Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Technology transformations are like murders: they require motive, method, and opportunity. In the case of the fax machine, everyone already had a phone line (that’s opportunity), my reader June Dilevsky’s father invented the modern digital fax machine for his startup that failed and so the startup was eventually acquired by Ricoh (that’s method), and the result was unattended business communication that was faster and cheaper than the Post Office while still creating a paper trail (that’s motive).
Every business got a fax machine when the cost of not having a fax machine came to exceed the cost of having one. Part of that was driven by the declining cost of fax machines, themselves, part was driven by peer pressure (What, you don’t have a fax machine???) and the rest was just the relentless acceleration of business.
There are unintended consequences of such revolutions. The fax machine boom, for example, led to huge growth in the number of telephone area codes as demand for fax lines ran phone companies completely out of local numbers. So we added new area codes and now some of those codes are disappearing again as we give up fax lines, give up land lines in general (I don’t have one), and even the massive growth of mobile numbers hasn’t been quite able to take up the slack [IPV6 replaces phone numbers with Internet Addresses].
5G wireless networking, …… has to do with replacing every other kind of data network with 5G wireless. No more landlines, no more cable systems, no more wires. Going all-wireless almost completely eliminates customer-facing labor. No more guy with a tool belt to keep you waiting for service. No more truck rolls.
There will be 5G and there will be content, that’s all. Content can mean a phone call or a movie, a game, or anything else that involves electrons in motion. And given that we’ll all have voracious and completely different demands for high-resolution content, 5G will suck-up all available bandwidth and then some.
The Future of Television
Lockheed Martin, an old economy aerospace company, writes and manages more code (and more complex code) than almost all Tech companies. But nobody has Lockheed Martin in mind when they use the word Tech without qualification.
On the other hand, Tesla is Tech but Ford is not. The former fundamentally views itself as a computer company that builds cars, while the latter views itself as a car company that might use computing (including advanced computing for driverless/EV car projects).
What matters in whether or not something is part of Tech sector is not how much, or what sort of technology work is going on in a sector, but who drives it.
The dominant feature of Tech is that technologists, rather than sales and marketing people, or politicians, are generally in the driver’s seat.
Tech is an overall pattern of strongly internally entangled economic activity by means of which pieces are dynamically bundled together to create services and products actually used by people. End-user capabilities emerge of the growing soup of deeply interconnected potentialities that is the Internet.
A good sign that a technology is not part of Tech is that it does not fit the venture capital investment profile. This generally means it is evolving too slowly, or with too low a return rate, for technologists to corner most of the decision-making authority. That in turn means other actors will muddy the picture, creating unmanaged uncertainties in risk profiles, time horizons, and return rates, making VC-style investment harder.
When 95% of the population is being left behind, complaining “too fast!” The bulk of the population being left behind is not a bug in Tech as a social process, it is the defining feature.
When they stop complaining and start acting en masse, that’s when it’s no longer Tech.
Companies that are not part of Tech, no matter how much technology they build, and how advanced or software-driven it is, have all consequential decisions made by non-technologists. This is because new agency is not being created by technologists faster than it is being taken away from them.
For example, in the defense sector, politicians decide what weapons systems to buy, and fight over where to build them. The weapons systems are merely politicians’ means to other ends, like creating jobs. Even military professionals, let alone technologists, don’t get as much say in the key decisions as they’d like.
Technology is Tech during the periods that it is single, connected, indefinitely sustainable game driven by an open culture of strong engineering decision-making overwhelming everything else.
This is neither good, nor bad. It just is, and soon it might not be anymore.
Tech does not every really die, except with civilizational collapse and species extinction. It can, however, go dormant for long periods of time, especially within specific geographies.
Is Tech immortal or can it die?
What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming?
The dancing species: how moving together in time helps make us human
The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters—elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for.
The cooperation required in large settled communities is different from what you need in a small group based on face-to-face ties between people. When you’re facing high-risk encounters with other groups or dangerous animals, what you want in a small group is people so strongly bonded that they really stick together. The rituals that seem best-designed to do that are emotionally intense but not performed all that frequently. But when the group is too large for you to know everyone personally, you need to bind people together through group categories, like an ethnic group or a religious organization. The high frequency rituals in larger religions make you lose sight of your personal self.
one of the key differences between simply identifying with a group and being fused with a group. When you’re fused with a group, a person’s social identity really taps into personal identity as well. And identity fusion has a number of behavioral outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, fused individuals demonstrate a significant willingness to sacrifice themselves for their groups.
The Ancient Rites That Gave Birth to Religion
Here it is again - an important annual signal of emerging signals. Always worth the view. The video is 30 min.
Mary Meeker’s most important trends on the internet
Here are all the slides, plus analysis.
It’s the holiday season for data nerds: That is, Mary Meeker is delivering her annual Internet Trends Report — the most highly anticipated slide deck in Silicon Valley — again at Code Conference 2019.
The general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital delivered a rapid-fire 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looked forward about what these trends tell us to expect in the year ahead. The “Queen of the Internet” and former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner touched on everything from accelerating internet ad spend in the US to the growth of digital delivery services in Latin America.
But 333 pages is a lot of data to wade through. So Recode has pulled out some of the significant and most interesting trends in Meeker’s report. (You can find the full slide deck at the bottom of this story.)
The actual youtube of the presentation is here
All the slides are also here and downloadable as a pdf
This is a great signal about the future of work, play and science. Revisiting a protein folding game a decade after it was invented.
Foldit was created in 2008 as a way to 'gamify' protein research. Proteins are essential biomolecules found inside every cell of every organism. Their intricate three-dimensional structures give rise to their diverse functions, which include digestion, wound healing, autoimmunity and much more.
Through gameplay, Foldit players have helped determine the structure of an HIV-related protein and improved the activity of useful enzymes. Until now, however, Foldit players could interact only with proteins that already existed. There was no way to design new ones.
"We didn't give [Foldit players] any lectures or tell them to read anything. Instead, we tweaked the code that has run the game over many years," said senior co-author Firas Khatib, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Video gamers design brand new proteins
A team of researchers encoded their specialized knowledge into the computer game Foldit to enable citizen scientists to successfully design synthetic proteins for the first time.
The initial results of this collaboration appear in the June 5 issue of Nature. The Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine led the multi-institutional effort.
"There are more possible proteins than there are atoms in the universe. It's exciting to think that now anyone can help explore this vast space of possibilities," said senior co-author David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine and director of the Institute for Protein Design.
"The diversity of molecules that these gamers came up with is astonishing," said lead author Brian Koepnick, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Protein Design. "These new proteins are by no means inferior to the stuff a Ph.D.-level scientist might make."
Protein design is an emerging scientific discipline. In the past five years, experts at the Institute for Protein Design and their colleagues have created proteins that stimulate the immune system to fight cancer and others that act as potent vaccine candidates. In April, the Institute for Protein Design received a commitment of $45 million in funding through The Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative organized by TED, to design protein-based vaccines, medicines and materials.
Could gamers create the next blockbuster drug?
Another signal of AI progress in relation to human games.
DeepMind Deploys Self-taught Agents To Beat Humans at Quake III
Without instructions, software agents learn how to crush human players at "Capture the Flag" in Quake III Arena
Chess and Go were originally developed to mimic warfare, but they do a bad job of it. War and most other competitions generally involve more than one opponent and more than one ally, and the play typically unfolds not on an orderly, flat matrix but in a variety of landscapes built up in three dimensions.
That’s why Alphabet’s DeepMind, having crushed chess and Go, has now tackled the far harder challenge posed by the three-dimensional, multiplayer, first-person video game. Writing today in Science, lead author Max Jaderberg and 17 DeepMind colleagues describe how a totally unsupervised program of self-learning allowed software to exceed human performance in playing “Quake III Arena.” The experiment involved a version of the game that requires each of two teams to capture as many of the other teams’ flags as possible.
This is definitely a worthy signal regarding the world of operating systems and the implications for accelerating a ‘splinternet’ among the Internet-of-Things and a new software geopolitics.
Inside Huawei’s secretive plans to develop an operating system to rival Google’s Android
The OS issue took an extra urgency after the US government in mid-May placed Huawei and its affiliates on a trade blacklist
One of the biggest technical challenges for the Huawei OS under development has been its compatibility with Android, people say
A specialised zone was created inside Huawei to house the OS team, with guards on the door. Only employees on the OS team had access to the specialist area, which was accessed with registered staff cards. Personal mobile phones were not allowed and had to be kept in an outside locker.
The OS issue took on extra urgency after the US government in mid-May placed Huawei and its affiliates on a trade blacklist that restricts the company from buying services and parts from US companies without approval.
Google and Microsoft, whose Android and Windows software Huawei largely relies upon in its smartphones, tablets and laptops, have both suspended access for new Huawei devices.
With only a 90-day reprieve from the US government until supplies are completely blocked, the Chinese company has finally had to acknowledge its long-secret plans for an alternative OS.
Google’s Android and Apple’s proprietary iOS have a stranglehold on smartphone operating systems, accounting for 99.9% of the global market, according to Gartner estimates last year.
Huawei was confident of its OS prospects in China as it believed developers and local consumers would support and build up the ecosystem quickly, the sources said. Huawei’s sales have continued to rise in the country as the Android system used on the mainland has never carried Google services, to comply with government restrictions.
But Bloomberg reported on June 5 that consumer fear in Europe that Huawei phones would quickly become out of date has meant demand for its devices has “dropped off a cliff” in some markets there, according to analysts.
This is a strong signal of the future of ‘fake news’ but also of a deep transformation of how we create entertainment. The talk of AI automating even skilled knowledge work - will also extend to Hollywood and all forms of performance.
“Unfortunately, technologies like this will always attract bad actors,” said Ohad Fried, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford. “But the struggle is worth it given the many creative video editing and content creation applications this enables.”
Stanford engineers make editing video as easy as editing text
A new algorithm allows video editors to modify talking head videos as if they were editing text – copying, pasting, or adding and deleting words.
In television and film, actors often flub small bits of otherwise flawless performances. Other times they leave out a critical word. For editors, the only solution so far is to accept the flaws or fix them with expensive reshoots.
Imagine, however, if that editor could modify video using a text transcript. Much like word processing, the editor could easily add new words, delete unwanted ones or completely rearrange the pieces by dragging and dropping them as needed to assemble a finished video that looks almost flawless to the untrained eye.
A team of researchers from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research created such an algorithm for editing talking-head videos – videos showing speakers from the shoulders up.
The work could be a boon for video editors and producers but does raise concerns as people increasingly question the validity of images and videos online, the authors said. However, they propose some guidelines for using these tools that would alert viewers and performers that the video has been manipulated.
Quantum biology remains a sort of weak signal - but there is increasing evidence supporting the importance of quantum phenomena in biology. This is an important signal worth the read and worth tracking. The graphics are very helpful in making these findings understandable.
Quantum Biology May Help Solve Some of Life’s Greatest Mysteries
From the remarkable speed of enzyme-catalyzed reactions to the workings of the human brain, numerous biological puzzles are now being explored for evidence of quantum effects.
When Coles and several collaborators reanalyzed the data, they found evidence that the nature of the interaction between the bacteria and the photons of light was much weirder than the original analysis had suggested. “It seemed an inescapable conclusion to us that indirectly what [we were] really witnessing was quantum entanglement,” says University of Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, a coauthor on both papers.
if Vedral and colleagues’ proposal that the phenomenon was taking place in bacteria is correct, the study could mark the first time entanglement has been observed inside a living organism, and add to a growing body of evidence that quantum effects are not as unusual in biology as once believed.
Al-Khalili and Vedral are part of an expanding group of scientists now arguing that effects of the quantum world may be central to explaining some of biology’s greatest puzzles—from the efficiency of enzyme catalysis to avian navigation to human consciousness—and could even be subject to natural selection.
“The whole field is trying to prove a point,” says Chiara Marletto, a University of Oxford physicist who collaborated with Coles and Vedral on the bacteria-entanglement paper. “That is to say, not only does quantum theory apply to these [biological systems], but it’s possible to test whether these [systems] are harnessing quantum physics to perform their functions.”
I love the explosion of research that is deconstructing our concepts of who we are whether it is the ecologies of our species or what we call our self.
The human body is a mosaic of different genomes
Survey finds that ‘normal’ human tissues are riddled with mutations.
The human body is a complex mosaic made up of clusters of cells with different genomes — and many of these clusters bear mutations that could contribute to cancer, according to a sweeping survey of 29 different types of tissue.
It is the largest such study to date, and compiles data from thousands of samples collected from about 500 people. The results, published on 6 June in Science, could help scientists to better understand how cancer starts, and how to detect it earlier.
“We now appreciate that we are mosaics’, and that a substantial number of cells in our body already carry cancer mutations,” says Iñigo Martincorena, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK. “These are the seeds of cancer.”
Tissue mosaics arise as cells accumulate mutations — from DNA errors that creep in during cell division, or because of exposure to environmental factors such as ultraviolet light or cigarette smoke. When a skin cell with a given mutation divides, it can create a patch of skin that is genetically different from its neighbours.
Previous studies have found high levels of mosaicism in the skin2, oesophagus3 and blood4. Those results were typically gleaned from sequencing specific genes in microscopic tissue samples.
An interesting signal of a potential leap in solar energy efficiency.
Solar cell defect mystery solved after decades of global effort
A team of scientists at the University of Manchester has solved a key flaw in solar panels after 40 years of research around the world.
Solar panels are among the most available system of generating energy through renewable sources due to their relative cost and consumer availability. However, the majority of solar cells only achieve 20 percent efficiency—for every kW of equivalent sunlight, about 200W of electrical power can be generated.
Now an international team of researchers have resolved a key fundamental issue of material defect which limits and degrades solar cell efficiency. The problem has been known about and studied for over 40 years, with over 270 research papers attributed to the issue with no solution.
The new research shows the first observation of a previously unknown material defect which limits silicon solar cell efficiency.
Prof Tony Peaker, who co-ordinated the research now published in the Journal of Applied Physics said: "Because of the environmental and financial impact, solar panel 'efficiency degradation' has been the topic of much scientific and engineering interest in the last four decades. However, despite some of the best minds in the business working on it, the problem has steadfastly resisted resolution until now."
This is a good signal of continuing progress in energy storage.
A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?
A prototype solid-state battery based on lithium and glass faces criticism over claims that its capacity increases over time
Is there such a thing as a battery whose capacity to store energy increases with age? One respected team of researchers say they have developed just such a technology. Controversy surrounds their claims, however, in part because thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over many charge-discharge cycles.
The researchers have a response for that critique and continue to publish peer-reviewed papers about this work. If such claims came from almost any other lab, they might be ignored and shunned by the broader community of battery researchers, the same way physicists turn their noses up at anything that smacks of a perpetual motion machine.
But this lab belongs to one of the most celebrated battery pioneers today—and one of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery itself. John Goodenough, who at 96 continues to research and publish like scientists one-third his age, last year joined with three co-authors in publishing a paper that grabbed headlines. (Spectrum had profiled him and his battery technology the year before, following an initial announcement about his group’s new glass battery.)
As for the future of the Goodenough/Braga battery, she projects it will first be used in a commercial product in three years. So circa 2022, if her forecasts are right, you might see an EV-maker or grid battery storage company, or a consumer-electronics manufacturer boast about a new, high-capacity (and non-flammable!) battery.
This is a good signal of development of material science - this could be vital for space technologies not just military uses. There is a 35 sec high speed video.
CMFs, in addition to being lightweight, are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation—and can handle fire and heat twice as well as the plain metals they are made of.
"In short, CMFs hold promise for a variety of applications: from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste, explosives and hazardous materials, to military and security applications and even cars, buses and trains," Rabiei says.
Metal foam stops .50 caliber rounds as well as steel – at less than half the weight
Researchers have demonstrated that vehicle armor using composite metal foam (CMF) can stop ball and armor-piercing .50 caliber rounds as well as conventional steel armor, even though it weighs less than half as much. The finding means that vehicle designers will be able to develop lighter military vehicles without sacrificing safety, or can improve protection without making vehicles heavier.
CMF is a foam that consists of hollow, metallic spheres—made of materials such as stainless steel or titanium—embedded in a metallic matrix made of steel, titanium, aluminum or other metallic alloys. In this study, the researchers used steel-steel CMF, meaning that both the spheres and the matrix were made of steel.
For the study, researchers manufactured a hard armor system consisting of a ceramic faceplate, a CMF core and a thin back plate made of aluminum. The armor was tested using .50 caliber ball and armor-piercing rounds. The armor was tested with the rounds being fired at impact velocities from 500 meters per second up to 885 meters per second.
The CMF layer of the armor was able to absorb 72-75% of the kinetic energy of the ball rounds, and 68-78% of the kinetic energy of the armor-piercing rounds.
A clear signal of the emerging transformation of transportation.
While it’s likely to be many years before Lyft expands its autonomous ridesharing service in a more meaningful way, the company is still looking for partnerships to further its self-driving ambitions. For example, it recently announced a deal with Waymo for a ridesharing service in Phoenix, Arizona, where Waymo already has a ton of on-road experience testing its driverless cars.
Lyft’s robo-taxis have made more than 50,000 rides in Las Vegas
If you’ve been to Las Vegas in the last year, you might have seen one of Lyft’s self-driving cars tootling up and down the Strip. Heck, you might even have ridden in one.
The company has just revealed it’s now given more than 50,000 automated rides to paying passengers in the city, up from 30,000 in January 2019. Lyft says the figure makes it the largest commercial self-driving car program currently operating in the U.S.
Lyft partnered with vehicle technology firm Aptiv to launch the service, with locals and tourists alike able to request a ride in the usual way, via the Lyft app. It uses 30 modified BMW 540i cars, all kitted out with Aptiv-made sensor, cameras, and software to ensure a safe ride.
In a blog post announcing its 50,000-ride milestone, Lyft said the average ride rating given by passengers was an impressive 4.97 out of 5, a figure that suggests the car took them successfully from A to B without any major mishaps. You have to wonder where it lost that 0.03.
And another signal of looming transportation transformation.
Uber says it will start delivering McDonald’s by drone this summer
It has a few hurdles to overcome before the service launches, though.
Uber Elevate, the company’s aerial arm, has said it will start delivering meals from McDonald’s and other local restaurants to households in San Diego this summer, Bloomberg reports. It will cost the same as a standard Uber Eats delivery but should eventually be quicker, Uber said.
But: Uber is still waiting for approval from the Federal Aviation Administration for the service. The company has promised it’ll be offering food deliveries by drone in multiple countries by 2023 (though it said 2021 last year, so take that with a pinch of salt).
Also, to be honest, the trial delivery process sounds a bit tortuous. Rather than delivering to your home, the drones will fly to designated zones, where couriers will pick up the goods and deliver them to your door.
Uber takes to the skies: It’s betting on a future where people not only want their food to travel by drone, but also fancy traveling that way themselves. Yesterday, Reuters reported that Melbourne, Australia, will be the third test site for Uber’s planned flying taxi service. The service will transport passengers from one of seven shopping centers in the city to its main international airport. The 19-kilometer trip should take 10 minutes, rather than the 25 minutes it normally takes by car.
Another signal of cheap easy to program robots - this one is sort of like Baxter 2.0 or maybe only 1.5. There is a 1 min video.
But it’s greatest feature is definitely that it can run on any device and operate via drag-and-drop functions, which makes it easy to use even by the inexperienced.
New Robotic Arm Is Low-Cost And Can Be Programmed By Anyone
The industrial robotics business is by no means small. If anything, it’s flourishing: the International Federation of Robotics stated that 387,000 robots were shipped all around the globe in 2017, an increase of 30% over the numbers registered in 2016. How much does that mean? About $16.2 billion.
That’s also because robotic arms don’t come cheap: we mostly see them in the presentation videos of large and well-known manufacturing companies that can actually afford them.
Smaller companies? Not so much. Robotic arms can cost up to $100,000 per piece, with larger machinery going even higher so it’s understandable.
However, things are changing, thanks to companies like Automata, who aim to make them more affordable than ever before. Their latest robotic arm is called Eva, after the adorable and universally-loved WALL-E robot, and only costs roughly around $7,600, shipping and VAT included. It’s still pricey but when you put it against the $100,000 sum, it all comes into perspective.
I first saw this sort of tire signalled around 2010 when I found an article from about 2008 and passed it around not realizing it was already outdated. Here we are more than a decade later and now a major tire company is signaling it’s arrival as a commercial product in another 5 years. To be fair - the initial concept tire did change the way most tires are made now. The images make the concept clear.
Michelin’s ingenious new tires ensure you’ll never get a flat again
They’re completely airless. And they should be on the market by 2024.
There’s no force in the universe more humbling than a flat tire. But now tire manufacturer Michelin and the car giant GM are teaming up to eliminate the problem. How? By taking the air out of tires altogether.
Michelin is developing a tire called the Uptis (or Unique Puncture-proof Tire System), which is a tire that cannot ever go flat or blow out because it doesn’t require oxygen to stay rigid. Instead, the Uptis features an internal system of flexible spokes that support the tire.
The Uptis is a working prototytpe that will begin testing on some Chevy Bolt models this year in Michigan. By 2024, the two companies hope to release the Uptis on a commercially available vehicle.
Some signal - are invariably deeply uncertain - until eventually they are not. This isn’t a new signal - it simply one that doesn’t seem to go away. As the saying goes - “The Truth is Out There”.
There are some short videos included.
‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects
The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”
No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.
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