The World after the Crisis

World economy crisis will outlast. It has not reached the bottom and no efficient policy solution could be seen yet. It is a crisis of global and virtual economy. It is more than a stage of the Kondratiev cycle, it is a structural crisis that tends to turn into a systemic one. But what will the world look like after it? Important changes will come out, changes that the world has not imagined till recently: market fundamentalism will decrease and state capitalism will become the dominant system; financial background will change, financial sector will be reduced and regulated, both nationally and internationally; despite the decrease of global demand, energy, food and commodities cost will rise; a greater but still insufficient attention will be given to the environmental issues; protectionism of all forms will increase; poverty will become endemic in many parts of the world, globalization will persist, as Earth is no longer flat; a technological tsunami is being born in front of us; we will be witnessing the emergence of the feminine principle. Change will become common everywhere, but first of all, we need to embody the change we want for the world.

Viewpoint

Though many writers are happy to put a date on the day a Japanese (or was it a Finn?) coined this rather ungainly word, mechatronics has been around in spirit for many decades. My first brush with industry nearly half a century ago involved designing autopilots. Their early computing circuits used analogue magnetic amplifiers rather than the digital microcomputer we would expect today. But a machine that trundled through the sky, obeying commands computed from a multitude of sensor signals that enabled it to make a perfect automatic landing must surely be worthy of being called a robot. By the early 1970s, we could buy 'budget' single-board computers for a thousand British pounds. Although these had a mere sixteen kilobytes of memory, their potential for mechatronics was immense. One of my Cambridge researchers took on the task of revolutionizing the phototypesetter. The method is now commonly found in the laser printer. A spinning mirror scans a laser beam across the photosensitive film, letter shapes are held in computer memory and the entire mechanical design is greatly simplified. I consider this trade-off between mechanics, electronics and computing power to be the guiding principle of mechatronics. The research team were soon knitting similar computers into a variety of real-time applications, including an 'acoustic telescope' to build the signals from 14 microphones into an image of the sound source. Hydrofoils were simulated, violins were analysed for their 'Stradivarius-like qualities' and music was synthesized. A display for a colour television, novel in those days, depended on a minimum of electronics and a wealth of software. But computing power soon came in ever smaller packages. In 1979, planning started for holding the Euromicro conference in London. The chairman wanted an added showpiece and his mind was on 'The Amazing Micromouse Maze Contest' that had just been announced by IEEE Spectrum. I put my hand up to organize the contest. Then I started to follow the news from the USA. Blows were nearly exchanged when the 'dumb wall followers' sprinted through the maze from the entrance at one corner to the exit at the other, much faster than their brainier rivals. How could the rules be massaged to give brains the edge? The solution was to give the mouse-builders more specific information that could be designed into the logic of their machines. Our maze was specified as sixteen squares by sixteen, with the target at the centre, not on the edge. In that way, paths could circle the centre to form 'moats' that no mere wall-follower could cross. A preliminary run was held in Portsmouth in July, with results that literally gave me nightmares. Of the six mice that competed, only one could make any attempt to follow a passageway, let alone find the centre. At the conference in September, fifteen mice competed. The winner was a clanking contraption, cobbled together around a brilliant maze-solving algorithm that has remained relevant to this day. The contest went from strength to strength, being held in Paris, Tampere, Madrid and Copenhagen, but for these first few years something struck me as strange. Not one of the winners was trained as an engineer. Great machines came from mathematicians, computer maintenance staff, programmers for manufacturing industry, but formally qualified engineers were notable by their absence. So what is it that defines a mechatronic engineer? What is the special aptitude that singled out these champions? What had they learned from their endeavours that was not to be found in a formal engineering course? They were able to put together a concept in which strategy, computing hardware, sensors, electronics and motors were blended together in harmony, not as a cobbled assembly of diverse technologies. So what of the next generation of mechatronic engineers? How do we give them skill and ability with the essentials, without deluging them with the entire contents of the textbooks of at least three diverse disciplines? We must distil the 'good bits' from the diverse range of specializations that make up engineering as a whole. The Micromouse experience suggests that hands-on experimentation is an essential ingredient. While learning, software must be ‘crafted’ by the student, rather than being ladled into the project as a bought-in commodity. The student must be prepared to deal with hydraulics or electro-mechanics, treating them as two sides of the same coin. Mechatronics is special. It is no more a mere mixture of electronics, mechanics and computing than a Chateau Latour is a mixture of yeast and grape-juice

Five insights from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 provides a rules-based synthesis of the available evidence on levels and trends in health outcomes, a diverse set of risk factors, and health system responses. GBD 2019 covered 204 countries and territories, as well as first administrative level disaggregations for 22 countries, from 1990 to 2019. Because GBD is highly standardised and comprehensive, spanning both fatal and non-fatal outcomes, and uses a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of hierarchical disease and injury causes, the study provides a powerful basis for detailed and broad insights on global health trends and emerging challenges. GBD 2019 incorporates data from 281 586 sources and provides more than 3·5 billion estimates of health outcome and health system measures of interest for global, national, and subnational policy dialogue. All GBD estimates are publicly available and adhere to the Guidelines on Accurate and Transparent Health Estimate Reporting. From this vast amount of information, five key insights that are important for health, social, and economic development strategies have been distilled. These insights are subject to the many limitations outlined in each of the component GBD capstone papers

Is “end of life” a special case? Connecting Q with survey methods to measure societal support for views on the value of life-extending treatments

Preference elicitation studies reporting societal views on the relative value of end-of-life treatments have produced equivocal results. This paper presents an alternative method, combining Q methodology and survey techniques (Q2S) to determine the distribution of 3 viewpoints on the relative value of end-of-life treatments identified in a previous, published, phase of this work. These were Viewpoint 1, “A population perspective: value for money, no special cases”; Viewpoint 2, “Life is precious: valuing life-extension and patient choice”; and Viewpoint 3, “Valuing wider benefits and opportunity cost: the quality of life and death.”. A Q2S survey of 4,902 respondents across the United Kingdom measured agreement with these viewpoints; 37% most agreed with Viewpoint 1, 49% with Viewpoint 2, and 9% with Viewpoint 3. Regression analysis showed associations of viewpoints with gender, level of education, religion, voting preferences, and satisfaction with the NHS. The Q2S approach provides a promising means to investigate how in-depth views and opinions are represented in the wider populati

Media Viewpoint

Agricultural and Food Policy,

The challenges of viewpoint-taking when learning a sign language: Data from the 'frog story' in British Sign Language

Little is known about how hearing adults learn sign languages. Our objective in this study was to investigate how learners of British Sign Language (BSL) produce narratives, and we focused in particular on viewpoint-taking. Twenty-three intermediate-level learners of BSL and 10 deaf native/early signers produced a narrative in BSL using the wordless picture book Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). We selected specific episodes from part of the book that provided rich opportunities for shifting between different characters and taking on different viewpoints. We coded for details of story content, the frequency with which different viewpoints were used and how long those viewpoints were used for, and the numbers of articulators that were used simultaneously. We found that even though learners’ and deaf signers’ narratives did not differ in overall duration, learners’ narratives had less content. Learners used character viewpoint less frequently than deaf signers. Although learners spent just as long as deaf signers in character viewpoint, they spent longer than deaf signers in observer viewpoint. Together, these findings suggest that character viewpoint was harder than observer viewpoint for learners. Furthermore, learners were less skilled than deaf signers in using multiple articulators simultaneously. We conclude that challenges for learners of sign include taking character viewpoint when narrating a story and encoding information across multiple articulators simultaneously