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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 07 - 12 AUGUST 2023
Hello and Welcome,
Former President Hit by Lurgi
Which former Club President was recently hit by a mysterious medical condition?
The symptoms include ringing in the ears (or tinnitus), dizziness and other effects.
It sounds like an ear infection, but after extensive hospital tests, the doctors have ruled that out.
We can only wish him a speedy recovery and all the best.
— Ed.
Meeting This Week
2023/08/08 — 18:00-20:00 — August, Tue — Programming
Meetings Next Week
2023/08/15 — 10:00-12:00 — August, Tue — Tuesday Group
2023/08/19 — 14:00-16:00 — August, Sat — Web Design
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
First Saturday 13:00-14:00 — Penrith Group
Second Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Programming
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official Sydney PC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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Penrith meetings are held every 2nd month on the 1st Saturday from 1-2 pm.
The following meetings are in September and November 2023.
ASCCA News:Tech News:
A CEO quits, and the BBC apologises to Trump ally Nigel Farage. A banking scandal erupts in Britain.
See the CNBC article by Elliot Smith | PUBLISHED WED, JUL 26, 2023, at 8:48 am EDT | UPDATED WED, JUL 26, 2023, at 10:56 am EDT.
KEY POINTS:
— NatWest Group CEO Alison Rose admitted on Tuesday to discussing the details of Nigel Farage's bank account with a BBC reporter.
— Farage was informed earlier this month that Coutts — a high-end private bank and wealth manager, part of NatWest, requires clients to hold a minimum of £1 million ($1.29 million) in investments or borrowing, or £3 million in savings — planned to cut ties with him.
— He subsequently filed a subject access request to obtain a dossier the bank held on him, which he then published, claiming it showed the bank account was being terminated due to his views.
LONDON — NatWest Group CEO Alison Rose resigned after a media storm over the termination of Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage's bank account by sister lender Coutts.
Rose admitted Tuesday to discussing the details of Farage's account with a BBC reporter and having thus been the source of a controversial story for which the national broadcaster has since apologised.
Initially, the board reiterated its support for her to remain CEO, but at 2 a.m. London time Wednesday, the bank announced her immediate departure by mutual consent.
In a statement, Rose said she remained "immensely proud of the progress the bank has made in supporting people, families and business across the U.K., and building the foundations for sustainable growth."
The controversy
NatWest is 39% owned by the British taxpayer following the 2008 crisis, heightening the public interest in the bizarre saga.
"Despite a stellar performance as the first woman to take the helm of a U.K. bank, her mistake in discussing sensitive customer details with a journalist broke a sacred trust with the British public, and her decision to step down was the only viable path," said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell.
"She will be a loss, having worked her way up the ranks and championed diversity and inclusion in the sector with a huge focus on getting more women in financial services. But NatWest is no ordinary bank. It is still almost forty per cent owned by the U.K. taxpayer, and the political and regulatory ramifications of this episode are likely to ripple out for months to come."
Farage was informed last month that Coutts — a high-end private bank and wealth manager requiring clients to hold a minimum of £1 million ($1.29 million) in investments or borrowing, or £3 million in savings — planned to cut ties with him.
Alison Rose, NatWest chief executive (right), departs 10 Downing Street in London,
after meeting with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
James Manning | PA Images | Getty Images
He subsequently filed a subject access request to obtain a dossier the bank held on him, which he then published, claiming it showed the bank account was being terminated due to his political views.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and several members of his Conservative government issued statements condemning the bank and characterizing the termination of Farage's account as an affront to free speech. Farage was offered an alternative account at regular main street bank NatWest but declined.
His critics maintain that although frequent references are made to Farage's political profile and controversial views, the reasons for allowing the banking relationship to lapse were primarily commercial, and he was not "de-banked", as he claims.
The dossier
Minutes from the Wealth Reputational Risk Committee at Coutts on November 2022 state that Farage's mortgage was due to expire in July 2023, at which point "on a commercial basis," it would not look to renew and therefore recommended winding down the banking relationship.
Without the mortgage, the bank indicated that Farage's account value would fall below its commercial criteria. The committee recommended exiting the relationship in July but sought to retain Farage as a client barring any "flashpoints" that might pose further "reputational risk."
Coutts said that upon the expiry of Farage's mortgage repayments, it "did not have the appetite to renew his mortgage or provide banking facilities" and had therefore implemented an "exit plan" that allowed for the bank to terminate Farage's account earlier in the event of further controversy in the meantime.
"The Committee did not think continuing to bank NF [Nigel Farage] was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation," the minutes added.
"This was not a political decision, but one centred around inclusivity and Purpose."
How worried should we be about space debris?
See the Msn.com Article by The Week Staff · 25 July.
As part of a rocket washes up in Australia, scientists warn 'critical mass' of orbital junk could only be decades away.
A large piece of unidentified space debris has been discovered on a remote beach in Western Australia.
The barnacle-encrusted object, about the size of a small car, was found about 150 miles north of Perth over the weekend. The Australian Space Agency has been liaising with its international counterparts to ascertain its origin.
The Australian Space Agency Twittered:
— "We are currently enquiring about this object on a beach near Jurien Bay in Western Australia."
— "The object could be from a foreign space launch vehicle, and we are liaising with global counterparts who may be able to provide more information."
Space Junk on WA Beach
It raises questions about the responsibility for monitoring and cleaning up space junk in orbit and who is ultimately liable for damage and disposal in the rare instances they fall back to Earth.
What is space debris?
Debris has been accruing in space around the Earth ever since the first rocket launched in the late 1950s. Consisting of parts of discarded rockets, spacecraft and satellites, the European Space Agency (ESA) estimates there are now 36,500 objects of space debris larger than 10 cm in near-Earth orbit, along with more than 130 million smaller objects.
Most of this space junk is moving up to seven times the speed of a bullet, meaning "an object no bigger than a penny could easily destroy a spacecraft", said BBC Science Focus.
"These objects pose more than just a hypothetical threat," according to Space.com. From 1999 to May 2021, the International Space Station (ISS) conducted 29 debris-avoiding manoeuvres, including three in 2020 alone, said Nasa. This number continues to grow.
Even more worryingly, said Dr Alastair Gunn in Science Focus, a "critical mass" of space junk "may be only a few decades away, where one major collision results in an uncontrollable chain reaction, causing untold damage."
This is known as the Kessler Syndrome, named after the former Nasa scientist Donald Kessler who laid out the idea of an orbital debris chain reaction in a seminal 1978 paper. It featured in the 2013 Oscar-winning film "Gravity" and could make space travel impossible, disrupting our complex web of satellites so crucial to global communications.
What can be done to clean up space?
"Unfortunately," said Space.com, "private companies and national governments have been slow to act."
Most of the efforts focus on mitigating and avoiding generating space junk in the first place, but this needs to address the enormous amount of debris already there.
Waiting for the Earth's atmosphere to drag debris into low orbit, where it will burn up in the atmosphere, can take decades. This has led to more radical clean-up proposals, including "gathering the debris using nets, harpoons, laser beams or mini-satellites", said Gunn.
The problem, said Space.com, is that besides the ground-based laser, all of the proposals call for launching new satellites, "thus making satellite clean-up uncomfortably expensive."
Also, any satellite clean-up technology "automatically becomes a 'remove an enemy's satellite from the sky' technology". So any proposal "quickly moves into the murky waters of defence, international diplomacy and the militarization of space."
"For now, our best strategy is to track, monitor and warn, using a network of ground — and satellite-based — observatories and cross our fingers," said the website.
Who is liable for space debris that falls to Earth?
While instances of space junk falling to Earth is "pretty rare", said Australian broadcaster 9news, it does happen. The Times reported villages in the remote northwest of Russia where people scavenge for space debris from a nearby launch site.
The debris provides an "unexpected resource for locals", said the paper. But it "also poses an existential threat" in the form of a highly toxic chemical compound called unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine — a rocket fuel — suspected of causing cancer.
Who pays for the clean-up depends on where it lands, if there is damage, and crucially, what the debris is, space lawyer and professor Melissa de Zwart told 9news.
In short, the answer is "whoever launched the object into space" in the first place, reported Al Jazeera.
"There is a United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and they have an Outer Space Treaty that everyone has signed, saying that whoever launches something into space is responsible for it right until the very end," said European Space Agency engineer Andrea Boyd.
However, "liability under international law attaches to states, not to companies", she said. This means that if, as likely, the recently discovered rocket was launched by India, it will be liable for any damage and disposal. But if it is launched by a private company, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX, it would be the liability of the United States.
Fun Facts:
How to use AI to make your life simpler, cheaper and more productive.
See the NewScientist article by Chris Stokel-Walker | 25 July, 2023.
From helping you to craft the perfect email to providing personal training and meal planning, a whole host of generative AI tools are here to streamline your daily grind.
Your AI Robot helper
WE ARE constantly being told that AI could be one of humanity's most useful inventions. It is identifying new ways to fight climate change and helping develop fusion technology (see "The biggest scientific challenges that AI is already helping to crack"). In the future, we may find it teaching our kids, cutting our workload and providing us all with a super-smart, computerised personal assistant (see "What generative AI really means for the economy, jobs and education"). But how can you use AI to improve your life today?
You have probably been benefiting from AI already without realising. From ride-share apps like Uber to personal assistants like Alexa, many products have been using AI for years. But with the new availability of generative AIs — which produce text, video, images, and other content in response to prompts — there are even more ways you can use this tech to make your life easier. "There's great potential for regular, everyday people to be able to use it," says Irena Cronin, CEO of Infinite Retina, a generative AI research consultancy.
One way of welcoming AI into your world is to look at how businesses are using it to become more productive and adapt it to your own needs. Got a tricky email to write to your landlord and don't know where to start? Ask generative AI. They are ideal for "factual things that need to be said concisely and without emotion," says Christina Philippe, a senior digital strategist at Ogilvy in Germany. She has been outsourcing such tasks to ChatGPT, giving a list of the issues and her desired remedies. She has found …
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[ NewScientist wants you to PAY to read any more of the story — Ed. ]
Scientists race to test claimed room-temperature superconductor.
See the NewScientist article by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | 2 August, 2023.
Researchers are moving quickly to test if a material called LK-99 really is a superconductor at room temperature and pressure. Several labs have already announced results.
New Superconductor?
When researchers claimed recently that they had created a material that perfectly conducts electricity — a superconductor — and that it does so at room temperature and pressure, many people were understandably sceptical. Such a finding would be transformative to many areas of science and technology. Now, labs around the world have kicked into action in a race to create and test the new material, called LK-99, to see if it really is what its creators claim.
Superconductors could radically increase the efficiency of many technologies, including …
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[ NewScientist wants you to PAY to read any more of the story — Ed. ]
Meeting Location & Disclaimer
Bob Backstrom
~ Newsletter Editor ~
Information for Members and Visitors:
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