvious to everyone, except the Windows Vista developers, since their universe has become constrained.

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The Twitterverse

Finally, there’s Twitter, which irks me because of its 140-character limit. Now, you’re probably thinking “Wait a minute – that’s Twitter’s limitation, not mine!” Actually it is our limitation because of our tacit acceptance of this limit. When we’re composing a tweet and we’re approaching 140 characters, we never think that there’s something wrong with the design of Twitter – we just assume that our thoughts need to be edited. In my opinion, there shouldn’t be a limit on the complexity of our thoughts and ideas. We shouldn’t have to force them to fit inside a ridiculously small container. Yet we do, and we don’t question it.

Imagine that you are an art gallery curator, and that your gallery has recently acquired an previously-unknown Old Master, discovered (sans frame) at a garage sale. When the painting arrives, you realize that it’s larger than you thought, and that the frame you selected for it is too small. What do you do? Buy a larger frame, or take a pair of scissors to the painting to ensure that it fits inside your container?

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The Shawshank Redemption is a remarkable movie, because it illustrated (to me, anyway) that we are all, to varying degrees, living a circumscribed existence. These invisible boundaries have placed you inside a prison of your own construction, yet until this moment, you were probably blissfully unaware of it. By making you aware of just a few of these constraints, you now have a choice: you can continue accepting or even ignoring these limitations, or you can identify and deconstruct your boundaries, break out of your own personal Shawshank State Penitentiary, and start flourishing in your new, unbounded universe.

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A Record Library In The Palm Of Your Hand

As part of my ongoing effort to practise mindfulness (formerly known as stopping to smell the proverbial roses), I often take time to look around and ponder the many advances in technology – not inter-generational transformations, but ones that have occurred during my own lifetime. Since change happens slowly and often imperceptibly, we may not always be aware of the dramatic advances that have occurred since our childhood.

I’m sure that most of your are familiar with Moore’s Law: In 1965, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years. As it turns out, Moore’s forecast has been fairly accurate since 1965, and has also been applied to digital storage capacity. Moore’s Law is often quoted in computer magazines when a columnist tries to predict what computers may be capable of in the not-too-distant future.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing through Amazon.com, and saw some USB thumb drives that had a capacity of 256GB. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, since I’ve known about Moore’s Law since the 1980s, but I was still stunned by the exponential increases in digital storage capacity.

When I was in university during the mid-1980s, I volunteered at the campus radio station. During my first year I was a disc jockey, and I had my own two-hour, weekly show. Back then, they were still playing vinyl LPs and singles, since compact discs – which had just been released – were still prohibitively expensive.

The radio station’s record library was a sight to behold – it took up an entire (fairly large) room. The other, more senior disc jockeys told me that this library contained approximately 5,000 LPs, which was larger than the libraries at most commercial radio stations. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of it, but here is a similarly-sized record library:

As a teenager, I felt as if I had died and gone to music heaven; everything I could think of was in that room. There were more albums than I could possibly listen to, and new music arrived almost weekly. Unfortunately, no one – not the disc jockeys or even the station management – was allowed to borrow any of the albums or remove them from the building. However, there was one exception: if we were supplying the music for a campus pub event, then the DJs would carry two or three milk cartons full of LPs to the pub and back.

At the time, it seemed like there was more music than I could possibly listen to in a lifetime, but how much music was in that record library? If I listened to one album per day, it would take me over 13.5 years to listen to those 5,000 albums.

Today, of course, most of us listen to our music as MP3 files, and the size of our music collection is often expressed in megabytes (or gigabytes), instead of the number of albums we own. This got me thinking… if I were able to digitize the campus radio station’s entire record library, how much disk space would I need?

In order to simplify the calculations, I’ll have to start with a couple of assumptions:

• Songs vary greatly in length, so rather than use the average number of songs (10-12) on a typical LP, I decided that a more accurate measurement would be the actual playing time of an LP. According to this source, a typical LP contains between 18-21 minutes of music per side, or 36-42 minutes per disk.

• I encode my MP3s at a variable bit rate, averaging 128-136 kbps, which works out to just under one megabyte per minute of music. So let’s round up and assume that each megabyte of an MP3 file contains exactly one minute of music.

Therefore, the size of a typical vinyl record will be between 36-42 megabytes. The average value in this range is 39 MB, but I want to be really conservative in my calculations so I’m going to assume that every LP in the station’s record library contained a full 42 minutes of music. Therefore, each album (digitized as a 128 kpbs MP3) will be 42 megabytes.

Multiply 42 MB by the 5,000 albums in the record library, and we get: 42 x 5,000 = 210,000 megabytes or 210 gigabytes.

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How Much is a Gigabyte?

This may seem like a ridiculously easy question: a gigabyte is one billion bytes, isn’t it? Well, yes and no… it depends on whom you ask. When you buy hard drives or USB drives, the manufacturers advertise 1 MB or 1 GB as exactly one million or 1 billion characters of storage, respectively. This seems logical, for those of us who grew up with the metric system, but to computer geeks, this isn’t quite accurate. In the computer world, the kilo or “k” prefix is actually 1,024 bytes (two to the tenth power), and not 1,000. This may not seem like much of a difference, but watch what happens when we start scaling upwards:

One megabyte is: 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 characters
One gigabtye is: 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 characters
210 gigabytes is: 225,485,783,040 characters

Therefore, the radio station’s music library – that entire room full of vinyl albums – can easily fit onto one of those 256 GB USB drives… with room for an additional 704 albums!

Finally, if that isn’t enough to boggle your mind, consider this: thumb drives aren’t the only available format – there are now SD cards and MicroSD cards with the same 256GB capacity. Behold:

Music that once filled every nook and cranny of an entire (fairly large) room now fits not only in your hand, but on the tip of your finger. This isn’t a comparison from an antiquated 1950s textbook; this colossal miniaturization happened during our lifetime, and is still continuing.

Financial planners try to impress us with what they call “the magic of compound interest” (which I don’t think is particularly magical at all – it’s just simple math). Now compare the annual growth of compound interest to the technological advances predicted by Moore’s Law, and after a couple of decades, you will also be astounded.

This is one example of mindfulness. Incredible things are happening all around us; it’s easy to be awed by your own existence by simply pausing and paying attention.

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