Infoman

Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-04-09T16:00:01Z.

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  Infoman

  Mad, bad and dangerous to know

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 Why is Lord Byron still so seductive?

  Lord Byron’s allure

  EVEN BEFORE rumours of his affair with his half-sister spread, Lord Byron had a reputation for scandal. His lover Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. That did not stop women besotted with his poetry from sending letters, invitations to parties and requests for locks of his hair. “I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war,” Byron insisted.

  Despite the breakdown of his marriage, he might have stayed in England, but the rumours of incest (probably true) and sodomy (also true) turned British society against him. The celebrated poet had become a monster. In 1816 Byron went into exile. For seven years he roamed Italy, frequenting Venice’s carnival, taking lovers, and studying Armenian with monks. He then sailed to Greece to lend his support to the Greek fight for independence from Ottoman rule. He died there, in Missolonghi, of a fever on April 19th 1824, aged 36.

  The Greeks, who adored him, kept his lungs and larynx in an urn; the rest of Byron was returned to England, against his wishes. (“Let not my body be hacked, or sent to England,” he had ordered.) Westminster Abbey refused to accept a man of “questionable morality”, so he was buried at a local church in Nottinghamshire, near his ancestral home. Within a month of his death his remaining friends burned his memoirs, judging them too scandalous.

  Two centuries later, the poet is mostly recalled in the context of the Byronic hero: a dark, brooding, sexy rebel, derived partly from Byron’s celebrity persona and also from his works, such as his autobiographical masterpiece, “Don Juan”. In England the bicentenary has been marked by new books and events. But many are also taking place abroad, in the countries that hosted his self-imposed exile. In Italy, where he wrote some of his greatest works, including “Don Juan”, he is claimed as something of a national poet. The Keats-Shelley House, at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, is holding a yearlong festival of readings, exhibitions and performances. “Byron’s Italy: An Anglo-Italian Romance” emphasises how his Italian experiences shaped his poetry.

  “I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, / Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,” Byron wrote in “Beppo”, a satirical poem set at the Venetian carnival. It was his first attempt at ottava rima, an Italian rhyming stanza form. In “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, a moody wanderer journeys through Italy’s crumbling beauty, “a ruin amidst ruins”. It doubled as a travel guide, inspiring British and American tourists. The Byronic hero is, it turns out, an early travel influencer.

  In “Don Juan” Byron turned the womanising Spaniard into a victim seduced by women: “What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, / Is much more common

  where the climate’s sultry,” his hero observes. Don Juan eventually lands in England, allowing Byron various jabs at the British aristocracy from the comfort of his Italian refuge.

  Greece also tries to claim the poet. A suburb of Athens, Vyronas, is named in his honour. At the Acropolis Museum in Athens, an exhibition notes that Byron was one of the earliest critics of Lord Elgin’s seizure of the Parthenon marbles. In “The Curse of Minerva”, Byron savaged Elgin as a “spoiler” worse than the Turks and the Goths. If that was not enough to make Byron a hero, his commitment to Greece’s independence sealed the deal. A passionate believer in liberty (political as well as sexual), Byron lent his celebrity and wealth to the Greek fight for freedom, selling his estate to raise money for the effort.

  Though the struggle against Ottoman rule reflected his Romantic ideals of freedom and rebellion, it also offered Byron a chance to redeem his tarnished reputation by dedicating himself to a greater cause. After his death, the Greek Chronicles, a newspaper, mourned the loss of Greece’s “precious benefactor”. Dionysios Solomos, the national poet, eulogised him in verse. The Byronic hero may have been a libertine, but he was a liberator, too. ■

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  UV’s bright side

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 Solar radiation may have positive health effects. But keep the sun cream handy

  The benefits of UV

  BASKING IN THE sun has been considered a health hazard for at least four decades. The main risk comes from ultraviolet ( UV) light, which the Sun emits alongside visible radiation. This can increase the chances of skin cancer—the number of diagnoses of which are rising—as well as bringing on premature ageing and leading to wrinkles. As a result, most developed countries recommend sunbathers protect their skin in the heat of the day with sun cream, especially in the summer months.

  The risks UV poses are real, but new research suggests it may be time to consider the benefits. According to a study published recently in Health and Place, increased UV exposure appears to make people significantly less likely to die from cardiovascular disease as well as cancer. The risk of dying from melanoma skin cancer, the deadliest form of skin cancer, did not meaningfully change with UV exposure. Although smaller-scale studies have previously nodded at health benefits, this is the largest study to show a direct correlation between UV exposure and longer lifespans.

  To conduct their analysis, the researchers from the University of Edinburgh used data from over 360,000 people in the UK Biobank, a database. They identified two cohorts more likely to have high UV exposure: those who claimed to use sunbeds or sunlamps; and those living in sunnier locations. To check that their assumptions

  about the subjects’ UV exposure were correct, the scientists also looked at vitamin D levels in a subset of blood samples. As vitamin D is synthesised in the skin in the presence of certain forms of UV radiation, it is a reliable indicator of solar exposure.

  The researchers then examined the subjects’ death rates while correcting for other confounding factors, including age, gender, smoking and socio-economic status (in Britain, those who live in sunnier climes are typically wealthier). They also corrected for exercise, as some sun-seekers might lead healthier outdoor lives.

  Their analysis showed that sunbed-users were 23% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease, and 14% less likely to die of cancer, than non-users. Similar trends held depending on where people lived. Someone living in Truro, for example, in the south of Britain, would on average experience about 25% more solar shortwave radiation (a measure that includes UV, visible and some infrared light) in a year than someone living in Glasgow or Edinburgh, which are much further north. The team concluded this translated to a 19% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and 12% lower risk of dying from cancer. Sunbed-users, in other words, lived an average of 48 days longer than non-users over the 15 years during which they were studied. The corresponding figure for those living in sunnier spots was 26 days.

  According to Richard Weller, who coled the study, most UV exposure guidance has thus far been firmly focused on preventing melanoma skin cancer. But, he says, “Many times more people die from other cancers and diseases. We have to think about how UV radiation could help them avoid illness.”

  The exact mechanism whereby UV light might lengthen lives is unknown. The authors, for their part, believe part of the explanation may lie in vitamin D’s ability to boost the immune system and improve bone health. They also point to nitric oxide, a potent blood-vessel widener capable of reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. Research published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology in 2014 showed that nitric oxide is released in skin cells that have moderate exposure to some UV radiation, and sunlight helps move it into the circulatory system where it could have health-boosting effects. The researchers hope that future studies might further clarify the causal chain.

  There are other questions that need answering. For one thing, Dr Weller’s team was able to analyse data only from individuals living in Britain: different attitudes to the risks and benefits of sun exposure could arise in other places. Owing to the structure of the data, they also could not control for sun-cream use.

  Most important, perhaps, they studied participants only of mostly white European ancestry, to ensure the response to UV was consistent. “We know that skin colour affects your body’s response to UV light and we don’t yet know how,” says Dr Weller. As people with darker skin are most at risk from vitamin D deficiency, more research on how UV exposure affects this population is called for, says Frank de Gruijl, an emeritus professor of dermatology at Leiden University Medical Centre. “We need to dig into the biology.”

  The new research may prompt scientists and health experts to look deeper into the benefits of UV exposure versus its risks and, perhaps in the future, make available more nuanced advice about how different groups of people can best stay safe in the sun. But for now, experts agree, the study is not a licence to stop wearing sun cream. ■

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  Great minds

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 The successes of AI algorithms are inspiring new theories of how brains learn

  The successes of AI algorithms are inspiring new theories of how brains learn,

  FIVE DECADES of research into artificial neural networks have earned Geoffrey Hinton the moniker of the Godfather of artificial intelligence ( AI). Work by his group at the University of Toronto laid the foundations for today’s headline-grabbing AI models, including ChatGPT and LaMDA. These can write coherent (if uninspiring) prose, diagnose illnesses from medical scans and navigate self-driving cars. But for Dr Hinton, creating better models was never the end goal. His hope was that by developing artificial neural networks that could learn to solve complex problems, light might be shed on how the brain’s neural networks do the same.

  Brains learn by being subtly rewired: some connections between neurons, known as synapses, are strengthened, while others must be weakened. But because the brain has billions of neurons, of which millions could be involved in any single task, scientists have puzzled over how it knows which synapses to tweak and by how much. Dr Hinton popularised a clever mathematical algorithm known as backpropagation to solve this problem in artificial neural networks. But it was long thought to be too unwieldy to have evolved in the human brain. Now, as AI models are beginning to look increasingly human-like in their abilities, scientists are questioning whether the brain might do something similar after all.

  Working out how the brain does what it does is no easy feat. Much of what neuroscientists understand about human learning comes from experiments on small slices of brain tissue, or handfuls of neurons in a Petri dish. It’s often not clear whether living, learning brains work by scaled-up versions of these same rules, or if something more sophisticated is taking place. Even with modern experimental techniques, wherein neuroscientists track hundreds of neurons at a time in live animals, it is hard to reverse-engineer what is really going on.

  One of the most prominent and longstanding theories of how the brain learns is Hebbian learning. The idea is that neurons which activate at roughly the same time become more strongly connected; often summarised as “cells that fire together wire together”. Hebbian learning can explain how brains learn simple associations— think of Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. But for more complicated tasks, like learning a language, Hebbian learning seems too inefficient. Even with huge amounts of training, artificial neural networks trained in this way fall well short of human levels of performance.

  Today’s top AI models are engineered differently. To understand how they work, imagine an artificial neural network trained to spot birds in images. Such a model would be made up of thousands of synthetic neurons, arranged in layers. Pictures are fed into the first layer of the network, which sends information about the content of each pixel to the next layer

  through the AI equivalent of synaptic connections. Here, neurons may use this information to pick out lines or edges before sending signals to the next layer, which might pick out eyes or feet. This process continues until the signals reach the final layer responsible for getting the big call right: “bird” or “not bird”.

  Integral to this learning process is the so-called backpropagation-of-error algorithm, often known as backprop. If the network is shown an image of a bird but mistakenly concludes that it is not, then— once it realises the gaffe—it generates an error signal. This error signal moves backwards through the network, layer by layer, strengthening or weakening each connection in order to minimise any future errors. If the model is shown a similar image again, the tweaked connections will lead the model to correctly declare: “bird”.

  Neuroscientists have always been sceptical that backpropagation could work in the brain. In 1989, shortly after Dr Hinton and his colleagues showed that the algorithm could be used to train layered neural networks, Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate who co-discovered the structure of DNA, published a takedown of the theory in the journal Nature. Neural networks using the backpropagation algorithm were biologically “unrealistic in almost every respect” he said.

  For one thing, neurons mostly send information in one direction. For backpropagation to work in the brain, a perfect mirror image of each network of neurons would therefore have to exist in order to send the error signal backwards. In addition, artificial neurons communicate using signals of varying strengths. Biological neurons, for their part, send signals of fixed strengths, which the backprop algorithm is not designed to deal with.

  All the same, the success of neural networks has renewed interest in whether some kind of backprop happens in the brain. There have been promising experimental hints it might. A preprint study published in November 2023, for example, found that individual neurons in the brains of mice do seem to be responding to unique error signals, one of the crucial ingredients of backprop-like algorithms long thought lacking in living brains.

  Scientists working at the boundary between neuroscience and AI have also shown that small tweaks to backprop can make it more brain-friendly. One influential study showed that the mirror-image network once thought necessary does not have to be an exact replica of the original for learning to take place (albeit more slowly for big networks). This makes it less implausible. Others have found ways of bypassing a mirror network altogether. If artificial neural networks can be given biologically realistic features, such as specialised neurons that can integrate activity and error signals in different parts of the cell, then backprop can occur with a single set of neurons. Some researchers have also made alterations to the backprop algorithm to allow it to process spikes rather than continuous signals.

  Other researchers are exploring rather different theories. In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience earlier this year, Yuhang Song and colleagues at Oxford University laid out a method that flips backprop on its head. In conventional backprop, error signals lead to adjustments in the synapses, which in turn cause changes in neuronal activity. The Oxford researchers proposed that the network could change the activity in the neurons first, and only then adjust the synapses to fit. They called this prospective configuration.

  When the authors tested out prospective configuration in artificial neural networks they found that they learned in a much more human-like way—more robustly and with less training—than models trained with backprop. They also found that the network offered a much closer match for human behaviour on other very different tasks, such as one that involved learning how to move a joystick in response to different visual cues.

  Learning the hard way

  For now though, all of these theories are just that. Designing experiments to prove whether backprop, or any other algorithm, is at play in the brain is surprisingly tricky. For Aran Nayebi and colleagues at Stanford University this seemed like a problem AI could solve.

  The scientists used one of four different learning algorithms to train over a thousand neural networks to perform a variety of tasks. They then monitored each network during training, recording neuronal activity and the strength of synaptic connections. Dr Nayebi and his colleagues then trained another supervisory metamodel to deduce the learning algorithm from the recordings. They found that the meta-model could tell which of the four algorithms had been used by recording just a couple of hundreds of virtual neurons at various intervals during learning. The researchers hope such a meta-model could do something similar with equivalent recordings of a real brain.

  Identifying the algorithm, or algorithms, that the brain uses to learn would be a big step forward for neuroscience. Not only would it shed light on how the body’s most mysterious organ works, it could also help scientists build new AI- powered tools to try to understand specific neural processes. Whether it could lead to better AI

  algorithms is unclear. For Dr Hinton, at least, backprop is probably superior to whatever happens in the brain. ■

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  BUTTONWOOD

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 Controlled chaos

  Investing in chaotic markets

  Contrary to popular wisdom, even retail investors should pay attention to volatility

  JUST IGNORE it. That, in short, is the advice given to retail investors when stockmarkets convulse, as plenty have over the past few weeks. Watching hardearned savings disappear in a flash tends not to promote a cool head. So do not check your portfolio, do not tot up your losses and, above all, do not decide that now is the time to overhaul your entire investment strategy. Simply wait for the storm to pass and for share prices to resume their long march upwards.

  In so far as it dissuades the nervous from panic-selling after a big drop, such advice is sensible, even if the investment platforms dispensing it are hardly acting out of altruism. “It’s about time in the market, not timing the market” is a mantra with particular appeal to those who charge fees in proportion to the time their clients spend in the market. Yet the idea that doing nothing is the only proper response to volatility is also deeply unsatisfying—so much so that it stretches credulity. Everyone knows that markets can overreact, and that wild swings in prices may be caused by technical factors rather than changes to economic fundamentals. That does not mean they convey no useful information at all.

  How should you respond to the turbulence that has swept markets this summer? Start with the immediate effect on portfolio allocation. Suppose that your strategy is the classic one of keeping 60% of savings in shares and 40% in bonds. After the upheaval of recent weeks, these two sides will now be out of whack. Share prices have fallen while bond prices have risen. Although this provides just the cushioning effect that makes the 60/40 strategy attractive, your split will have shifted to something more like 56/44. In other words, the buffer of bonds is too large compared with the stocks that will drive long-run returns. However jumpy markets are right now, at some point you will want to restore balance. Doing so now would entail selling bonds that have just become pricier to buy shares that have become cheaper.

  No time like the present, then. In practice, though, such opportunistic rebalancing is easier said than done: it always seems worth putting off in case share prices fall even more, and the moment is missed. Therefore it is best to forget about perfect timing and instead commit to a regular schedule (rebalancing at the end of each quarter, say, or each month) regardless of what markets are doing.

  Intrepid number-crunchers might want to go further, making use of the new information revealed by the tumult. When bond prices rise, their yields, or the prospective returns from holding them to maturity, fall. When stockmarkets plunge, their expected returns go up. Share-price volatility, meanwhile, implies that the spread of possible outcomes on either side of these expected returns has widened, making the investment riskier.

  Put all this together and you can derive the “Merton share”, a formula for optimising a portfolio’s split between stocks and bonds based on market conditions and an investor’s own risk appetite. The formula says that the share allocated to stocks should be proportional to their excess expected return above that of bonds, and inversely proportional to both the square of volatility and the investor’s risk aversion. Each of these variables, except the last, is liable to change in a crash. Retaining a balance of risk and reward that you are happy with may entail updating your portfolio allocations in response.

  Step back from such whizzy theory, and the downsides of intervention amid market chaos are plain. Professional traders may be able to swap from bonds to stocks almost immediately; mere mortals often face days-long delays during which prices leap around even more. If they move in the wrong direction, rebalancing might mean booking a substantial loss. Making such moves too often can involve trimming holdings of assets with momentum, causing you to miss out on gains. If you are to change your allocations at all, it must be via a procedure devised during calmer times, rather than a rash decision taken when fear is in the air. Adopting a new strategy, even one with rigorous grounding like the Merton share, is unwise. It is too easy to use the switch as an excuse to offload assets you are panicking about.

  None of that, however, means that investors should simply ignore market madness. Price swings do not need to be rational to change your portfolio’s positioning and prospects. A response, devised in advance, may well be in order. Keep your eyes open—provided you can keep your head while doing so.

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  Happy home front

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 Despite Russia’s recent military embarrassment, its economy is flourishing

  AUKRAINIAN INCURSION into Russia represents an enormous embarrassment for Vladimir Putin and his military leadership. Tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated after Ukrainian troops stormed across the border. The Russian armed forces, caught off guard, are being slow to respond. The rouble is slumping, as worries mount about the future of the war. Yet on the home front, at least, things look better than ever for Mr Putin. Despite sanctions and pariah status, Russia’s economy is growing strongly. It turns out that bacchanalian spending, at a time of war, really gets things going.

  Russian GDP will rise by over 3% in real terms this year, continuing its fastest growth spurt since the early 2010s. In May and June economic activity “significantly increased”, according to the central bank. Other “real time” measures of activity, including one published by Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggest the economy is accelerating (see chart 1 on next page). Unemployment is close to an all-time low. Inflation is too high—in July prices rose by 9.1% year on year, above the central bank’s target of 4%—but with cash incomes growing by 14% year on year, the purchasing power of Russians is rising fast. In contrast with people in almost every other country, Russians are feeling good about the economy.

  Consumer confidence, as measured by Russia’s statistical agency, is well above its average since Mr Putin assumed power 24 years ago. You might expect him to be goosing the numbers. But the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, finds equally startling trends (see chart 2). Only once in the past three decades has sentiment been higher. Russians’ confidence in their own financial situation, according to official data, recently jumped to an all-time high. They are more inclined to make big purchases, such as a car or a sofa, and restaurants are bursting. Last year Russians imported 18% more cognac than they did in 2019, according to our estimate, while spending 80% more on imports of sparkling wine. Sberbank, the country’s largest financial institution, notes that in June overall consumer spending rose by 20% year on year in nominal terms.

  The latest data are in sharp contrast to the 2010s. Back then, output and incomes grew slowly or not at all. By 2018 real wages were no higher than in 2012. People were fed up. A round of sanctions, which the West launched in 2014 following Mr Putin’s annexation of Crimea, contributed to the malaise. So did an unusually austere fiscal policy, involving increases in taxation and cuts to spending. The covid-19 pandemic and another barrage of Western sanctions, imposed in 2022 in response to Mr Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, compounded Russians’ financial woes.

  What explains the turnaround? It is tempting to credit Russian exports. Mr Putin has been able to divert hydrocarbons once destined for Europe to other parts of

  the world. Russian oligarchs, and the companies they run, are doing better than had been feared at the start of the war. In reality, however, Russia’s recent export performance is nothing to write home about. Oil prices are lower than a couple of years ago. In the first quarter of 2024 the total value of Russia’s physical exports was 4% lower in dollar terms than in the same period of 2023—and a third lower than in 2022.

  To understand the accelerating economy, look to two aspects of macroeconomic policy. The first is fiscal policy. Mr Putin has abandoned austerity as he doubles down on war. He is sensitive to domestic opinion and recognises that he needs to buy public support for his invasion of Ukraine. This year Russia will run a budget deficit of 2% of GDP— hefty by its standards—which it is funding in large part by drawing on enormous financial reserves, accumulated during the 2010s. In effect, Russia saved yesterday in order to party today. Total government outlays rose by an average of 15% in both 2022 and 2023, and a slightly smaller rise is budgeted this year. Ministers are devoting much of this extra spending to the war in Ukraine. Data published by the Bank of Finland suggest that military spending will rise by about 60% this year, boosting production of weapons and ammunition, and also putting money in people’s pockets.

  Patriots or mercenaries?

  In July Mr Putin doubled the federal bonus for those signing up to fight from 195,000 roubles ($2,200) to 400,000 roubles, which regional authorities are supposed to top up. The government is committing vast sums to compensation for the families of those killed in action. And Russia’s splurge goes beyond war-related spending. Mr Putin is lavishing money on welfare payments: in June he raised pensions for some recipients by close to 10%. The government is also spending big on infrastructure, including a highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg, two cities 450 miles (730km) apart. Indeed, it is spending on pretty much whatever takes its fancy. Mikhail Mishustin, Russia’s prime minister, recently boasted about a government scheme to pay for children to holiday in Crimea.

  The second reason for Russia’s party economy relates to its unusual monetary policy. In order to deal with high inflation the central bank has raised interest rates from 7.5% to 18%. More increases may be on their way. This has the effect of strengthening the rouble by attracting foreign investment from “friendly” countries such as China and India, which in turn cuts the price of imports and thus inflation. It also encourages people to save, trimming consumer spending. In a normal economy higher rates would hurt indebted households and companies, as their cost of repaying debt rose. Yet the government has almost entirely shielded the real economy from tighter monetary policy.

  There is a bewildering array of schemes. Earlier this year the government made it much easier for consumers to suspend repayments on loans, so long as they could prove that their income had fallen or they were “affected by an emergency”. Banks have offered loan holidays to soldiers in Ukraine. A mortgage scheme, recently closed, kept lending rates fixed at 8%, less than half the current policy rate. An “industrial mortgage” programme has channelled lending to companies at rates as low as 3% a year. Banks’ arms are also twisted so that they do not raise rates too far. When the financial sector loses income as a consequence, the state often steps in to make up the difference.

  This meddling has easily observable effects. According to official data, in the first quarter of this year households spent 11% of their disposable income on servicing debt—about the same as three years ago, when the policy rate was considerably lower. In the past year the interest rate facing households and firms has risen, but by only about half as much as the policy rate (see chart 3). New borrowing remains healthy. Lending to companies is growing at more than 20% a year. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, unsecured consumer lending has grown about as fast as nominal wages, which is to say very fast indeed.

  How long can the party last? Much depends on the war. A continued slump in the rouble would raise inflation; more military recruitment would worsen labour shortages. At some point, people may get angry about the cost of living. And Mr Putin cannot run budget deficits for ever: at current rates, Russia’s reserves will be gone in five years or so. But the economy has also shown its resilience in recent years. So, for now, the party continues. ■

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  How China thrives amid turmoil

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 The guerrilla tactics of the Long March guide the Communist Party to this day

  Thriving in a world of turmoil

  MODERN CHINA is a superpower with its roots in a guerrilla army. This helps explain its self-interested responses to crises, including the turmoil now raging in the Middle East.

  To hear America and other long-established powers tell it, China has unique influence over that region’s worst agents of disorder, starting with Iran, and an unusual need for stability in the Middle East. China is the world’s largest importer of both oil and liquefied natural gas, buying vast quantities from Iran and Arab countries alike. It is a big regional investor, with tens of billions of dollars at stake in such countries as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

  As the world’s biggest manufacturer, China is exceptionally exposed to spikes in global shipping rates. That is a painful distinction when drone and missile attacks by Iranian-armed Houthi rebels in Yemen have all but closed the Red Sea and Suez Canal to container ships, sending Europe-bound Chinese exports on a costly detour around Africa.

  With these arguments in hand, the Biden administration and other Western governments have spent months asking China to lean on Iran and the Houthis. In meetings with Western officials, Chinese diplomats are ambiguous, hinting at messages passed to Iran while playing down their influence in Tehran, and questioning whether Iran has much sway over the Houthis. Far from sending People’s Liberation Army ( PLA) warships to join an Americanled military coalition that has escorted civilian ships and attacked Houthi radar and missile sites, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, has noted that American and British strikes in Yemen lack UN Security Council approval.

  In late July leaders from Fatah and Hamas, the rival Palestinian factions, met in Beijing for unity talks that Mr Wang called “an important historical moment”. Others were more sceptical, noting that the resulting Beijing Declaration, signed by Fatah, Hamas and 12 other Palestinian groups, left unresolved the thorniest questions, such as who should control security in post-war Gaza.

  In Beijing, Western diplomats murmur that Chinese leaders have no illusions about their ability to solve the Middle East puzzle, but see an easy win in playing the peacemaking host. Meanwhile, China knows that its calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and its vocal support for a Palestinian state align with the views of most countries, notably those in the global south. The most cynical Western voices suggest that, though China would surely prefer a quieter world, today’s disorder does at least keep American aircraft carriers and diplomatic envoys usefully tied up in the Middle East, rather than making trouble in China’s backyard.

  To scholars from China’s foreign-policy and security establishment, such Western analysis is lamentably crude. “How many US troops can the Houthis in the Red Sea tie down? Not many, that is too simple,” says Hu Bo, a professor of maritime security at Peking University. Yes, Chinese exporters face higher costs with the Red Sea closed, but there is no evidence that their losses are “unbearable”. In the absence of a UN mandate, even escorting ships in the Red Sea “implies China is against the Houthis, or against Iran”, says the professor, and imperils China’s preferred stance of neutrality in the Middle East. Put bluntly, the Red Sea crisis is “not on China’s doorstep”, so Chinese people wonder, “why should we help the United States solve this trouble?” reports the professor.

  Zhou Bo, a retired PLA senior colonel, chides Western governments for arguing that, as the largest trading power on Earth, China should be willing to strike Houthi targets or apply pressure to Iran, in the name of upholding freedom of navigation on the high seas. The root cause of the crisis is “because Israelis are bombing and killing in Gaza”, he says. The Houthis have said that Chineseflagged ships are not their target, he adds, and most Chinese cargoes are already sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. Mr Zhou, now at Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy, cautions that frigates and destroyers—the warships that the PLA would send—have limited air defences. What, he asks, would be the purpose of such ships entering the Red Sea and firing on the Houthis? As for China applying pressure on Iran: “The point is at what cost would you make use of your influence?”

  An executive at a multinational company in China goes a step further. He argues that “we should be very careful about assessing disruption as bad for China”. When the covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc in supply chains and cargo-shipping markets, Chinese firms adapted fast and grabbed business from slower rivals, he notes. “China prefers stability, but when there is chaos they think opportunistically, not defensively.”

  China needs no help to calculate its interests

  Mr Zhou sees “a grain of truth” in such arguments. He notes that Chinese businesses are active in unstable regions of Africa and the Middle East where profits are hard to come by. Unlike Western companies that need quick returns, Chinese firms will endure hardships to grab market share, he suggests. The aim is to outlast competitors and reap rewards later. He draws a comparison with the Long March of 1934-35, when Red Army troops crossed snowcapped mountains, fast rivers and deadly marshes during China’s civil war, knowing that their foe, the larger, better-armed Nationalist army, would not follow them.

  To a striking extent, today’s Chinese diplomats manoeuvre like Red Army guerrillas, warily avoiding crises that might trap and entangle China, while staging quick, showy wins. China is a superpower with global interests. But it is run by the same Communist Party that survived the Long March by picking battles and staging strategic retreats. Remember that history and China’s opportunism makes more sense. ■

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  Use it or lose it

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 Startups are finding novel ways to recycle carbon

  Good uses for carbon

  IN A SUBURBAN car park near Seattle Bill Gates recently posed for an unusual photo shoot. Sporting a high-vis jacket and safety boots, the billionaire philanthropist shovelled asphalt from a wheelbarrow into a pothole. Mr Gates was there to tout his investment in a company involved in “carbon utilisation”, a neglected area of climate tech that is heating up.

  Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air will be a crucial part of efforts to slow climate change. Many projects envisage piping the gas to some form of permanent storage (such as salt caverns). Oil companies, which have experience of pumping CO2 into dwindling wells in order to enhance oil recovery, claim to be keen. But less attention has been paid to the many other commercial possibilities. In the group of technologies referred to as carbon capture, utilisation and storage ( CCUS), utilisation often gets short shrift.

  The asphalt Mr Gates was shovelling was made by Modern Hydrogen, a startup which has raised some $100m from investors. It has developed a compact pyrolysis reactor that can convert methane (from natural gas, say, or from manure) into pure hydrogen fuel and solid carbon. It has already demonstrated the viability of the hydrogen fuel to a power utility and is now scaling up production. Because its kit can fit inside a shipping container, it reckons this will allow customers far from pipelines to have easy access to clean hydrogen on

  demand. The solid carbon, meanwhile, is now replacing bitumen distilled from crude oil in asphalt for paying customers, which Tony Pan, its co-founder, calls a “high-value application”.

  CarbonFree, another startup which counts BP, an oil giant, among its investors, announced a 20-year deal in April to monetise carbon emissions at a US Steel facility in Indiana. The startup plans to invest $150m to deploy its proprietary technology at the mill. This uses calcium extracted from slag (a traditional waste product) and combines it with CO2 captured from blastfurnace gas to make high-quality calcium carbonate, which the startup plans to sell as a food ingredient.

  Martin Keighley, CarbonFree’s boss, insists his firm’s technology is profitable without subsidies. Still, government support helps. Dow, an American chemicals firm, has won up to $95m in government funding to build a facility that will capture some 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, which it will use to produce electrolyte solutions for lithium-ion batteries.

  ArcelorMittal, a European steel colossus, has built a €200m ($220m) carbonutilisation plant at a steelworks in the city of Ghent in Belgium. The facility relies on novel equipment made by LanzaTech, a biotech firm based in Illinois, which uses a biocatalyst to turn the carbon-rich waste gas from the blast furnaces into ethanol. This can then be used to make sustainable aviation fuel or chemicals.

  In 2022 LanzaTech secured $500m in funding from Brookfield, a Canadian asset manager, to scale up its business. Recently it was jointly awarded up to $200m by America’s Department of Energy to convert CO2 captured at a petrochemical plant into ethylene, a useful feedstock. Jennifer Holmgren, LanzaTech’s boss, reckons replacing “fossil carbon” in supply chains is “a $1trn addressable market”.

  The International Energy Agency ( IEA), an official forecaster, reckons some 230 megatonnes of CO2 are used in industrial applications each year, mainly for pumping into oil wells and as an input for fertiliser. But the IEA sees other uses such as synthetic fuels, chemicals and building materials “gaining momentum”. It estimates that the current global pipeline of utilisation projects would allow nearly 15 megatonnes of CO2 to be captured for these uses by 2030.

  That may not sound like much compared with the 37 gigatonnes of CO2 emitted globally last year. But the opportunity will grow as the cost of capturing and recycling carbon continues to fall. In a report published earlier this year, BCG, a consultancy, and the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative ( OGCI), a trade body, estimate that between 430 and 840 megatonnes a year of captured CO2 could be used in industrial applications by 2040. MarketsandMarkets, a research firm, predicts that the global carbon-utilisation market will grow in value from roughly $3bn in 2023 to some $13bn by 2030. BCG suggests this could rise to as much as $50bn by 2040.

  A report published on August 7th by America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a group of research bodies, examines the role that carbon utilisation could play in decarbonising the economy. Its boffins conclude that by 2050 “the conversion of CO2 into marketable products…can operate at a global annual scale of multiple gigatonnes to provide an alternative, circular-carbon feedstock.” That would certainly be worth picking up a shovel for. ■

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  2024/08/18
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  Infoman

  Less plain sailing

  Economist (UK) 17 Aug 2024 From Taylor Swift to Star Trek, niche cruises are on the rise

  Niche cruises set sail

  TORTURE, FOR some, might be spending five nights on a Taylor Swift-themed cruise in the Bahamas. But for Aubreigh Gniotczynski, a 26-year-old from Texas, it is a dream come true. Ms Gniotczynski and her husband—a “fan by marriage”—have each paid more than $1,500 to enjoy karaoke nights and fancydress parties on the cruise, which is not affiliated with the star. In preparation, Ms Gniotczynski has been busily making friendship bracelets showcasing Ms Swift’s lyrics, which she will give to her fellow passengers.

  Cruise holidays are back in vogue. Some 35.7m passengers are expected to board ships in 2024, 6% more than in 2019, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, a trade body. Operators have been experimenting with themed trips in an effort to persuade new customers to climb aboard. “We were very surprised with how many of our clients are going to be sailing for the first time,” says Jessica Malerman, a travel adviser behind the Taylor Swift extravaganza, which will take up 199 rooms on an existing Royal Caribbean International ( RCI) cruise.

  Some themed cruises are based on TV shows, such as Star Trek: The Cruise and the Golden Girls Cruise. Others, like The Kiss Kruise and the Beach Boys Good Vibrations Cruise, are curated around bands. There are at least four country-music cruises, a reggae cruise, and several rock and jazz cruises. Fans of wrestling can gather on Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Rager at Sea cruise and motorcycling enthusiasts can join the High Seas Rally cruise. Religious groups can board Kosherica (if they are Jewish) or Bountiful Travel (if they are Mormon). Those after adult experiences at sea can join the Desire, Temptation or Bare Necessities cruises.

  Niche cruises, aimed at those who want to do more than sun themselves, appeal to old and young alike. Nostalgia can be a big draw for older passengers, reckons Chris Hearing of Entertainment Cruise Productions, which organises, alongside Star Trek and High Seas Rally cruises, an 80s music cruise. “That’s the music they loved when they were in high school,” he says. “So that’s what they are going back to relive.”

  For younger passengers, cruise ships can present a haven away from judgmental festival crowds, says Gavin Simcoe, organiser of the Emo’s Not Dead Cruise, which has an average passenger age of 35. To attract even younger fans he plans to mix his line-up of bands from the 2000s with contemporary acts. Sometimes it pays to rock the boat.

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  2024/08/18
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  Infoman

  Prostate cancer therapy breakthrough

  Shaun Wooller Health Editor

  Daily Mail 03 Aug 2024

  THOUSANDS of men with prostate cancer could live longer thanks to a breakthrough by British experts.

  Scientists have developed a new form of immunotherapy to delay resistance to hormone treatment and help the body’s immune system to target the tumour.

  For many diagnosed with prostate cancer, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is a powerful first-line treatment. While it is initially effective, some patients’ tumours can develop resistance to it.

  Immunotherapy has had huge success in other cancers, but this has not translated to prostate cancer. Now researchers from the University of Sheffield have published findings in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer showing that a new form of the treatment using nanoparticles could help men live longer.

  The team found that a type of white blood cell called a macrophage accumulates in tumours during ADT treatment.

  They then developed a way of using nanoparticles to target delivery of a drug that boosts immunity levels in these cells. When released inside tumours, it stimulates other immune cells – called T cells – to kill cancer cells. When done with ADT, it delayed tumour resistance. Professor Claire Lewis, who led the study, said she was ‘excited’ by the therapy’s impact and hoped to conduct clinical trials ‘as soon as possible’.

  Some 52,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed in the UK every year. The Daily Mail has campaigned for more than two decades for better diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

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  2024/08/04
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  Infoman

  【巴黎奧運表演的文化象徵——法國想說出的故事】

  各屆奧運開幕禮都是用來「說好自己國家的故事」，這裏介紹一下巴黎奧運開幕表演部份的歷史含義，看看法國想向世界說一個怎樣的故事。

  Ça ira! 法國大革命<<< 開幕禮一開始，電視畫面打上法語「Ça ira!」，意思是「會OK的」，這是法國大革命時期的歌曲。 看過開幕禮介紹的都應該知道這首歌曲，因為在第3幕「自由」（Liberté），女高音 Marina Viotti 夥同重金屬樂隊 Gojira 合作獻唱的歌曲正是《Ça ira!》。 這一幕一開始時是預錄片段，重演法國大革命的一刻，演員一輪走位後，最後定格就是拼湊出有關法國大革命的名畫《自由引領人民》（La Liberté guidant le peuple），而且呈現革命畫面也是涉及談及另一場起義、雨果名作《孤星淚》。 然後鏡頭一轉，去到現場，飾演瑪麗王后的女演員拿着自己的頭，並開始 Viotti 和 Gojira 的演出。那裏是巴黎古監獄（La Conciergerie），而瑪麗王后在法國大革命期間被斬首前是囚禁在這裏。 Viotti 是站在一個類似船的物體出場，相信跟巴黎市徽有關——巴黎的市徽是一艘帆船，下面寫着拉丁語格言「Fluctuat nec Mergitur」，意思是「風浪衝擊，只浮不沉」。

  屋頂行走的蒙面男<<< 貫穿全部12幕的是一個拿着聖火的蒙面神秘人，他在巴黎建築的屋頂穿越巴黎和法國千年歷史。很多香港人都提及，這是電玩《刺客教條》（Assassin's Creed），除了因為取景巴黎，還因為這個系列是法國電玩開發商 Ubisoft 推出。 這既是顯示法國的電玩業實力，同時也因為 Ubisoft 向維修聖母院捐了50萬美元，而且也應該有贊助今屆奧運（或提供協助），就當這個橋段是用來鳴謝善長仁翁。 神秘人是蒙面，這一點也有含義。法國歷史和文學作品經常有蒙面人的出現，例如20世紀初的小說《歌聲魅影》（Le Fantôme de l'Opéra）的男主角，而路易十四年代曾出現一個外號「鐵面人」（l'Homme au masque de Fer）的神秘囚犯，囚禁多年都戴着鐵面具，到死的一刻都沒有人知道他的真正身份。所以，神秘蒙面男對法國人來說是有一些共鳴的。

  鳴謝LV<<< 上面提及要「鳴謝」Ubisoft，那麼，法國最大集團LVMH絕對有資格在開幕禮佔上一個致敬的席位。表演有一幕是顯示LV如何製作大廂，然後由一些人用酒店搬行李的車搬運。開幕禮介紹了獎牌，而未來兩週，工作人員拿出獎牌，準備頒獎時，裝着獎牌的小盒子是LV提供。開幕禮有 catwalk，是向包括LV在內的法國時裝業致敬。 開幕表演也有展示衣服製作，除了再次向LV等時裝業致敬，也是反映法國重視工匠。另一段表演是表演者扮作聖母院的維修人員，除了感謝他們復修巴黎古蹟，同樣展示出對這些工人的尊重。 法國政府不時在財長以下再設幾個部長，分擔工作，之前不時有一個部長負責工匠（及其他經濟活動）事務，可見工藝業在法國很受重視。

  地下水道的故事<<< 說回開幕禮一開始的片段。一開始拿着聖火走錯去了運動場的那個是法國摩洛哥裔喜劇演員 Jamel Debbouze，他年輕時有參演過電影《天使愛美麗》（Amélie）。 施丹因為巴黎地鐵壞了，需要把聖火交由3名青年和小朋友繼續傳遞，安排他們走入巴黎地下水道，這是有原因的。巴黎目前的市政基建大抵是19世紀一次大規劃為基礎，例如現時所見的林蔭大道，而龐大地下水道網絡也是其中之一。 巴黎地下水道猶如隧道網絡，十分出名，而且不少電影以這裏取景，例如60年代法英合拍電影《橫衝直撞出重圍》（La Grande Vadrouille）。 3名青年/小朋友在地下水道看到鱷魚，同樣有意思，因為地下水道有鱷魚是巴黎著名的都市傳說之一，而1984年確實有維修工人在地下水道找到一條尼羅河鱷魚。

  《蒙娜麗莎》失竊事件<<< Lady Gaga獻唱部份的法國文化含義應該很明顯。她唱出歌曲 Mon truc en plume ，這是向50年代芭蕾舞者及演員 Zizi Jeanmaire 致敬，她以唱好上述歌曲而知名。那個表演的風格、服裝以至樓梯油上金色，都是典型的法國歌舞廳表演。這個表演及前後的表演以粉紅色為主調，主要是引用傳奇歌后 Edith Piaf 最著名歌曲《生命如玫瑰》（La Vie en Rose）。 整個表演都有很多地方帶出法國的歷史及其他文學。當聖母院鐘樓自大火後首度響起鐘聲，畫面顯示塔尖有一個人，這是寓意鐘樓駝俠；Minions 偷了名畫《蒙娜麗莎》，是指1911年這幅畫作在羅浮宮失竊的事件，2年後才尋回，《蒙》部份名氣其實是源自這次偷竊事件；有一段是河中BMX單車、Breaking表演，那些人穿着古時服飾，這是寓意法國一些重要領袖，包括路易十四、拿破崙和戴高樂。

  香港人看得出的「左膠」：變裝皇后<<< 對於很多外國人來說，一定察覺到創作總監刻意安排表演者的種族、性取向、年齡等不同背景多元化，最明顯是第8幕「節慶」（Festivité），全世界都應該留意到一些變裝皇后（drag queen）表演。 其他國家不少人可能感到突兀，尤其他們坐在一起應該在模仿名畫《最後晚餐》的構圖，覺得冒犯基督教。不過，這些變裝皇后在法國出道多年，就算不是主流，也有一定知名度，例如其中一個是 Nicki Doll，她是變裝皇后比賽的電視節目 Drag Race France 的主持，這個節目第一季在2022年播放，而美國的原裝版 RuPaul's Drag Race 由2009年開始播放至今，他們早已是流行文化和藝術的一部份，把法國國內藝術圈所有界別都在奧運開幕禮表演，十分正常。 英國《衛報》live blog一句形容：你當這是 Eurovision 吧。看過多年歐洲歌唱大賽，就不會覺得表演有同性戀元素和變裝皇后是奇怪；其中一個表演者是DJ Barbara Butch，有香港網民說「做乜見到個肥婆」，但 Butch 本身積極推廣肥人也很美的概念，而且 Eurovision 近年也試過有歌曲談及這個議題。Again，稍為留意法國和歐洲流行文化的人不會覺得巴黎奧運有這個選擇有什麼奇怪。 至於有一個近乎全裸、全身塗上藍色的表演者，他是法國創作歌手 Philippe Katerine，在法國有一定知名度，而且他出道多年的表演都是「神經刀」（其實法國不乏這類歌手），他在奧運獻唱的歌曲《赤裸》（Nu），剛在 YouTube 上載另一個電視現場表現版，有英文歌詞翻譯，看完後大概明白為何法國會選一個這樣的一個表演。

  香港人意識不到的「左膠」：Nakamura<<< 表演中還有一些一般香港人看不出「左膠」的地方，那就是法國—馬里雙重國籍女歌手Aya Nakamura的表演。 香港人可能只看到一個黑人女歌手跟一班身穿軍服的樂隊表演，覺得這純粹是糅合傳統和流行文化，但幾個月前法國傳出 Nakamura 獲邀表演時，法國很多極右政界人士批評，有人還上街抗議，表示「巴黎不是（馬里首都）Bamako的市集」。 Nakamura 表演的一幕稱為「平等」（Egalité）。在這個背景下，Nakamura 跟法國共和國衛隊的樂手一同表演，唱出自己2首名曲Djadja和Pookie，以及法國已故歌手 Charles Aznavour 的 For me formidable，這強烈展示出法國現在是種族多元的國家，Nakamura 都是法國人、法國的一部份，跟其他種裔的法國人平等。 跳舞其中一段連歐盟旗幟也出現，我不得不佩服這很法國。電音跳舞表演那一段，並非只是法國音樂潮流，也包括整個歐陸流行的音樂，一些歌曲來自其他歐洲國家的，這突顯出法國認為「法國就是歐洲、歐洲就是法國」的概念。

  野心很大的表演<<< 撇除什麼歷史、文化含意，以節目效果來說，我認為只算一般，儘管很成功地「逼」世界各地觀眾欣賞巴黎市中心風景，而又確實拍攝得很漂亮。 節目效果一般，主要問題是感覺有點冗長，而且野心很大，把表演場地從運動場搬到6公里長的河流兩旁，要在這麼大的戶外地方控制直播效果，十分困難，4個多小時的直播中，始終有些「甩漏」。 野心大的地方不只是表演範圍廣閣，而且很多時候同一時間有兩、三件事情在發生，這次巴黎奧組委的概念是，不只我們在看表演和進場的運動員，運動員進場之時也在看表演，也在回看我們（在場觀眾），所以設計表演時是在考慮雙向的角度，這大大提高了表演的難度。 至於冗長，主要因為運動員在河上乘船6公里，令進場時間長了，而且今屆奧運以表演和進場輪流插播的方式進行（之前應該是表演和運動員進場大致分開進行），這個方式有好有壞，好處是不會出現超過一小時只有運動員進場的悶場，但壞處是把悶場分散在不同時間出現。 有2段表演明顯給人「刻意拖長」的感覺，包括Catwalk以及隨之而來的連場舞蹈，長達44分鐘，以及最後一名騎士披着奧林匹克旗騎着馬匹在河上「奔跑」，用了11分鐘進行，期間插播歷屆奧運片段。 這兩個表演都是有「行政功能」——Catwalk及跳舞是最後一批運動員乘船進場，騎士是要等全部運動員上岸、並到巴黎鐵塔前的地點集合，這兩個程序十分長，而如果再在這段表演花心思設計，影響表演過渡至下一幕。 有法國傳媒的live reporting 都形容那段騎士河上滑行是「廁所位」，建議讀者在這段時間沖咖啡，以免錯過尾段最精采的時刻。 不過，當考慮到壓軸的是Celine Dion，而無論是她久休復出，抑或純粹她的歌聲的震撼力，都足以完全抵銷上述悶場，完美演繹什麼是 diva。

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  2024/07/28
• 
  

  Infoman

  Eating Out? Outwit the Bots.The Wall Street Journal 20 Jul 2024

  THE MESSAGE “Do Not Buy Reservations”—encircled in red with a slash through the center on social media, or simply voiced aloud with increasing exasperation—is a frequent refrain these days from the owners of Raoul’s Restaurant in

  New York City. They say one of the biggest problems restaurateurs grapple with now is an illicit economy that makes scoring a table at a hot restaurant a competitive and expensive task.

  Reservations at popular restaurants around the country are often snapped up by “bots” within nanoseconds of their release online. The reservation will then be listed on a virtual marketplace like Appointment Trader, often for hundreds of dollars—sometimes even upward of $1,000. Buyers are provided with the reservation details, including the name under which the reservation was made and confirmation information. The virtual market collects a percentage of each sale.

  Alice Wozniak, the manager at Raoul’s charged with spotting bot reservations, says these services can preclude the average diner from getting in the door. What’s more, unsold reservations translate to no-shows, which cause the restaurant to lose revenue and servers to lose tips. And then there is the disconnect with the clientele:

  When a reservation is traded, the restaurant loses valuable information, such as a diner’s preferences and allergies. All the while, these third parties profit from the reservations, while the restaurant does not.

  The Bot Bill

  In early June, the New York State Legislature passed the

  Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, the first of its kind in the U.S., which states that third-party reservation services cannot “advertise, promote or sell reservations” without a written agreement with a restaurant. Violators can be fined up to $1,000 per instance. The bill has drawn support from restaurants and from reservation sites such as Resy and OpenTable.

  Jonas Frey, founder of Appointment Trader—which buys and sells reservations secured by “bots, concierges, hustlers and other mercenaries,” as per its website—says the bill is “against everything the free market in the U.S. stands for.” He considers what Appointment Trader does no different from greasing the palm of a concierge or maître d’.

  Frey insists that sites such as Appointment Trader “did not create this problem.” He blames the restaurants themselves, and credit card companies such as American Express—which owns the reservation site Resy and is in the process of acquiring the reservation site Tock—for holding reservations for cardholders and shutting out diners who are not. This week, OpenTable also announced a partnership with Visa that will “unlock premier dining reservations for Visa premium cardholders,” a press release stated. Frey said of Appointment Trader, “The platform was created precisely because these systems make it hard or next-to-impossible to get desirable reservations.” Cita Marketplace, another site that buys and sells reservations, proudly proclaims in its tagline, “Our tables are so good, American Express tried to shut us down.” A spokesperson for American Express said, “Tables at some Resy restaurants are available to eligible American Express Card Members through the Global Access Dining benefit, but you do not need to be an American Express Card Member to book reservations on Resy.” American Express did not comment on attempting to shut Cita down.

  The Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act currently sits on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk along with 805 other bills awaiting signature. (Gov. Hochul’s office declined to comment on her position.) Meanwhile, restaurants around the country and reservation sites are instituting tactics to battle bots. “A lot of cities are watching to see what’s going to happen in New York and then see if it makes sense to try and get something passed in their respective states,” said OpenTable CEO Debby Soo.

  How Restaurants Spot the Bots

  Telltale signs of bot-made reservations include inactive phone numbers, invalid email addresses, emails with a string of numbers, unresponsiveness to follow-up emails or texts, and multiple bookings by the same account. Many restaurants say if they identify a reservation as a bot they will cancel it.

  “Ninety-nine percent of the time, if it seems like a bot reservation, it is,” said Alex Meyer, chef/owner of Boia De in Miami. “I think only once so far we got it wrong, and the person emailed and said, ‘Hey! Why was my reservation canceled?’ We apologized, reinstated it and they got a little bonus when they came in, for that inconvenience. If it’s a bot, we don’t hear back when it’s canceled.”

  How Restaurants Stop the Bots

  Some restaurants, like Raoul’s, are instituting a $50 fee per guest for no-shows. Others, like New York’s Semma, take it a step further with a nonrefundable $50 deposit per person, collected upon making the reservation, which is then applied as a credit toward the final bill.

  “I don’t want to charge a deposit, but the buying and selling of reservations has disoriented the relationship between the consumer and the brand,” said Semma proprietor Roni Mazumdar. “The people who are buying a reservation to jump on the bandwagon and show they got into a hot restaurant will move on to the next hot thing. They are not the people who are going to show up on a rainy Tuesday night.”

  Small restaurants such as Washington, D.C.’s minibar rely on ticketing systems to discourage thirdparty reservation sales. Such systems require a full, prepaid investment, like a sporting event or concert. “The fact that someone has ponied up $800 for two seats indicates they are a real person who is interested in dining at our restaurant,” said Alex Torres, minibar’s general manager. “If someone calls up to cancel, and we have a reasonable amount of time to fill their seat, we will always refund, though the verbiage on our cancellation policy says otherwise.”

  Aimee Olexy, proprietor of Talula’s Table in Kennett Square, Penn., avoids the bot issue by maintaining reservations the old-school way. “We release reservations one year out from the numerical date, and every morning at 7 a.m. we open our phone lines, and a human person is answering the phone and booking on a first-come, first-serve basis.” Olexy does turn to technology, to post on Instagram, when seats open last-minute. Still, takers must call to book those seats.

  Reservation sites are working on new initiatives to combat the problem. On the Resy website, a statement announces a “dedicated task force” committed to “deactivating rogue accounts, canceling suspicious reservations, blocking bot traffic,” along with “other technical measures.” OpenTable’s Soo said their initiatives include a process that flags fake credit card numbers and verifies diner profiles.

  Frey of Appointment Trader said it has systems in place to encourage sales and minimize no-shows. “We prioritize a concierge or someone actually working in a restaurant to get you a reservation,” he said. He added that Appointment Trader differentiates “good bots from bad bots.” He explained, “If you are a bot operator and you upload 20 reservations and you don’t sell at least five of those 20, your vendor account is blocked. If you don’t sell at least 10, you are in a warning state.”

  Appointment Trader also offers partnerships with restaurants, where the site and the restaurant would split a portion of the reservation sale. Restaurateurs aren’t necessarily convinced. “That doesn’t really solve the problem,” said Rob Mosher, partner at Monteverde in Chicago. “We are trying to charge a fair price for the services we are providing to people, and it adds an extra layer of financial transaction. We’d much rather our diners order a great bottle of wine instead of having to pay for a reservation.”

  Niki Nakayama, chef/owner of n/ naka in Los Angeles, said charging for reservations also inflates the customer’s expectations: “We have set a certain price point that is in line with what we feel we can provide. People should not have to pay a price on top of that.” Taking reservations out of the control of the restaurant presents an additional frustration level for the consumer, too. “We should be the ones who control it,” Nakayama said. “The bot market discourages people from wanting to visit, because they feel they can’t get a reservation. They become upset they can’t get in, and the restaurants get blamed for it.”

  How Diners Can Beat the Bots

  As restaurants, reservation sites and reservation-sale marketplaces battle it out, diners remain caught in the middle. But restaurateurs say there are still ways that diners can grab hard-to-get reservations without resorting to buying them.

  Members-only app Dorsia, for example, requires a minimum spend from the consumer at the restaurant rather than charging a fee for a reservation. “Dorsia is good for restaurants, as it transfers that extra money diners are willing to spend from the third-party sellers sitting on their couch to the restaurants doing the actual work,” said Meyer of Boia De. “This also means more tips for employees and more revenue for higher wages. At the end of the day, though, we want guests to join us for dinner without having to buy their way in, or be a member of an exclusive club.”

  Meyer is a firm believer in the “human factor,” where “diners can have an advantage over a bot in that they are a person with a personality. If people are human, nice, generous and gracious, we will do our best to give them what they ask for if they call, email or just show up.”

  Mosher of Chicago’s Monteverde agrees. “Don’t forget that most restaurants hold back a portion of reservations that are not made available online,” he said. “We will offer those to our guests who come into the restaurant, stop at the host stand and ask for a reservation. We like to say yes to that person because they have made the extra effort to come in.” He further emphasized the power of building relationships in-person: “Ask for the maître’d’s card. Get to know the staff and the management.” He also suggested that diners make a reservation in person on their way out, after they have already dined. “If someone has had a good experience and they say, ‘I’d like to come back in two weeks,’ we want to be able to say yes to that person. It really goes back to getting away from the digital aspect and going back to the old-school way of doing things.”

  OpenTable’s Soo recommended following the restaurant’s lead: “If it is using a certain type of system for the reservation, secure the reservation in that way and don’t contribute to the market. If diners stop the activity, it will stop giving these third parties oxygen to keep going.”

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  Big Tech Outage Disrupts Banks, AirlinesBy Sam Schechner, Gareth Vipers and Alyssa Lukpat

  The Wall Street Journal 20 Jul 2024

  A massive tech outage swept the globe on Friday, knocking out operations for banks, companies and emergency services and forcing airlines to ground flights, exposing the fragility and interdependence of global digital technology.

  A single update from CrowdStrike, a major provider of cybersecurity software, caused outages for millions of users of Microsoft Windows devices worldwide. Major airlines including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines halted departures overnight.

  Windows computers and tablets crashed in countries from the U.S. to China and Australia, with reports of forced device restarts spreading across social media. Many affected machines were unable to restart, instead showing a blue error screen sometimes called the “blue screen of death.”

  The outage touched almost every industry. Multiple financial institutions, government entities and corporations reported tech issues. Some hospitals and school districts said computers were down, and courthouses around the U.S. either closed or delayed trial proceedings. Still, financial markets were largely operat-

  ing as normal, and many companies said systems were starting to be restored.

  That one update from a single provider could plunge so many companies into a digital dark age serves as a fresh warning of the world’s technological dependence. While past outages, like a Google failure in 2020, have also locked millions out of tools they need, companies’ and individuals’ increasing reliance on automated tools powered by artificial intelligence makes each new disruption feel more ominous.

  Friday’s outage also highlights the tension in relying heavily on centralized tools like those offered by CrowdStrike. On one hand, the fact that so many companies use the tools help make them more effective at detecting and blocking the latest attacks.

  But it also shows how one bug in one update can just as easily grind parts of the global economy to a halt.

  Tech issues

  CrowdStrike Chief Executive George Kurtz said in a post on X that the issue had been identified and a fix had been deployed, adding that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack.”

  Kurtz told NBC’s “Today” show that the company is always pushing out updates to stay ahead of adversaries and its recent update had a bug in it. “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” he said. “It could be some time for some systems that just won’t automatically recover.”

  One of CrowdStrike’s main services is called Falcon, which monitors a company’s machines for hacking attempts, viruses and other threats. The Austin-based company has about 29,000 customers and went public in 2019.

  CrowdStrike told customers in a status update seen by The Wall Street Journal that the problem was with a software change it had pushed via Falcon out to clients’ computers. The company said its engineers had undone the change but clients would need to use a workaround to download a fix to affected computers.

  Some affected users may be back up and running soon, but for others it could take weeks depending on the system in use, said Simo Kohonen, founder of Finland-based network security company Defused. “The fix CrowdStrike has given is quite manual and may be difficult, in some cases, to deploy at large scale,” he said.

  Microsoft said the CrowdStrike error was separate from a problem it faced overnight with cloud services including Microsoft 365 apps.

  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Friday on X the company was working closely with CrowdStrike to provide customers with technical guidance to help bring their systems back online.

  CrowdStrike shares closed 11% lower Friday. Microsoft’s were down slightly.

  Broad impact

  In the U.S., many 911 and nonemergency call centers were disrupted. The New York City mass transit system was fully operational, but countdown clocks and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s app were disrupted, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.

  Amazon.com’s corporate email system also appeared to be experiencing issues Friday morning, according to employees. The company uses Microsoft Outlook for email, and many of the company’s employees also use the communications platform Slack. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

  Starbucks had issues early Friday with app ordering and its payment and point-of-sale systems, forcing customers to order directly in stores.

  The financial sector was largely running as usual, but some companies reported issues. Visa said it was aware of reports of people unable to make payments. Banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and TD Bank experienced varying disruptions related to the outage.

  Seaports from Los Angeles to Gdansk, Poland, reported delays in handling cargo and other operations, according to risk-management firm Everstream Analytics, but most expected to resume normal business on Friday.

  Freight railroad Union Pacific said the outage had varying levels of impacts across its network, while BNSF said it hadn’t seen signs that its systems were affected.

  United Parcel Service said its package business was “operating and delivering in all areas,” but warned of possible delays in pickup and delivery.

  Billionaire Elon Musk, who runs Tesla, X and SpaceX among other companies, said the outage had given the auto supply chain a “seizure,” disrupting operations for parts makers and logistics partners using CrowdStrike software. In a series of posts, he said: “we just deleted Crowdstrike from all our systems” and called the episode the “biggest IT fail ever.”

  President Biden is receiving updates on the outage and his team has offered U.S. government support to CrowdStrike, a White House official said. Government agencies have been convened to assess the situation around the country, the official said.

  Travel snarls

  More than 41,000 flights around the world were delayed and more than 4,600 were canceled by Friday evening, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

  United and American had also asked the Federal Aviation Administration overnight to alert their pilots in the air that they were experiencing communication problems, according to public notices.

  Several U.S. airlines, including American, Delta and United, said they were starting to resume some flights Friday morning. Delta had initially paused flights because the outage had affected backend systems that ensure planes are safely dispatched, a person familiar with the matter said.

  In the Columbus, Ohio, airport, agents for Spirit Airlines handed out paper boarding passes in a line that snaked across a concourse.

  At Boston’s Logan airport, Tom Fennell, a 47-year-old teacher from Cameron Park, Calif., remained near an outlet with his phone to wait out the delay, surrounded by a group of fellow stranded travelers.

  The outage also snarled hotels, making it harder to bill guests, check out of rooms or create new reservations. At Indus Hotels, which operates roughly a dozen Hilton and Marriott hotels in Ohio and Pennsylvania, many properties had only a single computer working on Friday morning.

  “On-property managers are definitely pulling their hair out,” said Alan L. Assaf, chief operating officer at Indus. “I’d say they’re limping along.”

  The outage didn’t affect everyone equally. While some PC users were staring at blue screens and troubleshooting, others were able to go about their workdays as normal.

  Dr. Agus De Ganzó, a molecular biologist, thought he wouldn’t be able to work on his PC when he arrived at his job Friday.

  “Mine was the only one working,” he said. “I hate Microsoft.”

  De Ganzó, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., and is in his mid 30s, said the PC he reluctantly uses was the oldest one in the lab and was the only one that didn’t go down because of the outage.

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  A push to develop generative A.I. and avoid the lawsuits

  NICO GRANT AND CADE METZ

  The New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024 Content creators seek licensing to be paid for images that train models

  Companies like Google and OpenAI built their artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators by gobbling content from the web, prompting legal fights over copyright claims.

  Now, some of those copyright holders are trying to get in on the A.I. boom. The major stock photo suppliers Getty Images and Shutterstock, among others, are building A.I. image generators with their own data, bypassing the legal worries that have shadowed the industry.

  While the largest tech companies have been locked in a dizzying A.I. race, visual media marketplaces, content creators and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train A.I. models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. It’s part of a larger effort to transform how A.I. models are developed, one that would train them with licensed data rather than with content that is scraped without permission.

  While many image generators are often used by consumers for amusement, like creating the viral image of the pope in a white puffer jacket, the tech industry has coalesced around the idea that more advertising agencies and other companies would use these tools for marketing if there were no legal uncertainty surrounding them.

  That’s the target market for Getty. Its partner, Picsart, which is building an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository, is trying to appeal to small- and medium-size businesses. The company is mostly known for a photoediting app used by more than 100 million people, most of them Gen Z-ers.

  Picsart wanted to use licensed data to build the model because, for the company and customers, lawsuits are “a drag to the business; it’s a distraction,” Craig Foster, its chief financial officer, said. “I don’t want any part of that.”

  After ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI, and Stable Diffusion, a popular image generator from the British startup Stability AI, wowed consumers in 2022, Google, Meta and other companies rushed to release similar A.I. capabilities. Lawsuits soon followed.

  Publishers, authors and artists said they found signs that their works had been scraped to train the A.I. models. The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train A.I. chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft said they used the articles under “fair use.”

  There’s also been legal wrangling over models that convert text into images. Cartoonists and a photographer sued Google in April, saying the company trained Imagen, its image generator, with their copyrighted works. Google has said that “American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways.”

  “With each different version of technology that comes out, copyright law is put to the test,” said Alan Fisch, an intellectual property lawyer at Fisch Sigler. Without clear legal rules in place, licensing data is “one way to reduce risk,” he added.

  In early 2023, Getty Images, the world’s largest privately owned archive, noticed that its famous watermark was being recreated in some A.I.-generated images from Stable Diffusion. It sued the tool’s maker, Stability AI, in February 2023, saying it had copied more than 12 million images from Getty’s collection. Stability said it had not infringed on Getty’s intellectual property rights.

  Getty worked with the chipmaker Nvidia to build its own image generator, calling it “a worry-free model built for business.” Through Getty’s website or another interface, customers can type in a prompt for the image they want to see and specify its quality and style. Then, they can select the shape and color of the image, and the generator will present multiple options.

  Getty, along with 20 other stock image companies, is providing images for Bria AI, an Israeli start-up, to build an A.I. model. Bria will split revenue from its generator with Getty and its partners.

  Yair Adato, the chief executive of Bria, said dividing revenue with all of the partners and helping to attribute work back to artists was essential to preserve the role of content creators.

  Without “value for creation, everything will be very average and very boring,” he said.

  Getty has said it will pay photographers when it uses their images to train a model. It will also give photographers a portion of the subscription revenue it receives from clients. The company told Wired it paid about 30 cents on the dollar for every dollar it made.

  The rising quality of models that generate images and videos has many artists concerned for the fate of their industries. And it is not always clear if A.I. companies have used their content to train the underlying models. The Times has reported that Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, was trained partly on YouTube videos, but the company has not been transparent about data sources.

  That lack of transparency concerns filmmakers like Joe Talbot, who directed the award-winning film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” He said artists needed to be consulted about technology being built on the backs of their work.

  “I worry,” he said, “about my fellow film brethren being able to etch out a decent existence.”

  Shutterstock, which has a massive library of images and video clips, started a contributor fund in 2022 to compensate artists when their work was licensed for A.I. The amount a contributor is paid depends on how much an A.I. provider pays Shutterstock. Their royalties are a proportion from each deal, and the amount rises if the client uses more of their images. The company declined to specify exact percentages, the average value of a photo or typical payouts.

  Outside of A.I., regular photos on Shutterstock often sell for $14.50 each, and photographers receive 15 to 40 percent of the total, depending on how many they license in a year.

  Shutterstock has taken a different route to A.I. than its rival Getty has, selling images to major A.I. providers like OpenAI since 2021 and receiving $104 million in licensing revenue last year. But it says licensing habits are changing.

  “We are well aware that the days of needing huge volumes of data to train models are over,” said Aimee Egan, the chief enterprise officer of Shutterstock.

  Later this year, the company will roll out two A.I. models: one with the software maker Databricks for images and another with Nvidia for 3-D images.

  Companies like Shutterstock and Adobe are now paying photographers to take pictures for A.I. training, but the earning potential can be modest and inconsistent. Adobe has offered photographers less than $100 to shoot as many as 1,000 photos for A.I., Bloomberg News reported. And the rush to develop polished generated images could erode long-term job prospects in photography.

  That has left room for other companies trying to help artists be paid when their work is used for A.I. The start-up OpenLicense built a marketplace where A.I. businesses can find data and artists can be compensated and track which models are using their work. Payments scale with how often a photo is used. If a photo is referenced a million times to generate images, the artist can expect as much as $12,000 in royalties, said Joshua Soto, the co-founder and president of OpenLicense.

  The company has started working with artists on Imageshack, an imagehosting site it has teamed up with.

  Mr. Soto said the company was “trying to bridge the benefits” of A.I. between developers and artists.

  That relationship was recently put under more strain when Adobe, the software giant behind Photoshop, updated its terms of service with vague language in June. Some customers believed the words to mean that Adobe would scrape their work to keep building its generative A.I. system, Firefly.

  The company denied the claim several times. But the episode highlighted artists’ fears over how A.I. could disrupt their livelihoods — a worry that has led some to oppose the technology. But Mr. Soto, a onetime graphic designer, said that engaging could make the best of a challenging situation.

  “Your content is going to get used either way,” he said. “You might as well be in a position where you are part of that process and explicitly saying which content you want used.”

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  THIS ANT SPECIES ACTS LIKE SURGEONS WHEN TREATING HURT LIMBS

  New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024

  The life of a Florida carpenter ant can be brutal. These half-inch ants are territorial and have violent bouts with ants from rival colonies in the Southeast.

  Combat can leave the ants with leg injuries. But as scientists recently discovered, these ants have evolved an effective wound treatment: amputation.

  In the journal Current Biology, researchers report that the ants bite off the injured limbs of their nest mates to prevent infection. Although other ant species are known to tend to the wounds of their injured, typically by licking them clean, this is the first time that an ant species has been known to use amputation to treat an injury.

  The ants performed amputations on only certain leg injuries, suggesting that they are methodical in their surgical practices. Aside from humans, no other animal is known to conduct such amputations.

  In early 2020, Dany Buffat, a graduate student at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, was observing a colony of Florida carpenter ants in his lab when he noticed one ant was biting off another ant’s leg. His adviser, Erik Frank, now at the University of Würzburg, didn’t believe him at first, but was then shown the video evidence.

  They began tracking the amputees’ survival rate. Unexpectedly, the ants with amputated limbs survived 90 percent of the time — and the amputations appeared to be consensual. “The ant presents its injured leg and calmly sits there while another ant gnaws it off,” Dr. Frank said. “As soon as the leg drops off, the ant presents the newly amputated wound and the other ant finishes the job by cleaning it.”

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  Infoman

  ‘LIFE AND TRUST’ IMMERSES VIEWERS FROM A SETTING HIGH IN THE SKY

  New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024

  What’s the going rate for a soul these days? A little more than $200 on weekends, less on weekdays, handling fees included.

  That’s the ticket price for “Life and Trust,” the new show from Emursive, the producers of “Sleep No More,” and arguably an even more ambitious undertaking. A version of the Faust legend (well, several braided versions of the Faust legend), “Life and Trust,” which opens on Aug. 1, occupies 100,000 square feet, or about 9,300 square meters, over six floors of a financial district skyscraper in New York that was once the home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Company.

  In a brief introduction, set on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, a financier makes a deal with the Devil: damnation in exchange for the chance to relive his youth. The show ushers audiences back to 1894, plunging them into a Gilded Age delirium.

  “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a canvas of this size,” said Teddy Bergman, the director of “Life and Trust.” “It just keeps going.”

  Making this deal with the Devil took space. And time. And quite a lot of money. How much money? The producers wouldn’t say, though Jonathan Hochwald, a producer at Emursive, said the final amount was comfortably in the millions.

  In 2011, Emursive imported “Sleep No More,” a Hitchcockian riff on “Macbeth” created by the celebrated British company Punchdrunk. Staged in a series of former nightclub spaces in the Chelsea neighborhood that the producers rechristened the McKittrick Hotel, “Sleep No More,” which is set to close in September, was an instant word-of-mouth success. A few years into its run, Emursive began to scout other spaces for immersive events. Hochwald estimates that he considered about a dozen.

  What Emursive calls the Conwell Tower takes up a full block near Wall Street. The building was intended to be the world’s tallest when its plans were submitted in 1929, but they were scaled back before it opened in 1931. The exterior has been designated a landmark. While most of the upper floors have been converted to rental apartments, a portion of the ground floor and the floors underneath, once the headquarters of the bank, have been more or less unoccupied since the late 1970s. (Occasionally they have been rented for film shoots.)

  Hochwald said these floors had essentially been “hidden in plain sight.” “It was quite a marvel,” he added. That marvel demanded an original script. “Having found the building, it was like: What story does this building want to tell?” Hochwald said.

  Emursive secured the lease in 2019 and brought on Jon Ronson, a nonfiction writer (“The Psychopath Test,” “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”), to work up a script. The script used the template of the bank — with its vocabulary of bonds, trusts and life savings — for a rendering of the Faust myth. Here, the Goethe and Marlowe versions are knit with similar stories such as “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Red Shoes.”

  With a script drafted, Emursive reached out to Bergman (“KPOP”), a longtime artistic director of Woodshed Collective, a New York-based immersive theater company. Woodshed had set at least one show, “Empire Travel Agency,” in the financial district, so Bergman knew the neighborhood well. (Hochwald said that while Emursive maintains a relationship with Punchdrunk, which also has a Faust in its repertory, the producers wanted a local team for this piece.)

  When he visited the site, Bergman was immediately struck by its potential, even though the space — concrete, columns — was almost entirely raw. “The ghosts of its functional history as a bank building and the vaults and the thickness of the walls all gave off energy,” he said.

  Briskly, Bergman and the producers assembled a team, including the experience director and scenic designer Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, another Woodshed veteran, and the sibling co-directors and choreographers Jeff and Rick Kuperman, recent Tony nominees for “The Outsiders.”

  Echoing “Sleep No More,” audience members are masked (the Mephistophelian “Life and Trust” masks are black, not white) and free to wander the space — following characters at will, pausing to explore an environment — before uniting for a finale. And though Ronson’s script was initially text heavy, nearly all of that text was removed, in favor of a movement-based work with constant underscoring, lending the show a surreal, dreamy feel.

  “One of the things that Emursive and ‘Sleep No More’ have done so successfully is conjure the feeling of a dream,” Bergman said. “We want it to use that in the service of creating a different show in its subject matter and also in its Americanness.”

  Construction began in late 2019, with the removal of decades of bank detritus, and stopped in the spring because of pandemic lockdowns. Members of the creative team — including Bergman, the Kupermans, Evansohn, the co-designer Grace Laubacher and the show’s composers, Taylor Bense and Owen Belton — spent much of that lockdown online, manipulating a three-dimensional model of the space. For more than a year, without pressure of construction or deadlines, they could play and imagine how the story might flow through it. The pandemic, therefore, was paradoxically a gift, if an expensive one, since the lease had to be maintained, and ticket sales from Emursive’s other projects were halted.

  Gradually, the creative team created a template involving 30 characters in 250 overlapping scenes, which would loop twice during the evening, with every entrance and exit dictated by preset sound cues. While those sound cues are locked, there is typically a sonic buffer at the start and end of each scene to allow the performers to get to their places, even if they have to fight through crowds. In total, Bense and Belton composed more than 1,000 minutes of music.

  “You end up with a spreadsheet like an Advent calendar. Everything pops out and is a scene,” Bergman said.

  The space had its limitations. Left unused for so long, the electricity and the heating, ventilation and air conditioning required updates, which necessitated an extensive permitting process. “It’s like climbing a Himalayan peak, to get through all of the city bureaucracy,” Hochwald said. The building’s neighbors also had to be convinced that the show wouldn’t create too much additional noise and traffic. And two new elevators had to be installed to make the space compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

  The vast floors had low ceilings, which made sightlines tricky. And the concrete surfaces were hard on the actors’ joints. “When we started, we were dancing on concrete with little nails popping out or really rough surfaces that felt hostile,” said Marla Phelan, a performer. Running up and down the many stairs was also challenging.

  “It’s violent. It’s a marathon,” added Mia DiLena, Phelan’s scene partner.

  But there were also opportunities. Padding was installed, a spiral staircase built. “Now we have squishy grass or gravel,” Phelan said. “I can actually be a person that’s not in danger of their surroundings.”

  Certain structural elements couldn’t be altered — “because they’re literally supporting a skyscraper,” Evansohn said — but nearly everything else was theirs for the reimagining. And elements such as the walls, the floors and the vault doors could be incorporated into the experience, even informing the choreography.

  “You need to create choreography that can’t exist in any other space or any other piece of scenery,” Rick Kuperman said. “That’s what really makes it come alive to us.”

  Construction began again in 2021 and ended only recently. At times there were as many as 200 workers building out the warrens of rooms. These workers also created an elaborate entrance point, the Conwell Coffee Hall, a dramatic space adorned with a custom-painted mural. It opened in late winter. During the day, it’s a bustling cafe. At night, it becomes a theater lobby and bar. In the coffee hall and in the rooms beneath, Evansohn chose real materials — brick, stone, wood — which is unusual for a theater piece.

  “The design is tactile,” Evansohn said. And it is thick with illusions and secrets (perhaps you will find the poodle room). “Life and Trust” is built to reward curiosity, but there are, Bergman said, safety protocols to prevent harassment of the performers, a problem that plagued “Sleep No More.”

  The performers began rehearsing on site in November. At the end of June, audiences joined them for a handful of friends and family evenings and then for previews. With bodies in the room, the crew began adjusting the hundreds of sound cues and the thousands of light cues.

  “We have our plan,” Jeff Kuperman said. “And then you get in the space and reality hits and it all shifts.” Bergman described these adjustments as a mix of precision and magic. “It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of refinement. It’s alchemy,” he said.

  When I visited the coffee hall, on two afternoons in late June, it was full of tourists and locals enjoying sandwiches and cold brew. They didn’t seem to notice that all the clocks were set to 10:29 — the month and year of the stock market crash — or the Easter eggs hidden in the menu and in the mural. Very few would realize what lies beneath.

  “It’s exciting,” Hochwald said, gazing around the room. “They have no idea that there’s an entire world underneath them.”

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