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PC industry suffers as Microsoft severs link between Windows and hardware refreshes
New Post has been published on http://team77.com/pc-industry-suffers-as-microsoft-severs-link-between-windows-and-hardware-refreshes/
PC industry suffers as Microsoft severs link between Windows and hardware refreshes
The global PC market is set to decline by almost 1.9% over the next two years, according to Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. “PC shipments will total 258 million units in 2019, a 0.6% decline from 2018,” he said. “Traditional PCs are set to decline by 3% in 2019 to total 189 million units.”
However, Gartner’s latest forecast suggests that between 2018 and 2012, sales of ultramobiles will increase by almost 20%.
Atwal said it has taken a while for the PC industry to offer compelling features such as instant on and all-day battery life on these types of device, which often have a far higher selling price than standard laptops.
He said the PC market is effectively saturated, but businesses will continue to buy mobile PCs even though the smartphone tends to be users’ primary mobile device. “A laptop is the device you use to create content,” he said.
Given that businesses will continue to provide end-users with laptop PCs, Windows 10 remains the dominant platform on which content creation-type work will run. Gartner predicted that Windows 10 will represent 75% of the professional PC market by 2021.
Windows 7 support is scheduled to end in January 2020, and for businesses, the Windows 10 migration will continue to drive a PC refresh. According to Gartner, while the US is now in the final phase of moving off Windows 7, China is still a few years away.
“By moving the Windows 10 migration to 2020, organisations increase the risk of remaining on an unsupported operating system.,” said Atwal.
“We are seeing businesses across the word migrating to Windows 10. It is a modern operating system and allows organisations to run cloud applications and provide security much more effectively.”
End of support for Windows 7
Support for Windows 7 will end in January 2020, after which organisations will have to buy a custom support contract if they want their Windows 7 systems supported. This situation mirrors the Windows XP end-of-support deadline, which occured in 2014.
“When XP support was pulled, a lot of government organisations were left on XP,” said Atwal. “They had to pay extra for support. Businesses do not want to be in this situation again, where they have to pay for one-off support of Windows 7.”
He pointed out that there is no option for organisations to skip a version because there will not be a Windows 11. “From now on, organisations will get consistent upgrades to the Windows operating system,” he said.
So, the migration from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is the last time IT departments will have to take a forklift approach to upgrading their desktop operating system, said Atwal. Organisations need to move to Windows 10, or they will fall behind, he said. For instance, Microsoft has aligned the upgrades of its cloud productivity suite, Office 365, to Windows 10.
But the main benefit of Windows 10 to IT is its improved back-end management, said Atwal. “You can operate and manage Windows more effectively once you are on Windows 10,” he added.
One example is that Microsoft now manages upgrades, said Atwal. Many organisations do not have a team that is permanently set up to upgrade the Windows operating system, so embarking on a new Windows operating system upgrade is a major IT project.
Such Windows upgrade projects should become a thing of the past if organisations entrust Microsoft to update their PC estates automatically, he said.
PC refresh
From a PC market perspective, Windows 10 disconnects the link between PC hardware and Windows operating system upgrades. Windows 10 is upgraded twice a year, which means business users will receive new operating system features every six months.
Atwal said he expected businesses to continue to upgrade PCs, but with more enterprise applications consumed as software as a service (SaaS), hardware upgrades are likely to be driven by wear and tear rather than the availability of a new PC operating system from Microsoft. “Given that the laptop is an important business tool, it will be upgraded,” he said.
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JetStream DR cloud replication aims to make backup redundant
New Post has been published on http://team77.com/jetstream-dr-cloud-replication-aims-to-make-backup-redundant/
JetStream DR cloud replication aims to make backup redundant
JetStream software has announced general availability for its JetStream DR product, which allows continuous replication – as opposed to periodic snapshots – of VMware virtual machines (VMs) and data to public cloud locations.
The product, aimed at service providers and enterprises, allows customers to failover to operations from the cloud in the case of an outage with an RPO (recovery point objective) of near zero.
JetStream DR also works with S3-based object storage and can continuously replicate that data from on-premise locations to public clouds.
JetSteam originated as FlashSoft and went through a number of acquisitions, with a formative period being one in which it developed technology used by VMware in its APIs for I/O filtering (VAIO).
At its core, this allows for any I/O stream to be intercepted between the VM and virtual disk in real time, with intelligence then being applicable to that flow of data.
So, for example, JetStream has a product called Accelerate, in which IO Filter can select whether data should be served/stored on cache or underlying storage, with claimed application performance of 3x to 5x.
Meanwhile, JetStream Migrate allows for data to be migrated in near real time from on-premise VMware deployments to the public cloud.
This can be carried out without shutdown during transfer because IO Filter can move the bulk of the VM and disk and then keep track of data written concurrently to build the VM and disk as soon as possible afterwards.
JetStream DR aims to allow for “data protection as a true cloud service”, said company president Rich Petersen.
“Data protection need to be elastic and dynamically consumable. So, for example, if you have Nutanix on-premise, you need to replicate to Nutanix in the cloud. It’s the same for other HCI providers and for [VMware] VSAN.”
Instead, JetStream DR allows users to replicate VMware VMs and data to any cloud service and to failover to it in case of a disaster recovery scenario.
Petersen contrasts his company’s product with backup in general and in particular with offerings from Veeam and Druva. Unlike those products, JetStream is continuous and not dependent on periodic snapshots or backups.
A similar service can be applied to on-premise S3 object storage data, although re-hydration of stored data will take longer than for VMs.
There are no plans to expand the product to support Hyper-V and KVM. That will be “years away”, said Petersen.
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Boeing 737 MAX Crash Sends Market Cap Lower
New Post has been published on http://ritzywordpressthemes.com/boeing-737-max-crash-sends-market-cap-lower/
Boeing 737 MAX Crash Sends Market Cap Lower
Every month, AeroAnalysis International covers the orders and deliveries for Boeing (BA) and Airbus (OTCPK:EADSY, OTCPK:EADSF). Now, there’s a lot more than just orders and deliveries. Some subjects are worthy of more detailed analysis, and some are not. The subjects that are not are not necessarily unimportant. Therefore, AeroAnalysis has been running a monthly series that bundles some of the most interesting news items that do not justify a separate article or deserve to be mentioned again. You can read the February report here. In this report, some news items from March will be highlighted.
Source: Axios
Share Price Development in March
In March 2019, Boeing’s shares lost 13.4% compared to a 13.6% gain a month earlier. Boeing’s shares significantly underperformed the Dow Jones, which was flat for the month.
The reach for the downward pressure on Boeing shares during the month is clear: The crash with the Boeing 737 MAX 8 from Ethiopian Airlines marking the second fatal crash.
A look at some price target announcements in March:
Argus initially gave Boeing shares a $460 with a buy rating but reverted to a Hold rating after the Ethiopian Airlines crash with a $371.30 price target.
Edward Jones downgraded Boeing shares from a Buy to Hold with a $300 price target.
DZ Bank downgraded Boeing shares from a Buy to Hold with a $300 price target.
Norddeutsche Landesbank set a $300 on Boeing shares with a Sell rating.
Tigres Financial reiterated its Buy rating.
Citi Group resumed with a Buy rating.
What we did see in the aftermath of the second fatal crash with the Boeing 737 MAX is that analyst sentiment deteriorated, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. This stepdown in sentiment was expected, but it remains to be seen whether going forward, with fixes implemented and a return to service for the MAX, this negative sentiment will endure.
Commercial Airplanes News
Source: Boeing
During the month of March, the crash with the Boeing 737 MAX captured most attention. Boeing shares declined in value after the crash on fears that there is a design flaw on the Boeing 737 MAX. In the aftermath of the first crash, I already pointed out that the MCAS design might not have been robust and that it was unclear as to how this part of the speed trim system was certified by the FAA and aviation administrations around the globe. While I consider this a shortcoming on Boeing’s side, even with a preliminary report out, it is not clear why the pilots flew the aircraft at a very high speed which might have made regaining control over the aircraft nearly impossible. Currently, Boeing is working on a fix, which will likely be closely eyeballed by administrations around the globe because confidence in Boeing as well as the FAA has been severely dented. Until the fix is approved, the fleet of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft will remain on the ground and no deliveries will occur. The crash is likely going to impact Boeing’s earnings for the simple reason that the grounding is costing money, possibly beyond the amount Boeing is covered for by insurers, and revenue is being delayed due to the production stop resulting in working capital increases.
I’ve written a few reports on the subject, which you can read here:
In the aftermath of the two crashes, Indonesian carriers are looking for cancellations of their direct orders for the MAX with Boeing and agreements with lessors while Boeing is being probed.
The only other noteworthy news item regarding commercial aircraft was the order for 20 Boeing 787-9s from Lufthansa (OTCQX:DLAKF). Boeing had been battling Airbus for an order for months, and Lufthansa eventually ended up splitting the order between both jet makers.
Investment News
Source: The Boeing Company
Fitting its after-sales and digital solutions strategy, Boeing acquired ForeFlight, a leading provider of innovative mobile and web-based aviation applications.
ForeFlight has partnered with Boeing for the past two years to bring aviators Jeppesen’s aeronautical data and charts through ForeFlight’s popular mobile platforms. Now, the teams will integrate talent and offerings to bring innovative, expanded digital solutions to all segments of the aviation industry.
As part of the joint venture between Boeing and Embraer (ERJ), Boeing announced three leadership moves aimed at further strengthening the company’s global presence and partnerships:
Marc Allen has been named senior vice president of Boeing and president of Embraer Partnership and Group Operations;
Sir Michael Arthur has been named president of Boeing International;
John Slattery announced as president and chief executive officer of the commercial aviation and services joint venture between Boeing and Embraer.
Global Services
Source: Aviation Jobs and Aviation Employment – AviationCV.com
In March, there was no notable news for Boeing’s Global Services division.
Defense News
Source: The Boeing Company
For Boeing Defense, there were a couple of news events. A program capturing some negative attention was the KC-46A. In February, the USAF stopped accepting tankers from Boeing as foreign object debris was found inside the tankers. Deliveries resumed in March, which should have been a good thing were it not that the USAF halted deliveries again in early April. While the second delivery stop is an April news event, I think it is important to highlight it in this report, which covers the March news events as well.
More positive news came from Boeing’s F-18 fighter jet program. Boeing was awarded a three-year contract award for 78 F/A-18 Block III Super Hornets. The contract is valued $4B and is expected to save US taxpayer $395 million.
A major milestone was also achieved by the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 DEFIANT; The Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 DEFIANT™ helicopter achieved first flight. The helicopter is participating in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role-Medium Technology Demonstrator program. Data from DEFIANT will help the Army develop requirements for new utility helicopters expected to enter service in the early 2030s. This flight marks a key milestone for the Sikorsky-Boeing team and is the culmination of significant design, simulation, and test activity to further demonstrate the capability of the X2 Technology.
X2 Technology is scalable to a variety of military missions such as attack and assault, long-range transportation, infiltration and resupply. DEFIANT is the third X2®aircraft in less than 10 years.
During the month, there also was a milestone for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense [GMD] system as the US Missile Defense Agency and Boeing for the first time launched two GMD system interceptors to destroy a threat-representative target, validating the fielded system protects the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In the test, one interceptor struck the target in space. The second interceptor observed that intercept before destroying additional debris to ensure missile destruction. The test is known as a “two-shot salvo” engagement. The target launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean while the interceptors launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
Conclusion
Without doubt, March was a bad month for Boeing. For a company’s share to perform well, you ultimately need a good product, coupled with good execution or you need good execution to make a good product. With the second crash of a Boeing 737 MAX, it does seem like Boeing has failed miserably on the execution part, which I expect will affect their current year performance.
Boeing had some highlights as well with a milestone order from Lufthansa and a production contract for its Super Hornet fighter, but not nearly enough to mitigate the pressure the Boeing 737 MAX cash cow is currently putting on Boeing. During the month of March, Boeing’s market cap declined by $33.4B. This decline cannot be fully explained by closing math (there is no calculation to support the cap decline), but such a big decline in market cap is perfectly understandable, given the importance of the Boeing 737 program to Boeing and the uncertainty regarding the aircraft. I expect that the Boeing 737 MAX will eventually be approved for flight again, and as investors and stakeholders around the world regain confidence, Boeing should see recovery in its market cap. In fact, in the first days of March, nearly $9B in market cap was recovered. At the end of the day, Boeing should be learning lessons from this.
If you enjoyed reading this article, don’t forget to hit the “Follow” button at the top of this page (below the article title) to receive updates for my upcoming articles.
If you like our regular coverage, please consider joining The Aerospace Forum which gives you more indepth tools to understand the industry, access to over 750+ previously published reports and ways (Live chat with the group and one-on-one conversations) to discuss the aerospace industry. *Start your free trial today*
Disclosure: I am/we are long BA, EADSF. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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Boeing 737 MAX Crash Sends Market Cap Lower
New Post has been published on http://croopdiseno.com/boeing-737-max-crash-sends-market-cap-lower/
Boeing 737 MAX Crash Sends Market Cap Lower
Every month, AeroAnalysis International covers the orders and deliveries for Boeing (BA) and Airbus (OTCPK:EADSY, OTCPK:EADSF). Now, there’s a lot more than just orders and deliveries. Some subjects are worthy of more detailed analysis, and some are not. The subjects that are not are not necessarily unimportant. Therefore, AeroAnalysis has been running a monthly series that bundles some of the most interesting news items that do not justify a separate article or deserve to be mentioned again. You can read the February report here. In this report, some news items from March will be highlighted.
Source: Axios
Share Price Development in March
In March 2019, Boeing’s shares lost 13.4% compared to a 13.6% gain a month earlier. Boeing’s shares significantly underperformed the Dow Jones, which was flat for the month.
The reach for the downward pressure on Boeing shares during the month is clear: The crash with the Boeing 737 MAX 8 from Ethiopian Airlines marking the second fatal crash.
A look at some price target announcements in March:
Argus initially gave Boeing shares a $460 with a buy rating but reverted to a Hold rating after the Ethiopian Airlines crash with a $371.30 price target.
Edward Jones downgraded Boeing shares from a Buy to Hold with a $300 price target.
DZ Bank downgraded Boeing shares from a Buy to Hold with a $300 price target.
Norddeutsche Landesbank set a $300 on Boeing shares with a Sell rating.
Tigres Financial reiterated its Buy rating.
Citi Group resumed with a Buy rating.
What we did see in the aftermath of the second fatal crash with the Boeing 737 MAX is that analyst sentiment deteriorated, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. This stepdown in sentiment was expected, but it remains to be seen whether going forward, with fixes implemented and a return to service for the MAX, this negative sentiment will endure.
Commercial Airplanes News
Source: Boeing
During the month of March, the crash with the Boeing 737 MAX captured most attention. Boeing shares declined in value after the crash on fears that there is a design flaw on the Boeing 737 MAX. In the aftermath of the first crash, I already pointed out that the MCAS design might not have been robust and that it was unclear as to how this part of the speed trim system was certified by the FAA and aviation administrations around the globe. While I consider this a shortcoming on Boeing’s side, even with a preliminary report out, it is not clear why the pilots flew the aircraft at a very high speed which might have made regaining control over the aircraft nearly impossible. Currently, Boeing is working on a fix, which will likely be closely eyeballed by administrations around the globe because confidence in Boeing as well as the FAA has been severely dented. Until the fix is approved, the fleet of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft will remain on the ground and no deliveries will occur. The crash is likely going to impact Boeing’s earnings for the simple reason that the grounding is costing money, possibly beyond the amount Boeing is covered for by insurers, and revenue is being delayed due to the production stop resulting in working capital increases.
I’ve written a few reports on the subject, which you can read here:
In the aftermath of the two crashes, Indonesian carriers are looking for cancellations of their direct orders for the MAX with Boeing and agreements with lessors while Boeing is being probed.
The only other noteworthy news item regarding commercial aircraft was the order for 20 Boeing 787-9s from Lufthansa (OTCQX:DLAKF). Boeing had been battling Airbus for an order for months, and Lufthansa eventually ended up splitting the order between both jet makers.
Investment News
Source: The Boeing Company
Fitting its after-sales and digital solutions strategy, Boeing acquired ForeFlight, a leading provider of innovative mobile and web-based aviation applications.
ForeFlight has partnered with Boeing for the past two years to bring aviators Jeppesen’s aeronautical data and charts through ForeFlight’s popular mobile platforms. Now, the teams will integrate talent and offerings to bring innovative, expanded digital solutions to all segments of the aviation industry.
As part of the joint venture between Boeing and Embraer (ERJ), Boeing announced three leadership moves aimed at further strengthening the company’s global presence and partnerships:
Marc Allen has been named senior vice president of Boeing and president of Embraer Partnership and Group Operations;
Sir Michael Arthur has been named president of Boeing International;
John Slattery announced as president and chief executive officer of the commercial aviation and services joint venture between Boeing and Embraer.
Global Services
Source: Aviation Jobs and Aviation Employment – AviationCV.com
In March, there was no notable news for Boeing’s Global Services division.
Defense News
Source: The Boeing Company
For Boeing Defense, there were a couple of news events. A program capturing some negative attention was the KC-46A. In February, the USAF stopped accepting tankers from Boeing as foreign object debris was found inside the tankers. Deliveries resumed in March, which should have been a good thing were it not that the USAF halted deliveries again in early April. While the second delivery stop is an April news event, I think it is important to highlight it in this report, which covers the March news events as well.
More positive news came from Boeing’s F-18 fighter jet program. Boeing was awarded a three-year contract award for 78 F/A-18 Block III Super Hornets. The contract is valued $4B and is expected to save US taxpayer $395 million.
A major milestone was also achieved by the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 DEFIANT; The Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 DEFIANT™ helicopter achieved first flight. The helicopter is participating in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role-Medium Technology Demonstrator program. Data from DEFIANT will help the Army develop requirements for new utility helicopters expected to enter service in the early 2030s. This flight marks a key milestone for the Sikorsky-Boeing team and is the culmination of significant design, simulation, and test activity to further demonstrate the capability of the X2 Technology.
X2 Technology is scalable to a variety of military missions such as attack and assault, long-range transportation, infiltration and resupply. DEFIANT is the third X2®aircraft in less than 10 years.
During the month, there also was a milestone for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense [GMD] system as the US Missile Defense Agency and Boeing for the first time launched two GMD system interceptors to destroy a threat-representative target, validating the fielded system protects the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In the test, one interceptor struck the target in space. The second interceptor observed that intercept before destroying additional debris to ensure missile destruction. The test is known as a “two-shot salvo” engagement. The target launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean while the interceptors launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
Conclusion
Without doubt, March was a bad month for Boeing. For a company’s share to perform well, you ultimately need a good product, coupled with good execution or you need good execution to make a good product. With the second crash of a Boeing 737 MAX, it does seem like Boeing has failed miserably on the execution part, which I expect will affect their current year performance.
Boeing had some highlights as well with a milestone order from Lufthansa and a production contract for its Super Hornet fighter, but not nearly enough to mitigate the pressure the Boeing 737 MAX cash cow is currently putting on Boeing. During the month of March, Boeing’s market cap declined by $33.4B. This decline cannot be fully explained by closing math (there is no calculation to support the cap decline), but such a big decline in market cap is perfectly understandable, given the importance of the Boeing 737 program to Boeing and the uncertainty regarding the aircraft. I expect that the Boeing 737 MAX will eventually be approved for flight again, and as investors and stakeholders around the world regain confidence, Boeing should see recovery in its market cap. In fact, in the first days of March, nearly $9B in market cap was recovered. At the end of the day, Boeing should be learning lessons from this.
If you enjoyed reading this article, don’t forget to hit the “Follow” button at the top of this page (below the article title) to receive updates for my upcoming articles.
If you like our regular coverage, please consider joining The Aerospace Forum which gives you more indepth tools to understand the industry, access to over 750+ previously published reports and ways (Live chat with the group and one-on-one conversations) to discuss the aerospace industry. *Start your free trial today*
Disclosure: I am/we are long BA, EADSF. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
0 notes
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Monthly Review Of DivGro: March 2019
New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/monthly-review-of-divgro-march-2019/
Monthly Review Of DivGro: March 2019
Welcome to the March review of DivGro, my portfolio of dividend growth stocks. Quarter-ending months are exciting, as many of the stocks I own pay dividends in these months and I usually set a new record for monthly dividend income in quarter-ending months.
March did not disappoint. I received dividends totaling $3,220 from 43 stocks in my portfolio, a new record for monthly dividend income! Year over year, DivGro’s dividend income increased by 28%. So far in 2019, I’ve collected $6,724 in dividends or about 27% of my 2019 goal of $25,200.
Looking at how the month’s activities impacted DivGro’s projected annual dividend income (PADI), I note that five DivGro stocks announced dividend increases in March. Additionally, I opened one new position and added shares to five existing positions. On the other hand, I closed out one high-yielding position. Unfortunately, the net result of these changes is that projected annual dividend income (PADI) decreased by about 0.6% in March. Year over year, PADI increased by 39%.
DivGro’s PADI now stands at $25,376, which means I can expect to receive $2,115 in dividend income per month, on average, in perpetuity, assuming the status quo is maintained. Of course, I expect the companies I’ve invested in not only to continue to pay dividends but to also increase them over time. Also, until I retire, I hope to continue reinvesting all dividends, so DivGro’s PADI should continue to grow through dividend growth and through compounding.
Dividend Income
In March, I received a total of $3,220 in dividend income from 43 different stocks:
Following is a list of the dividends I collected in March:
Aflac (AFL) — income of $27.00
Amgen (AMGN) — income of $36.25
Broadcom (AVGO) — income of $53.00
Boeing (BA) — income of $41.10
BlackRock (BLK) — income of $115.50
Cummins (CMI) — income of $57.00
Chevron (CVX) — income of $28.56
Dominion Energy (D) — income of $91.75
Digital Realty Trust (DLR) — income of $48.60
EPR Properties (EPR) — income of $18.75
Eversource Energy (ES) — income of $53.50
Extra Space Storage (EXR) — income of $47.30
Ford Motor (F) — income of $300.00
Gilead Sciences (GILD) — income of $126.00
Home Depot (HD) — income of $81.60
Honeywell International (HON) — income of $41.00
International Business Machines (IBM) — income of $47.10
Intel (INTC) — income of $163.81
International Paper (IP) — income of $50.00
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) — income of $111.60
Lockheed Martin (LMT) — income of $30.80
Main Street Capital (MAIN) — income of $146.26
McDonald’s (MCD) — income of $31.32
3M (MMM) — income of $36.00
Microsoft (MSFT) — income of $46.00
NextEra Energy (NEE) — income of $31.25
AllianzGI Equity & Convertible Income Fund (NIE) — income of $380.00
Realty Income (O) — income of $56.38
PepsiCo (PEP) — income of $18.55
Pfizer (PFE) — income of $72.00
Public Storage (PSA) — income of $60.00
Ross Stores (ROST) — income of $25.50
Stanley Black & Decker (SWK) — income of $33.00
TJX (TJX) — income of $39.00
T. Rowe Price (TROW) — income of $152.00
Travelers (TRV) — income of $77.00
UnitedHealth (UNH) — income of $36.00
Union Pacific (UNP) — income of $35.20
United Parcel Service (UPS) — income of $33.60
Visa (V) — income of $4.25
Valero Energy (VLO) — income of $166.50
Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) — income of $88.00
Exxon Mobil (XOM) — income of $82.00
The following chart shows DivGro’s monthly dividends plotted against PMDI. Quarter-ending months are huge outliers:
This is one reason that I now create a rolling 12-month average of dividends received (the orange bars) plotted against a rolling 12-month average of PMDI (the blue, staggered line):
While it would be nicer if dividends were distributed more evenly, it is not something that would drive my investment decisions.
Dividend Changes
In March, the following stocks announced dividend increases:
General Dynamics (GD) — an increase of 9.68%
Realty Income — an increase of 0.22%
Ross Stores — an increase of 13.33%
Raytheon (RTN) — an increase of 8.65%
W.P. Carey (WPC) — an increase of 0.19%
These changes will increase DivGro’s PADI by about $39.
I like seeing dividend increases above 7% and three of the five increases top my expectations. As for the REITs O and WPC, they announce dividend increases multiple times per year. O’s year-over-year increase is 2.96%, whereas WPC’s year-over-year increase is 1.67%.
Transactions
Here is a summary of my transactions in March:
Merck (MRK) — new position of 30 shares
After opening a small position in Chevron (CVX) in December 2018, MRK was the highest ranked stock in the top 50 holdings of dividend ETFs not in my DivGro portfolio. MRK ranked higher on an aggregate score than several of my Health Care sector holdings and, according to Simply Safe Dividends, MRK has a Very Safe dividend safety score of 98.
I opened a relatively small position of 30 shares at $80.52 per share, as MRK is not trading at my preferred discount to fair value of at least 10%. With this opening position, I’ll be able to track MRK more closely and look for opportunities to add shares at a better valuation.
Omega Healthcare Investors (OHI) — sold 250 shares and closed position
I decided to close my position in OHI on concerns about the declining fundamentals of OHI’s skilled nursing tenants. OHI has a Borderline Safe dividend safety score of 47, yet the REIT’s yield of 7%+ provides some compensation for the increased risk. Unfortunately, OHI broke a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of dividend increases when it froze its dividend last April, and unless OHI declares another dividend increase in 2019, it will be removed from the CCC list of dividend growth stocks.
It turns out my closing trade was about two weeks premature, as OHI closed at a 30-day high of $38.31 on 28 March. Nevertheless, my closing price of $35.90 secured a net gain of 29% or about 18% annualized.
To (somewhat) make up for the $660 in annual dividends I gave up by closing my OHI position, I added shares to several existing positions trading at favorable comparative yields.
CVS Health (CVS) — added 50 shares and increased position to 200 shares
CVS continues to struggle and now is trading about 34% below its 52-week high. I paid $53.49 per share and lowered my average cost basis to $65.16. CVS froze its dividend after buying Aetna, though Simply Safe Dividends still considers the dividend Safe with a dividend safety score of 75.
I believe CVS will be fine in the long term, so the current yield is just too compelling to pass up, as illustrated in this 7-year yield channel chart:
Home Depot — added 10 shares and increased position to 60 shares
Honeywell International — added 10 shares and increased position to 60 shares
Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) — added 50 shares and increased position to 200 shares
3M — added 15 shares and increased position to 40 shares
HD‘s dividend safety score is 90 (Very Safe) while the stock’s current dividend yield of 2.71% is 29% above its 5-year average of 2.11%, according to Simply Safe Dividends. I paid $182.11 per share, slightly lowering my average cost basis in the process. The stock’s dividend growth is stellar, with 5-year and 20-year dividend growth rates of 22%.
I also added 10 shares to my HON position, which is deemed a Very Safe dividend growth stock with a dividend safety score of 98. HON is trading at about fair value. Honeywell reported solid Q4’18 results and the management team increased their guidance for fiscal 2019. I think the stock is a great long term hold, though it is vulnerable to market cyclicality.
IRM‘s dividend yield of 6.8% is about 11% above its 5-year average dividend yield of 6.13%. While the REIT’s dividend safety score is on the low end at 52 (Borderline Safe), I think the 6.8% yield compensates me sufficiently for the somewhat higher risk. I paid $34.86 per share and I notice the stock is now trading above $36 per share, so my timing seemed to be good.
Finally, it is not often that one can buy MMM at a discount to fair value. I missed an even better opportunity in December 2018, but I’m happy that I grabbed 15 shares at $206.08 in March. The stock now trades at $216 per share. MMM has a Very Safe dividend safety score of 86 and boasts a 5-year dividend growth rate of 16%.
The net effect of my March transactions is that DivGro’s PADI decreased by about $198. However, I believe my portfolio’s risk profile has improved in the process and I’m happy that I replaced the somewhat riskier OHI with safer alternatives.
Markets
Here is a summary of various market indicators, showing the changes over the last month:
In March, the DOW 30 increased slightly, the S&P 500 increased by 1.79%, and the NASDAQ increased by 2.61%. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.414%, while CBOE’s measure of market volatility, the VIX, decreased to 13.71.
Portfolio Statistics
Based on the total capital invested and the portfolio’s current market value, DivGro has delivered a simple return of about 47% since inception. In comparison, DivGro’s IRR (internal rate of return) is 14.5%. (IRR takes into account the timing and size of deposits since inception, so it is a better measure of portfolio performance).
I track the yield on cost (YoC) for individual stocks, as well as an average YoC for my portfolio. DivGro’s average YoC decreased from 3.98% last month to 3.92% this month.
On the other hand, DivGro’s projected annual yield is 4.73%. This is down from last month’s value of 4.84%. I calculate the projected annual yield by dividing PADI ($25,376) by the total amount invested.
Percentage payback relates dividend income to the amount of capital invested. DivGro’s average percentage payback is 13.5%, up from last month’s 13.1%.
Here’s a chart showing DivGro’s market value breakdown. Dividends are plotted at the base of the chart so we can see them grow over time:
Looking Ahead
I’ve been working on creating a database of weekly dividend yields covering a period of 12 years. For now, the database covers dividend-paying stocks in my portfolio. In time, I’d like to add high-quality dividend growth stocks I don’t yet own.
Maintaining the database will allow me to create yield channel charts at any time to help guide investment decisions. Furthermore, I’ll be able to do a quick fair value estimate for stocks in the database by comparing the current dividend yield with the historical average dividend yield over a period of, say, five years.
I’m hoping to get back to writing monthly DivGro Pulse articles and share yield channel charts of stocks trading at or near extreme historical yields.
Please see my Performance page for various visuals summarizing DivGro’s performance.
Thanks for reading and take care, everybody!
Disclosure: I am/we are long AAPL, ABBV, ADM, AFL, AMGN, APD, AVGO, BA, BLK, CB, CMCSA, CMI, CSCO, CVS, CVX, D, DGX, DIS, DLR, EPR, ES, EXR, FDX, FRT, GD, HD, HON, HRL, IBM, INTC, IP, IRM, ITW, JNJ, JPM, KO, LMT, LOW, MAIN, MCD, MDT, MMM, MO, MRK, MSFT, NEE, NNN, O, PEP, PFE, PG, PM, ROST, RTN, SBUX, SKT, SPG, SWK, T, TJX, TROW, TRV, TXN, UNH, UNP, UPS, V, VLO, VZ, WBA, WEC, WPC, XOM. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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The Math of How Crickets, Starlings and Neurons Sync Up
New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/the-math-of-how-crickets-starlings-and-neurons-sync-up/
The Math of How Crickets, Starlings and Neurons Sync Up
When the incoherent claps of a crowd suddenly become a pulse, as everyone starts clapping in unison, who decided? Not you; not anyone. Crickets sing in synchrony; metronomes placed side by side sway into lockstep; some fireflies blink together in the dark. All across the United States, the power grid operates at 60 hertz, its innumerable tributaries of alternating current synchronizing of their own accord. Indeed, we live because of synchronization. Neurons in our brains fire in synchronous patterns to operate our bodies and minds, and pacemaker cells in our hearts sync up to generate the beat.
Quanta Magazine
About
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Objects with rhythms naturally synchronize. Yet the phenomenon went entirely undocumented until 1665, when the Dutch physicist and inventor Christiaan Huygens spent a few days sick in bed. A pair of new pendulum clocks—a kind of timekeeping device that Huygens invented—hung side by side on the wall. Huygens noticed that the pendulums swung exactly in unison, always lurching toward each other and then away. Perhaps pressure from the air was synchronizing their swings? He conducted various experiments. Standing a table upright between the clocks had no effect on their synchronization, for instance. But when he rehung the clocks far apart or at right angles to each other, they soon fell out of phase. Huygens eventually inferred that the clocks’ “sympathy,” as he called it, resulted from the kicks that their swings gave each other through the wall.
When the left pendulum swings left, it kicks the wall and the other pendulum rightward, and vice versa. The clocks kick each other around until they and the wall attain their most stable, relaxed state. For the pendulums, the most stable behavior is to move in opposite directions, so that each pushes the other in the direction it’s already going, the way you push a child on a swing. And this is also easiest for the wall; it no longer moves at all, because the pendulums are giving it equal and opposite kicks. Once in this self-reinforcing, synchronous state, there’s no reason for the system to deviate. Many systems synchronize for similar reasons, with kicks replaced by other forms of influence.
Christiaan Huygens’ sketch of an experiment with a pair of pendulum clocks (top), and his attempt to understand why they synchronize (bottom). “B has gone again through the position BD when A is at AG, whereby the suspension A is drawn to the right, and therefore the vibration of pendulum A is being accelerated,” he wrote. “B is again in BK when A has been returned to position AF, whereby the suspension of B is drawn to the left, and therefore the vibration of pendulum B slows down. And so, when the vibration of pendulum B is steadily slowing down, and A is being accelerated, it is necessary that … they should move together in opposite beats….”
Reproduced from Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens (1888); Huygens’ passage from Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences (2002)
Another Dutchman, Engelbert Kaempfer, traveled to Thailand in 1690 and observed the local fireflies flashing simultaneously “with the utmost regularity and exactness.” Two centuries later, the English physicist John William Strutt (better known as Lord Rayleigh) noticed that standing two organ pipes side by side can “cause the pipes to speak in absolute unison, in spite of inevitable small differences.” Radio engineers in the 1920s discovered that wiring together electrical generators with different frequencies forced them to vibrate with a common frequency—the principle behind radio communication systems.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the pulsating chirps of crickets inspired the American theoretical biologist Art Winfree to propose a mathematical model of synchronization. Winfree’s equation was too difficult to solve, but in 1974, a Japanese physicist named Yoshiki Kuramoto saw how to simplify the math. Kuramoto’s model described a population of oscillators (things with rhythms, like metronomes and heartbeats) and showed why coupled oscillators spontaneously synchronize.
Kuramoto, then 34, had little prior experience in nonlinear dynamics, the study of the feedback loops that tangle together variables in the world. When he showed his model to experts in the discipline, they failed to grasp its significance. Discouraged, he set the work aside.
Five years later, Winfree came across a précis of a talk Kuramoto had given about his model and realized that it offered a revolutionary new understanding of a subtle phenomenon that pervades the world. Kuramoto’s math has proved versatile and extendable enough to account for synchronization in clusters of neurons, fireflies, pacemaker cells, starlings in flight, reacting chemicals, alternating currents and myriad other real-world populations of coupled “oscillators.”
“I didn’t imagine at all that my model would have a wide applicability,” said Kuramoto, now 78, by email.
But, as ubiquitous as Kuramoto’s model became, any illusions physicists had of understanding synchronization shattered in 2001. Once again, Kuramoto was at the center of the action.
Different Strokes
In Kuramoto’s original model, an oscillator can be pictured as an arrow that rotates in a circle at some natural frequency. (If it’s a firefly, it might flash every time the arrow points up.) When a pair of arrows are coupled, the strength of their mutual influence depends on the sine of the angle between their pointing directions. The bigger this angle, the bigger the sine, and therefore the stronger their mutual influence. Only when the arrows point in parallel directions, and rotate together, do they stop pulling on each other. Thus, the arrows will drift until they find this state of synchrony. Even oscillators that have different natural frequencies, when coupled, reach a compromise and oscillate in tandem.
But that basic picture only explains the onset of global synchronization, where a population of oscillators all do the same thing. As well as being the simplest kind of sync, “there are plenty of examples of global synchronization; that’s why people paid so much attention to that,” said Adilson Motter, a physicist at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a leading sync scientist. “But in 2001, Kuramoto discovered something very different. And that’s where the story of different states starts.”
Yoshiki Kuramoto, a professor of physics at Kyoto University, developed the famous Kuramoto model of synchronization in the 1970s and co-discovered the chimera state in 2001, again revolutionizing the understanding of sync.
Tomoaki Sukezane
It was Kuramoto’s Mongolian post-doc, Dorjsuren Battogtokh, who first noticed a new kind of synchronous behavior in a computer-simulated population of coupled oscillators. The identical oscillators, which were all identically coupled to their neighbors, had somehow split into two factions: Some oscillated in sync, while the rest drifted incoherently.
Kuramoto presented his and Battogtokh’s discovery at a 2001 meeting in Bristol, but the result didn’t register in the community until Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, came across it in the conference proceedings two years later. “When I came to understand what I was seeing in the graphics, I didn’t really believe it,” Strogatz said.
“What was so weird,” he explained, “was that the universe looks the same from every place” in the system. And yet the oscillators responded differently to identical conditions, some ganging together while the rest went their own way, as if not coupled to anything at all. The symmetry of the system “was broken,” Strogatz said, in a way that “had never been seen before.”
Strogatz and his graduate student Daniel Abrams, who now studies synchronization as a professor at Northwestern, reproduced the peculiar mix of synchrony and asynchrony in computer simulations of their own and explored the conditions under which it arises. Strogatz dubbed it the “chimera” state after a mythological fire-breathing monster made of incongruous parts. (Months earlier, Strogatz had written a popular book called Sync, about the pervasiveness of global synchronization.)
Two independent teams realized this chimera state in the lab in 2012, working in different physical systems, and more experiments have seen it since. Many researchers suspect chimeras arise naturally. The brain itself seems to be a complicated kind of chimera, in that it simultaneously sustains both synchronous and asynchronous firing of neurons. Last year, researchers found qualitative similarities between the destabilization of chimera states and epileptic seizures. “We believe that further detailed studies may open new therapeutic methods for promoting seizure prediction and termination,” said co-author Iryna Omelchenko of the University of Berlin.
But the chimera state is still not fully understood. Kuramoto worked out the math verifying that the state is self-consistent, and therefore possible, but that doesn’t explain why it arises. Strogatz and Abrams further developed the math, but other researchers want “a more seat-of-the-pants, physical explanation,” Strogatz said, adding, “I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t really hit the nail on the head yet” about why the chimera state occurs.
Good Vibrations
The discovery of chimeras ushered in a new era in sync science, revealing the conceivably countless exotic forms that synchronization can take. Now, theorists are working to pin down the rules for when and why the different patterns occur. These researchers have bold hopes of learning how to predict and control synchronization in many real-world contexts.
Motter and his team are finding rules about how to stabilize the synchronization of power grids and more stably integrate the U.S. grid with intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. Other researchers are looking for ways of nudging systems between different synchronous states, which could be useful for correcting irregular heartbeats. Novel forms of sync could have applications in encryption. Scientists speculate that brain function and even consciousness can be understood as a complicated and delicate balance of synchrony and asynchrony.
“There’s a lot of new vibrancy to thinking about sync,” said Raissa D’Souza, a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at University of California, Davis. “We’re gaining the tools to look at these exotic, intricate patterns beyond just simple, full synchronization or regions of synchronization and regions of randomness.”
Many of the new synchronization patterns arise in networks of oscillators, which have specific sets of connections, rather than all being coupled to one another, as assumed in the original Kuramoto model. Networks are better models of many real-world systems, like brains and the internet.
In a seminal paper in 2014, Louis Pecora of the United States Naval Research Laboratory and his co-authors put the pieces together about how to understand synchronization in networks. Building on previous work, they showed that networks break up into “clusters” of oscillators that synchronize. A special case of cluster sync is “remote synchronization,” in which oscillators that are not directly linked nonetheless sync up, forming a cluster, while the oscillators in between them behave differently, typically syncing up with another cluster. Remote synchronization jibes with findings about real-world networks, such as social networks. “Anecdotally it’s not your friend who influences your behavior so much as your friend’s friend,” D’Souza said.
In 2017, Motter’s group discovered that oscillators can remotely synchronize even when the oscillators between them are drifting incoherently. This scenario “breeds remote synchronization with chimera states,” he said. He and his colleagues hypothesize that this state could be relevant to neuronal information processing, since synchronous firing sometimes spans large distances in the brain. The state might also suggest new forms of secure communication and encryption.
Then there’s chaotic synchronization, where oscillators that are individually unpredictable nonetheless sync up and evolve together.
As theorists explore the math underpinning these exotic states, experimentalists have been devising new and better platforms for studying them. “Everyone prefers their own system,” said Matthew Matheny of the California Institute of Technology. In a paper in Science last month, Matheny, D’Souza, Michael Roukes and 12 co-authors reported a menagerie of new synchronous states in a network of “nanoelectromechanical oscillators,” or NEMs — essentially miniature electric drumheads, in this case. The researchers studied a ring of eight NEMs, where each one’s vibrations send electrical impulses to its nearest neighbors in the ring. Despite the simplicity of this eight-oscillator system, “we started seeing a lot of crazy things,” Matheny said.
The researchers documented 16 synchronous states that the system fell into under different initial settings, though many more, rare states might be possible. In many cases, NEMs decoupled from their nearest neighbors and remotely synchronized, vibrating in phase with tiny drumheads elsewhere in the ring. For example, in one pattern, two nearest neighbors oscillated together, but the next pair adopted a different phase; the third pair synced up with the first and the fourth pair with the second. They also found chimeralike states (though it’s hard to prove that such a small system is a true chimera).
NEMs are more complicated than simple Kuramoto oscillators in that the frequency at which they oscillate affects their amplitude (roughly, their loudness). This inherent, self-referential “nonlinearity” of each NEM gives rise to complex mathematical relationships between them. For instance, the phase of one can affect the amplitude of its neighbor, which affects the phase of its next-nearest neighbor. The ring of NEMs serves as “a proxy for other things that are out in the wild,” said Strogatz. When you include a second variable, like amplitude variations, “that opens up a new zoo of phenomena.”
Roukes, who is a professor of physics, applied physics and biological engineering at Caltech, is most interested in what the ring of NEMs suggests about huge networks like the brain. “This is very, very primordial compared to the complexity of the brain,” he said. “If we already see this explosion in complexity, then it seems feasible to me that a network of 200 billion nodes and 2,000 trillion [connections] would have enough complexity to sustain consciousness.”
Broken Symmetries
In the quest to understand and control the way things sync up, scientists are searching for the mathematical rules dictating when different synchronization patterns occur. That major research effort is unfinished, but it’s already clear that synchronization is a direct manifestation of symmetry — and the way it breaks.
The link between synchronization and symmetry was first solidified by Pecora and co-authors in their 2014 paper on cluster synchronization. The scientists mapped the different synchronized clusters that can form in a network of oscillators to that network’s symmetries. In this context, symmetries refer to the ways a network’s oscillators can be swapped without changing the network, just as a square can be rotated 90 degrees or reflected horizontally, vertically or diagonally without changing its appearance.
D’Souza, Matheny and their colleagues applied the same potent formalism in their recent studies with NEMs. Roughly speaking, the ring of eight NEMs has the symmetries of an octagon. But as the eight tiny drums vibrate and the system evolves, some of these symmetries spontaneously break; the NEMs divide into synchronous clusters that correspond to subgroups of the “symmetry group” called D8, which specifies all the ways you can rotate and reflect an octagon that leave it unchanged. When the NEMs sync up with their next-nearest neighbors, for example, alternating their pattern around the ring, D8 reduces to the subgroup D4. This means the network of NEMs can be rotated by two positions or reflected across two axes without changing the pattern.
Even chimeras can be described in the language of clusters and symmetry subgroups. “The synchronized part is one big synchronized cluster, and the desynchronized part is a bunch of single clusters,” said Joe Hart, an experimentalist at the Naval Research Lab who collaborates with Pecora and Motter.
Synchronization seems to spring from symmetry, and yet scientists have also discovered that asymmetry helps stabilize synchronous states. “It is a little bit paradoxical,” Hart admitted. In February, Motter, Hart, Raj Roy of the University of Maryland and Yuanzhao Zhang of Northwestern reported in Physical Review Letters that introducing an asymmetry into a cluster actually strengthens its synchrony. For example, making the coupling between two oscillators in the cluster unidirectional instead of mutual not only doesn’t disturb the cluster’s synchrony, it actually makes its state more robust to noise and perturbations from elsewhere in the network.
These findings about asymmetry hold in experiments with artificial power grids. At the American Physical Society meeting in Boston last month, Motter presented unpublished results suggesting that “generators can more easily oscillate at the exact same frequency, as desired, if their parameters are suitably different,” as he put it. He thinks nature’s penchant for asymmetry will make it easier to stably sync up diverse energy supplies.
“A variety of tasks can be achieved by a suitable combination of synchrony and asynchrony,” Kuramoto observed in an email. “Without a doubt, the processes of biological evolution must have developed this highly useful mechanism. I expect man-made systems will also become much more functionally flexible by introducing similar mechanisms.”
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
More Great WIRED Stories
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The Math of How Crickets, Starlings and Neurons Sync Up
New Post has been published on http://croopdiseno.com/the-math-of-how-crickets-starlings-and-neurons-sync-up/
The Math of How Crickets, Starlings and Neurons Sync Up
When the incoherent claps of a crowd suddenly become a pulse, as everyone starts clapping in unison, who decided? Not you; not anyone. Crickets sing in synchrony; metronomes placed side by side sway into lockstep; some fireflies blink together in the dark. All across the United States, the power grid operates at 60 hertz, its innumerable tributaries of alternating current synchronizing of their own accord. Indeed, we live because of synchronization. Neurons in our brains fire in synchronous patterns to operate our bodies and minds, and pacemaker cells in our hearts sync up to generate the beat.
Quanta Magazine
About
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Objects with rhythms naturally synchronize. Yet the phenomenon went entirely undocumented until 1665, when the Dutch physicist and inventor Christiaan Huygens spent a few days sick in bed. A pair of new pendulum clocks—a kind of timekeeping device that Huygens invented—hung side by side on the wall. Huygens noticed that the pendulums swung exactly in unison, always lurching toward each other and then away. Perhaps pressure from the air was synchronizing their swings? He conducted various experiments. Standing a table upright between the clocks had no effect on their synchronization, for instance. But when he rehung the clocks far apart or at right angles to each other, they soon fell out of phase. Huygens eventually inferred that the clocks’ “sympathy,” as he called it, resulted from the kicks that their swings gave each other through the wall.
When the left pendulum swings left, it kicks the wall and the other pendulum rightward, and vice versa. The clocks kick each other around until they and the wall attain their most stable, relaxed state. For the pendulums, the most stable behavior is to move in opposite directions, so that each pushes the other in the direction it’s already going, the way you push a child on a swing. And this is also easiest for the wall; it no longer moves at all, because the pendulums are giving it equal and opposite kicks. Once in this self-reinforcing, synchronous state, there’s no reason for the system to deviate. Many systems synchronize for similar reasons, with kicks replaced by other forms of influence.
Christiaan Huygens’ sketch of an experiment with a pair of pendulum clocks (top), and his attempt to understand why they synchronize (bottom). “B has gone again through the position BD when A is at AG, whereby the suspension A is drawn to the right, and therefore the vibration of pendulum A is being accelerated,” he wrote. “B is again in BK when A has been returned to position AF, whereby the suspension of B is drawn to the left, and therefore the vibration of pendulum B slows down. And so, when the vibration of pendulum B is steadily slowing down, and A is being accelerated, it is necessary that … they should move together in opposite beats….”
Reproduced from Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens (1888); Huygens’ passage from Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences (2002)
Another Dutchman, Engelbert Kaempfer, traveled to Thailand in 1690 and observed the local fireflies flashing simultaneously “with the utmost regularity and exactness.” Two centuries later, the English physicist John William Strutt (better known as Lord Rayleigh) noticed that standing two organ pipes side by side can “cause the pipes to speak in absolute unison, in spite of inevitable small differences.” Radio engineers in the 1920s discovered that wiring together electrical generators with different frequencies forced them to vibrate with a common frequency—the principle behind radio communication systems.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the pulsating chirps of crickets inspired the American theoretical biologist Art Winfree to propose a mathematical model of synchronization. Winfree’s equation was too difficult to solve, but in 1974, a Japanese physicist named Yoshiki Kuramoto saw how to simplify the math. Kuramoto’s model described a population of oscillators (things with rhythms, like metronomes and heartbeats) and showed why coupled oscillators spontaneously synchronize.
Kuramoto, then 34, had little prior experience in nonlinear dynamics, the study of the feedback loops that tangle together variables in the world. When he showed his model to experts in the discipline, they failed to grasp its significance. Discouraged, he set the work aside.
Five years later, Winfree came across a précis of a talk Kuramoto had given about his model and realized that it offered a revolutionary new understanding of a subtle phenomenon that pervades the world. Kuramoto’s math has proved versatile and extendable enough to account for synchronization in clusters of neurons, fireflies, pacemaker cells, starlings in flight, reacting chemicals, alternating currents and myriad other real-world populations of coupled “oscillators.”
“I didn’t imagine at all that my model would have a wide applicability,” said Kuramoto, now 78, by email.
But, as ubiquitous as Kuramoto’s model became, any illusions physicists had of understanding synchronization shattered in 2001. Once again, Kuramoto was at the center of the action.
Different Strokes
In Kuramoto’s original model, an oscillator can be pictured as an arrow that rotates in a circle at some natural frequency. (If it’s a firefly, it might flash every time the arrow points up.) When a pair of arrows are coupled, the strength of their mutual influence depends on the sine of the angle between their pointing directions. The bigger this angle, the bigger the sine, and therefore the stronger their mutual influence. Only when the arrows point in parallel directions, and rotate together, do they stop pulling on each other. Thus, the arrows will drift until they find this state of synchrony. Even oscillators that have different natural frequencies, when coupled, reach a compromise and oscillate in tandem.
But that basic picture only explains the onset of global synchronization, where a population of oscillators all do the same thing. As well as being the simplest kind of sync, “there are plenty of examples of global synchronization; that’s why people paid so much attention to that,” said Adilson Motter, a physicist at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a leading sync scientist. “But in 2001, Kuramoto discovered something very different. And that’s where the story of different states starts.”
Yoshiki Kuramoto, a professor of physics at Kyoto University, developed the famous Kuramoto model of synchronization in the 1970s and co-discovered the chimera state in 2001, again revolutionizing the understanding of sync.
Tomoaki Sukezane
It was Kuramoto’s Mongolian post-doc, Dorjsuren Battogtokh, who first noticed a new kind of synchronous behavior in a computer-simulated population of coupled oscillators. The identical oscillators, which were all identically coupled to their neighbors, had somehow split into two factions: Some oscillated in sync, while the rest drifted incoherently.
Kuramoto presented his and Battogtokh’s discovery at a 2001 meeting in Bristol, but the result didn’t register in the community until Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, came across it in the conference proceedings two years later. “When I came to understand what I was seeing in the graphics, I didn’t really believe it,” Strogatz said.
“What was so weird,” he explained, “was that the universe looks the same from every place” in the system. And yet the oscillators responded differently to identical conditions, some ganging together while the rest went their own way, as if not coupled to anything at all. The symmetry of the system “was broken,” Strogatz said, in a way that “had never been seen before.”
Strogatz and his graduate student Daniel Abrams, who now studies synchronization as a professor at Northwestern, reproduced the peculiar mix of synchrony and asynchrony in computer simulations of their own and explored the conditions under which it arises. Strogatz dubbed it the “chimera” state after a mythological fire-breathing monster made of incongruous parts. (Months earlier, Strogatz had written a popular book called Sync, about the pervasiveness of global synchronization.)
Two independent teams realized this chimera state in the lab in 2012, working in different physical systems, and more experiments have seen it since. Many researchers suspect chimeras arise naturally. The brain itself seems to be a complicated kind of chimera, in that it simultaneously sustains both synchronous and asynchronous firing of neurons. Last year, researchers found qualitative similarities between the destabilization of chimera states and epileptic seizures. “We believe that further detailed studies may open new therapeutic methods for promoting seizure prediction and termination,” said co-author Iryna Omelchenko of the University of Berlin.
But the chimera state is still not fully understood. Kuramoto worked out the math verifying that the state is self-consistent, and therefore possible, but that doesn’t explain why it arises. Strogatz and Abrams further developed the math, but other researchers want “a more seat-of-the-pants, physical explanation,” Strogatz said, adding, “I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t really hit the nail on the head yet” about why the chimera state occurs.
Good Vibrations
The discovery of chimeras ushered in a new era in sync science, revealing the conceivably countless exotic forms that synchronization can take. Now, theorists are working to pin down the rules for when and why the different patterns occur. These researchers have bold hopes of learning how to predict and control synchronization in many real-world contexts.
Motter and his team are finding rules about how to stabilize the synchronization of power grids and more stably integrate the U.S. grid with intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. Other researchers are looking for ways of nudging systems between different synchronous states, which could be useful for correcting irregular heartbeats. Novel forms of sync could have applications in encryption. Scientists speculate that brain function and even consciousness can be understood as a complicated and delicate balance of synchrony and asynchrony.
“There’s a lot of new vibrancy to thinking about sync,” said Raissa D’Souza, a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at University of California, Davis. “We’re gaining the tools to look at these exotic, intricate patterns beyond just simple, full synchronization or regions of synchronization and regions of randomness.”
Many of the new synchronization patterns arise in networks of oscillators, which have specific sets of connections, rather than all being coupled to one another, as assumed in the original Kuramoto model. Networks are better models of many real-world systems, like brains and the internet.
In a seminal paper in 2014, Louis Pecora of the United States Naval Research Laboratory and his co-authors put the pieces together about how to understand synchronization in networks. Building on previous work, they showed that networks break up into “clusters” of oscillators that synchronize. A special case of cluster sync is “remote synchronization,” in which oscillators that are not directly linked nonetheless sync up, forming a cluster, while the oscillators in between them behave differently, typically syncing up with another cluster. Remote synchronization jibes with findings about real-world networks, such as social networks. “Anecdotally it’s not your friend who influences your behavior so much as your friend’s friend,” D’Souza said.
In 2017, Motter’s group discovered that oscillators can remotely synchronize even when the oscillators between them are drifting incoherently. This scenario “breeds remote synchronization with chimera states,” he said. He and his colleagues hypothesize that this state could be relevant to neuronal information processing, since synchronous firing sometimes spans large distances in the brain. The state might also suggest new forms of secure communication and encryption.
Then there’s chaotic synchronization, where oscillators that are individually unpredictable nonetheless sync up and evolve together.
As theorists explore the math underpinning these exotic states, experimentalists have been devising new and better platforms for studying them. “Everyone prefers their own system,” said Matthew Matheny of the California Institute of Technology. In a paper in Science last month, Matheny, D’Souza, Michael Roukes and 12 co-authors reported a menagerie of new synchronous states in a network of “nanoelectromechanical oscillators,” or NEMs — essentially miniature electric drumheads, in this case. The researchers studied a ring of eight NEMs, where each one’s vibrations send electrical impulses to its nearest neighbors in the ring. Despite the simplicity of this eight-oscillator system, “we started seeing a lot of crazy things,” Matheny said.
The researchers documented 16 synchronous states that the system fell into under different initial settings, though many more, rare states might be possible. In many cases, NEMs decoupled from their nearest neighbors and remotely synchronized, vibrating in phase with tiny drumheads elsewhere in the ring. For example, in one pattern, two nearest neighbors oscillated together, but the next pair adopted a different phase; the third pair synced up with the first and the fourth pair with the second. They also found chimeralike states (though it’s hard to prove that such a small system is a true chimera).
NEMs are more complicated than simple Kuramoto oscillators in that the frequency at which they oscillate affects their amplitude (roughly, their loudness). This inherent, self-referential “nonlinearity” of each NEM gives rise to complex mathematical relationships between them. For instance, the phase of one can affect the amplitude of its neighbor, which affects the phase of its next-nearest neighbor. The ring of NEMs serves as “a proxy for other things that are out in the wild,” said Strogatz. When you include a second variable, like amplitude variations, “that opens up a new zoo of phenomena.”
Roukes, who is a professor of physics, applied physics and biological engineering at Caltech, is most interested in what the ring of NEMs suggests about huge networks like the brain. “This is very, very primordial compared to the complexity of the brain,” he said. “If we already see this explosion in complexity, then it seems feasible to me that a network of 200 billion nodes and 2,000 trillion [connections] would have enough complexity to sustain consciousness.”
Broken Symmetries
In the quest to understand and control the way things sync up, scientists are searching for the mathematical rules dictating when different synchronization patterns occur. That major research effort is unfinished, but it’s already clear that synchronization is a direct manifestation of symmetry — and the way it breaks.
The link between synchronization and symmetry was first solidified by Pecora and co-authors in their 2014 paper on cluster synchronization. The scientists mapped the different synchronized clusters that can form in a network of oscillators to that network’s symmetries. In this context, symmetries refer to the ways a network’s oscillators can be swapped without changing the network, just as a square can be rotated 90 degrees or reflected horizontally, vertically or diagonally without changing its appearance.
D’Souza, Matheny and their colleagues applied the same potent formalism in their recent studies with NEMs. Roughly speaking, the ring of eight NEMs has the symmetries of an octagon. But as the eight tiny drums vibrate and the system evolves, some of these symmetries spontaneously break; the NEMs divide into synchronous clusters that correspond to subgroups of the “symmetry group” called D8, which specifies all the ways you can rotate and reflect an octagon that leave it unchanged. When the NEMs sync up with their next-nearest neighbors, for example, alternating their pattern around the ring, D8 reduces to the subgroup D4. This means the network of NEMs can be rotated by two positions or reflected across two axes without changing the pattern.
Even chimeras can be described in the language of clusters and symmetry subgroups. “The synchronized part is one big synchronized cluster, and the desynchronized part is a bunch of single clusters,” said Joe Hart, an experimentalist at the Naval Research Lab who collaborates with Pecora and Motter.
Synchronization seems to spring from symmetry, and yet scientists have also discovered that asymmetry helps stabilize synchronous states. “It is a little bit paradoxical,” Hart admitted. In February, Motter, Hart, Raj Roy of the University of Maryland and Yuanzhao Zhang of Northwestern reported in Physical Review Letters that introducing an asymmetry into a cluster actually strengthens its synchrony. For example, making the coupling between two oscillators in the cluster unidirectional instead of mutual not only doesn’t disturb the cluster’s synchrony, it actually makes its state more robust to noise and perturbations from elsewhere in the network.
These findings about asymmetry hold in experiments with artificial power grids. At the American Physical Society meeting in Boston last month, Motter presented unpublished results suggesting that “generators can more easily oscillate at the exact same frequency, as desired, if their parameters are suitably different,” as he put it. He thinks nature’s penchant for asymmetry will make it easier to stably sync up diverse energy supplies.
“A variety of tasks can be achieved by a suitable combination of synchrony and asynchrony,” Kuramoto observed in an email. “Without a doubt, the processes of biological evolution must have developed this highly useful mechanism. I expect man-made systems will also become much more functionally flexible by introducing similar mechanisms.”
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
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The Math of How Crickets, Starlings and Neurons Sync Up
New Post has been published on http://team77.com/the-math-of-how-crickets-starlings-and-neurons-sync-up/
The Math of How Crickets, Starlings and Neurons Sync Up
When the incoherent claps of a crowd suddenly become a pulse, as everyone starts clapping in unison, who decided? Not you; not anyone. Crickets sing in synchrony; metronomes placed side by side sway into lockstep; some fireflies blink together in the dark. All across the United States, the power grid operates at 60 hertz, its innumerable tributaries of alternating current synchronizing of their own accord. Indeed, we live because of synchronization. Neurons in our brains fire in synchronous patterns to operate our bodies and minds, and pacemaker cells in our hearts sync up to generate the beat.
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Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Objects with rhythms naturally synchronize. Yet the phenomenon went entirely undocumented until 1665, when the Dutch physicist and inventor Christiaan Huygens spent a few days sick in bed. A pair of new pendulum clocks—a kind of timekeeping device that Huygens invented—hung side by side on the wall. Huygens noticed that the pendulums swung exactly in unison, always lurching toward each other and then away. Perhaps pressure from the air was synchronizing their swings? He conducted various experiments. Standing a table upright between the clocks had no effect on their synchronization, for instance. But when he rehung the clocks far apart or at right angles to each other, they soon fell out of phase. Huygens eventually inferred that the clocks’ “sympathy,” as he called it, resulted from the kicks that their swings gave each other through the wall.
When the left pendulum swings left, it kicks the wall and the other pendulum rightward, and vice versa. The clocks kick each other around until they and the wall attain their most stable, relaxed state. For the pendulums, the most stable behavior is to move in opposite directions, so that each pushes the other in the direction it’s already going, the way you push a child on a swing. And this is also easiest for the wall; it no longer moves at all, because the pendulums are giving it equal and opposite kicks. Once in this self-reinforcing, synchronous state, there’s no reason for the system to deviate. Many systems synchronize for similar reasons, with kicks replaced by other forms of influence.
Christiaan Huygens’ sketch of an experiment with a pair of pendulum clocks (top), and his attempt to understand why they synchronize (bottom). “B has gone again through the position BD when A is at AG, whereby the suspension A is drawn to the right, and therefore the vibration of pendulum A is being accelerated,” he wrote. “B is again in BK when A has been returned to position AF, whereby the suspension of B is drawn to the left, and therefore the vibration of pendulum B slows down. And so, when the vibration of pendulum B is steadily slowing down, and A is being accelerated, it is necessary that … they should move together in opposite beats….”
Reproduced from Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens (1888); Huygens’ passage from Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences (2002)
Another Dutchman, Engelbert Kaempfer, traveled to Thailand in 1690 and observed the local fireflies flashing simultaneously “with the utmost regularity and exactness.” Two centuries later, the English physicist John William Strutt (better known as Lord Rayleigh) noticed that standing two organ pipes side by side can “cause the pipes to speak in absolute unison, in spite of inevitable small differences.” Radio engineers in the 1920s discovered that wiring together electrical generators with different frequencies forced them to vibrate with a common frequency—the principle behind radio communication systems.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the pulsating chirps of crickets inspired the American theoretical biologist Art Winfree to propose a mathematical model of synchronization. Winfree’s equation was too difficult to solve, but in 1974, a Japanese physicist named Yoshiki Kuramoto saw how to simplify the math. Kuramoto’s model described a population of oscillators (things with rhythms, like metronomes and heartbeats) and showed why coupled oscillators spontaneously synchronize.
Kuramoto, then 34, had little prior experience in nonlinear dynamics, the study of the feedback loops that tangle together variables in the world. When he showed his model to experts in the discipline, they failed to grasp its significance. Discouraged, he set the work aside.
Five years later, Winfree came across a précis of a talk Kuramoto had given about his model and realized that it offered a revolutionary new understanding of a subtle phenomenon that pervades the world. Kuramoto’s math has proved versatile and extendable enough to account for synchronization in clusters of neurons, fireflies, pacemaker cells, starlings in flight, reacting chemicals, alternating currents and myriad other real-world populations of coupled “oscillators.”
“I didn’t imagine at all that my model would have a wide applicability,” said Kuramoto, now 78, by email.
But, as ubiquitous as Kuramoto’s model became, any illusions physicists had of understanding synchronization shattered in 2001. Once again, Kuramoto was at the center of the action.
Different Strokes
In Kuramoto’s original model, an oscillator can be pictured as an arrow that rotates in a circle at some natural frequency. (If it’s a firefly, it might flash every time the arrow points up.) When a pair of arrows are coupled, the strength of their mutual influence depends on the sine of the angle between their pointing directions. The bigger this angle, the bigger the sine, and therefore the stronger their mutual influence. Only when the arrows point in parallel directions, and rotate together, do they stop pulling on each other. Thus, the arrows will drift until they find this state of synchrony. Even oscillators that have different natural frequencies, when coupled, reach a compromise and oscillate in tandem.
But that basic picture only explains the onset of global synchronization, where a population of oscillators all do the same thing. As well as being the simplest kind of sync, “there are plenty of examples of global synchronization; that’s why people paid so much attention to that,” said Adilson Motter, a physicist at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a leading sync scientist. “But in 2001, Kuramoto discovered something very different. And that’s where the story of different states starts.”
Yoshiki Kuramoto, a professor of physics at Kyoto University, developed the famous Kuramoto model of synchronization in the 1970s and co-discovered the chimera state in 2001, again revolutionizing the understanding of sync.
Tomoaki Sukezane
It was Kuramoto’s Mongolian post-doc, Dorjsuren Battogtokh, who first noticed a new kind of synchronous behavior in a computer-simulated population of coupled oscillators. The identical oscillators, which were all identically coupled to their neighbors, had somehow split into two factions: Some oscillated in sync, while the rest drifted incoherently.
Kuramoto presented his and Battogtokh’s discovery at a 2001 meeting in Bristol, but the result didn’t register in the community until Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, came across it in the conference proceedings two years later. “When I came to understand what I was seeing in the graphics, I didn’t really believe it,” Strogatz said.
“What was so weird,” he explained, “was that the universe looks the same from every place” in the system. And yet the oscillators responded differently to identical conditions, some ganging together while the rest went their own way, as if not coupled to anything at all. The symmetry of the system “was broken,” Strogatz said, in a way that “had never been seen before.”
Strogatz and his graduate student Daniel Abrams, who now studies synchronization as a professor at Northwestern, reproduced the peculiar mix of synchrony and asynchrony in computer simulations of their own and explored the conditions under which it arises. Strogatz dubbed it the “chimera” state after a mythological fire-breathing monster made of incongruous parts. (Months earlier, Strogatz had written a popular book called Sync, about the pervasiveness of global synchronization.)
Two independent teams realized this chimera state in the lab in 2012, working in different physical systems, and more experiments have seen it since. Many researchers suspect chimeras arise naturally. The brain itself seems to be a complicated kind of chimera, in that it simultaneously sustains both synchronous and asynchronous firing of neurons. Last year, researchers found qualitative similarities between the destabilization of chimera states and epileptic seizures. “We believe that further detailed studies may open new therapeutic methods for promoting seizure prediction and termination,” said co-author Iryna Omelchenko of the University of Berlin.
But the chimera state is still not fully understood. Kuramoto worked out the math verifying that the state is self-consistent, and therefore possible, but that doesn’t explain why it arises. Strogatz and Abrams further developed the math, but other researchers want “a more seat-of-the-pants, physical explanation,” Strogatz said, adding, “I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t really hit the nail on the head yet” about why the chimera state occurs.
Good Vibrations
The discovery of chimeras ushered in a new era in sync science, revealing the conceivably countless exotic forms that synchronization can take. Now, theorists are working to pin down the rules for when and why the different patterns occur. These researchers have bold hopes of learning how to predict and control synchronization in many real-world contexts.
Motter and his team are finding rules about how to stabilize the synchronization of power grids and more stably integrate the U.S. grid with intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. Other researchers are looking for ways of nudging systems between different synchronous states, which could be useful for correcting irregular heartbeats. Novel forms of sync could have applications in encryption. Scientists speculate that brain function and even consciousness can be understood as a complicated and delicate balance of synchrony and asynchrony.
“There’s a lot of new vibrancy to thinking about sync,” said Raissa D’Souza, a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at University of California, Davis. “We’re gaining the tools to look at these exotic, intricate patterns beyond just simple, full synchronization or regions of synchronization and regions of randomness.”
Many of the new synchronization patterns arise in networks of oscillators, which have specific sets of connections, rather than all being coupled to one another, as assumed in the original Kuramoto model. Networks are better models of many real-world systems, like brains and the internet.
In a seminal paper in 2014, Louis Pecora of the United States Naval Research Laboratory and his co-authors put the pieces together about how to understand synchronization in networks. Building on previous work, they showed that networks break up into “clusters” of oscillators that synchronize. A special case of cluster sync is “remote synchronization,” in which oscillators that are not directly linked nonetheless sync up, forming a cluster, while the oscillators in between them behave differently, typically syncing up with another cluster. Remote synchronization jibes with findings about real-world networks, such as social networks. “Anecdotally it’s not your friend who influences your behavior so much as your friend’s friend,” D’Souza said.
In 2017, Motter’s group discovered that oscillators can remotely synchronize even when the oscillators between them are drifting incoherently. This scenario “breeds remote synchronization with chimera states,” he said. He and his colleagues hypothesize that this state could be relevant to neuronal information processing, since synchronous firing sometimes spans large distances in the brain. The state might also suggest new forms of secure communication and encryption.
Then there’s chaotic synchronization, where oscillators that are individually unpredictable nonetheless sync up and evolve together.
As theorists explore the math underpinning these exotic states, experimentalists have been devising new and better platforms for studying them. “Everyone prefers their own system,” said Matthew Matheny of the California Institute of Technology. In a paper in Science last month, Matheny, D’Souza, Michael Roukes and 12 co-authors reported a menagerie of new synchronous states in a network of “nanoelectromechanical oscillators,” or NEMs — essentially miniature electric drumheads, in this case. The researchers studied a ring of eight NEMs, where each one’s vibrations send electrical impulses to its nearest neighbors in the ring. Despite the simplicity of this eight-oscillator system, “we started seeing a lot of crazy things,” Matheny said.
The researchers documented 16 synchronous states that the system fell into under different initial settings, though many more, rare states might be possible. In many cases, NEMs decoupled from their nearest neighbors and remotely synchronized, vibrating in phase with tiny drumheads elsewhere in the ring. For example, in one pattern, two nearest neighbors oscillated together, but the next pair adopted a different phase; the third pair synced up with the first and the fourth pair with the second. They also found chimeralike states (though it’s hard to prove that such a small system is a true chimera).
NEMs are more complicated than simple Kuramoto oscillators in that the frequency at which they oscillate affects their amplitude (roughly, their loudness). This inherent, self-referential “nonlinearity” of each NEM gives rise to complex mathematical relationships between them. For instance, the phase of one can affect the amplitude of its neighbor, which affects the phase of its next-nearest neighbor. The ring of NEMs serves as “a proxy for other things that are out in the wild,” said Strogatz. When you include a second variable, like amplitude variations, “that opens up a new zoo of phenomena.”
Roukes, who is a professor of physics, applied physics and biological engineering at Caltech, is most interested in what the ring of NEMs suggests about huge networks like the brain. “This is very, very primordial compared to the complexity of the brain,” he said. “If we already see this explosion in complexity, then it seems feasible to me that a network of 200 billion nodes and 2,000 trillion [connections] would have enough complexity to sustain consciousness.”
Broken Symmetries
In the quest to understand and control the way things sync up, scientists are searching for the mathematical rules dictating when different synchronization patterns occur. That major research effort is unfinished, but it’s already clear that synchronization is a direct manifestation of symmetry — and the way it breaks.
The link between synchronization and symmetry was first solidified by Pecora and co-authors in their 2014 paper on cluster synchronization. The scientists mapped the different synchronized clusters that can form in a network of oscillators to that network’s symmetries. In this context, symmetries refer to the ways a network’s oscillators can be swapped without changing the network, just as a square can be rotated 90 degrees or reflected horizontally, vertically or diagonally without changing its appearance.
D’Souza, Matheny and their colleagues applied the same potent formalism in their recent studies with NEMs. Roughly speaking, the ring of eight NEMs has the symmetries of an octagon. But as the eight tiny drums vibrate and the system evolves, some of these symmetries spontaneously break; the NEMs divide into synchronous clusters that correspond to subgroups of the “symmetry group” called D8, which specifies all the ways you can rotate and reflect an octagon that leave it unchanged. When the NEMs sync up with their next-nearest neighbors, for example, alternating their pattern around the ring, D8 reduces to the subgroup D4. This means the network of NEMs can be rotated by two positions or reflected across two axes without changing the pattern.
Even chimeras can be described in the language of clusters and symmetry subgroups. “The synchronized part is one big synchronized cluster, and the desynchronized part is a bunch of single clusters,” said Joe Hart, an experimentalist at the Naval Research Lab who collaborates with Pecora and Motter.
Synchronization seems to spring from symmetry, and yet scientists have also discovered that asymmetry helps stabilize synchronous states. “It is a little bit paradoxical,” Hart admitted. In February, Motter, Hart, Raj Roy of the University of Maryland and Yuanzhao Zhang of Northwestern reported in Physical Review Letters that introducing an asymmetry into a cluster actually strengthens its synchrony. For example, making the coupling between two oscillators in the cluster unidirectional instead of mutual not only doesn’t disturb the cluster’s synchrony, it actually makes its state more robust to noise and perturbations from elsewhere in the network.
These findings about asymmetry hold in experiments with artificial power grids. At the American Physical Society meeting in Boston last month, Motter presented unpublished results suggesting that “generators can more easily oscillate at the exact same frequency, as desired, if their parameters are suitably different,” as he put it. He thinks nature’s penchant for asymmetry will make it easier to stably sync up diverse energy supplies.
“A variety of tasks can be achieved by a suitable combination of synchrony and asynchrony,” Kuramoto observed in an email. “Without a doubt, the processes of biological evolution must have developed this highly useful mechanism. I expect man-made systems will also become much more functionally flexible by introducing similar mechanisms.”
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
More Great WIRED Stories
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Copper Still Says A Trade Agreement Is On The Horizon
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Copper Still Says A Trade Agreement Is On The Horizon
Doctor copper has a long history as a bellwether commodity when it comes to the health and wellbeing of the global economy. We can debate the efficiency of the copper price as a leading indicator, but recently the red metal has been watching and reacting to the ongoing negotiations between the United States and China over trade.
During the 2016 election campaign, President Trump promised that he would level the playing field for trade with the nation with the world’s second leading economy. The Commander-in-Chief pointed his finger directly at China as an abuser of US trade policies. While he did not blame China and expressed his disdain for previous US administrations that allowed the Chinese to take advantage of the US, he pledged to remedy the situation if elected. In 2018, the President began the negotiations by slapping tariffs on China that have weakened their economy which has been a benefit when it comes to the discussions surrounding a new framework for trade that will end the period of protectionism by the US and retaliation by the
Chinese when it comes to US goods.
With the 2020 election season gearing up, President Trump wants to deliver on his promise to level the playing field when it comes to trade with the Chinese. A victory would be a political bonus as he hits the campaign trail in his re-election bid. The copper market has been telling us that success is on the horizon as the price of the red metal has been moving towards the $3 per pound level after trading to a low at under $2.55 at the start of 2019.
BHP Group (BBL) is based in Melbourne, Australia, but the company’s tentacles reach around the globe. BHP is one of the leading natural resources firms in the world and a leading producer of copper as it operates the largest copper mine in Chile and properties around the globe that produce the red metal. A rise in the price of copper above the $3 level would support gains in the price of BBL shares.
The price action in the red metal has been strong
Copper came into 2019 with a whimper as the price dropped to a low at $2.5430 per pound on January 3, the second day of trading of the year. Since then, the price of copper has recovered and traded at the highest level since June 2018 when it was on its way lower on the back of the trade dispute between the US and China.
On the way down, copper broke below multiple levels of technical support, the last being at $2.8750 which was the September 2017 low. In February, the price rose above that level.
Source: CQG
As the weekly chart highlights, the price of copper rallied steadily from the early January low through the end of February when the price ran out of steam on the upside at $2.9780 on the nearby COMEX futures contract. After a correction that took copper back to $2.8335 in March, the price moved to a marginally higher high at $2.9885 on April 1. The price of the base metal was trading just below the $2.90 per pound level at the end of last week with price momentum in slightly overbought territory and relative strength at the upper region of a neutral condition. Open interest has been flatlining around the 250,000-contract level since early February as copper has been following the ups and downs of the flow of trade negotiations between the US and China.
At around $2.90 per pound, the copper market remains optimistic that a trade deal is on the horizon.
An analysis of LME and COMEX stockpiles yields a bullish conclusion
In March 2018, copper inventories on the London Metals Exchange moved to a high at over 388,000 metric tons. In mid-March 2019, the stockpiles in LME warehouses had declined to a low at 111,775 tons, a drop of over 71%.
Source: LME/Kitco
As the chart shows, LME stocks suddenly increased in mid-March to 186,425 tons from the low which likely put some downside pressure on the price of copper which fell to $2.8335 during the week of March 25. However, stocks had been edging lower since the recent high and stood at 167,425 tons as of April 2. On April 4, they rose to 198,325 tons which put some pressure on the price of the red metal at the end of last week.
Meanwhile, stocks of copper in COMEX warehouses moved lower over the past two months.
Source: LME/COMEX
As the chart shows, COMEX inventories declined from around 82,000 tons to 41,425 tons as of April 4.
Overall, the current level of copper stockpiles on the two leading exchanges in the world is supportive of the price of the red metal. Declining stocks is a sign of robust demand for the red metal. I will be keeping an eye on the LME stocks next week. If they rise above the 200,000-ton level, we could see further corrective price action.
The monthly chart has shifted to an uptrend
The longer-term monthly copper chart shows that the base metal rose to an overbought condition and remained in overbought territory from mid-2017 through early 2018. Last June, the threat of a strike at the world’s leading copper mine, Escondida in Chile, caused a short-term price spike that took the metal to 0.65 cents under the late 2017 peak at $3.3220 per pound. However, a settlement between the mine’s management BHP and workers combined with the escalating tariffs on
China by the US and Chinese retaliation caused the price to fall like a stone. To just over the $2.50 per pound level in August 2018.
Source: CQG
As the monthly chart shows, the price spent around four months consolidating between just over $2.50 and under the $2.8750 technical resistance level when price momentum declined into an oversold condition. Rising optimism over a new framework for trade between the US and China lifted the price of copper over its technical resistance price at $2.8750 and pushed the price to just shy of $3 per pound and price momentum crossed to the upside on the longer-term chart and is now in neutral territory.
China is a massive consumer of the metal
The trade dispute has weighed on China’s economy, but economic growth in the world’s most populous nation was still at over 6.5% in 2018. China continues to grow, and that means that the demand for infrastructure building across the country of 1.4 billion people is rising. At the same time, President Xi rolled out a program to reduce pollution near many Chinese cities which caused a reduction in the smelting and refining of metals. Cutting pollution in China means that import requirements for refined copper are likely rising. A trade deal could propel demand for the red metal even higher over the coming months which is a reason why copper traded to a high at almost $3 per pound.
The monthly chart indicates that the current path of least resistance for the price of copper is higher. A trade agreement between Presidents Trump and Xi could send the price back over the $3 per pound psychological level in copper and set the stage for a higher peak above the $3.3220 resistance level. On April 4, President Trump expressed optimism over a trade deal. He told markets that negotiators need another four weeks to settle the many issues but added that the two sides had already agreed on many of the most challenging factors. Intellectual property and the future of tariffs continue to be sticking points for a final deal. Therefore, we are likely to see a continuation of volatility in the copper market over the coming month with support at over $2.80 and resistance at the $3 per pound level on the nearby COMEX futures contract.
BHP Group is one of the leading producers in the world
BHP Group is a multinational commodity producing company with a large footprint in the copper market. Aside from their interest in the world’s leading copper producing mine in Chile, they own and operate many other properties around the globe. The company profile for BHP Group states:
BHP Group discovers, acquires, develops, and markets natural resources worldwide. The company engages in the exploration, development, and production of oil and gas properties; and mining of copper, silver, lead, zinc, molybdenum, uranium, gold, and iron ores, as well as metallurgical and energy coal. It also engages in the mining, smelting, and refining of nickel; provision of freight, finance, and administrative services, as well as trading, marketing, and support services; and potash development activities. BHP Group is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. (Source: Yahoo Finance)
BHP Group has net assets of $204.997 billion, trades at a price to earnings multiple of 24.53 times earnings and pays a dividend of 4.41%. Over 1.5 million BBL shares change hands on average each day.
Source: Barchart
As the chart shows, BBL shares are correlated with the price of copper which is one of the leading products for the company. BBL has rallied steadily since early 2016 when copper fell to a low at $1.9355 per pound. Last May the shares traded at a peak at $47.92, but the issues at Escondida and the weak stock market in Q4 2018 caused a correction to a low at $38.04 in late 2018. Since then, the shares have been moving higher reaching their most recent peak at $50.59 per share last week and they closed at over the $50 level.
There is an excellent description of the difference between BBL and BHP shares via this link. The piece opines that “It is almost always better for Americans investing through retirement accounts to buy into BBL rather than BHP. As a significant producer of copper, both BBL and BHP are likely to move higher or lower with the price of the red metal over the coming weeks. As a barometer of the state of trade negotiations between the US and China, the company is likely to act as an excellent proxy for the price of the red metal which could move back above $3 per pound in the event of a trade agreement that ends the current era of protectionism.
The Hecht Commodity Report is one of the most comprehensive commodities reports available today from the #2 ranked author in both commodities and precious metals. My weekly report covers the market movements of 20 different commodities and provides bullish, bearish and neutral calls; directional trading recommendations, and actionable ideas for traders. I just reworked the report to make it very actionable!
Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Additional disclosure: The author always has positions in commodities markets in futures, options, ETF/ETN products, and commodity equities. These long and short positions tend to change on an intraday basis.
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Monthly Review Of DivGro: March 2019
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Monthly Review Of DivGro: March 2019
Welcome to the March review of DivGro, my portfolio of dividend growth stocks. Quarter-ending months are exciting, as many of the stocks I own pay dividends in these months and I usually set a new record for monthly dividend income in quarter-ending months.
March did not disappoint. I received dividends totaling $3,220 from 43 stocks in my portfolio, a new record for monthly dividend income! Year over year, DivGro’s dividend income increased by 28%. So far in 2019, I’ve collected $6,724 in dividends or about 27% of my 2019 goal of $25,200.
Looking at how the month’s activities impacted DivGro’s projected annual dividend income (PADI), I note that five DivGro stocks announced dividend increases in March. Additionally, I opened one new position and added shares to five existing positions. On the other hand, I closed out one high-yielding position. Unfortunately, the net result of these changes is that projected annual dividend income (PADI) decreased by about 0.6% in March. Year over year, PADI increased by 39%.
DivGro’s PADI now stands at $25,376, which means I can expect to receive $2,115 in dividend income per month, on average, in perpetuity, assuming the status quo is maintained. Of course, I expect the companies I’ve invested in not only to continue to pay dividends but to also increase them over time. Also, until I retire, I hope to continue reinvesting all dividends, so DivGro’s PADI should continue to grow through dividend growth and through compounding.
Dividend Income
In March, I received a total of $3,220 in dividend income from 43 different stocks:
Following is a list of the dividends I collected in March:
Aflac (AFL) — income of $27.00
Amgen (AMGN) — income of $36.25
Broadcom (AVGO) — income of $53.00
Boeing (BA) — income of $41.10
BlackRock (BLK) — income of $115.50
Cummins (CMI) — income of $57.00
Chevron (CVX) — income of $28.56
Dominion Energy (D) — income of $91.75
Digital Realty Trust (DLR) — income of $48.60
EPR Properties (EPR) — income of $18.75
Eversource Energy (ES) — income of $53.50
Extra Space Storage (EXR) — income of $47.30
Ford Motor (F) — income of $300.00
Gilead Sciences (GILD) — income of $126.00
Home Depot (HD) — income of $81.60
Honeywell International (HON) — income of $41.00
International Business Machines (IBM) — income of $47.10
Intel (INTC) — income of $163.81
International Paper (IP) — income of $50.00
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) — income of $111.60
Lockheed Martin (LMT) — income of $30.80
Main Street Capital (MAIN) — income of $146.26
McDonald’s (MCD) — income of $31.32
3M (MMM) — income of $36.00
Microsoft (MSFT) — income of $46.00
NextEra Energy (NEE) — income of $31.25
AllianzGI Equity & Convertible Income Fund (NIE) — income of $380.00
Realty Income (O) — income of $56.38
PepsiCo (PEP) — income of $18.55
Pfizer (PFE) — income of $72.00
Public Storage (PSA) — income of $60.00
Ross Stores (ROST) — income of $25.50
Stanley Black & Decker (SWK) — income of $33.00
TJX (TJX) — income of $39.00
T. Rowe Price (TROW) — income of $152.00
Travelers (TRV) — income of $77.00
UnitedHealth (UNH) — income of $36.00
Union Pacific (UNP) — income of $35.20
United Parcel Service (UPS) — income of $33.60
Visa (V) — income of $4.25
Valero Energy (VLO) — income of $166.50
Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) — income of $88.00
Exxon Mobil (XOM) — income of $82.00
The following chart shows DivGro’s monthly dividends plotted against PMDI. Quarter-ending months are huge outliers:
This is one reason that I now create a rolling 12-month average of dividends received (the orange bars) plotted against a rolling 12-month average of PMDI (the blue, staggered line):
While it would be nicer if dividends were distributed more evenly, it is not something that would drive my investment decisions.
Dividend Changes
In March, the following stocks announced dividend increases:
General Dynamics (GD) — an increase of 9.68%
Realty Income — an increase of 0.22%
Ross Stores — an increase of 13.33%
Raytheon (RTN) — an increase of 8.65%
W.P. Carey (WPC) — an increase of 0.19%
These changes will increase DivGro’s PADI by about $39.
I like seeing dividend increases above 7% and three of the five increases top my expectations. As for the REITs O and WPC, they announce dividend increases multiple times per year. O’s year-over-year increase is 2.96%, whereas WPC’s year-over-year increase is 1.67%.
Transactions
Here is a summary of my transactions in March:
Merck (MRK) — new position of 30 shares
After opening a small position in Chevron (CVX) in December 2018, MRK was the highest ranked stock in the top 50 holdings of dividend ETFs not in my DivGro portfolio. MRK ranked higher on an aggregate score than several of my Health Care sector holdings and, according to Simply Safe Dividends, MRK has a Very Safe dividend safety score of 98.
I opened a relatively small position of 30 shares at $80.52 per share, as MRK is not trading at my preferred discount to fair value of at least 10%. With this opening position, I’ll be able to track MRK more closely and look for opportunities to add shares at a better valuation.
Omega Healthcare Investors (OHI) — sold 250 shares and closed position
I decided to close my position in OHI on concerns about the declining fundamentals of OHI’s skilled nursing tenants. OHI has a Borderline Safe dividend safety score of 47, yet the REIT’s yield of 7%+ provides some compensation for the increased risk. Unfortunately, OHI broke a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of dividend increases when it froze its dividend last April, and unless OHI declares another dividend increase in 2019, it will be removed from the CCC list of dividend growth stocks.
It turns out my closing trade was about two weeks premature, as OHI closed at a 30-day high of $38.31 on 28 March. Nevertheless, my closing price of $35.90 secured a net gain of 29% or about 18% annualized.
To (somewhat) make up for the $660 in annual dividends I gave up by closing my OHI position, I added shares to several existing positions trading at favorable comparative yields.
CVS Health (CVS) — added 50 shares and increased position to 200 shares
CVS continues to struggle and now is trading about 34% below its 52-week high. I paid $53.49 per share and lowered my average cost basis to $65.16. CVS froze its dividend after buying Aetna, though Simply Safe Dividends still considers the dividend Safe with a dividend safety score of 75.
I believe CVS will be fine in the long term, so the current yield is just too compelling to pass up, as illustrated in this 7-year yield channel chart:
Home Depot — added 10 shares and increased position to 60 shares
Honeywell International — added 10 shares and increased position to 60 shares
Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) — added 50 shares and increased position to 200 shares
3M — added 15 shares and increased position to 40 shares
HD‘s dividend safety score is 90 (Very Safe) while the stock’s current dividend yield of 2.71% is 29% above its 5-year average of 2.11%, according to Simply Safe Dividends. I paid $182.11 per share, slightly lowering my average cost basis in the process. The stock’s dividend growth is stellar, with 5-year and 20-year dividend growth rates of 22%.
I also added 10 shares to my HON position, which is deemed a Very Safe dividend growth stock with a dividend safety score of 98. HON is trading at about fair value. Honeywell reported solid Q4’18 results and the management team increased their guidance for fiscal 2019. I think the stock is a great long term hold, though it is vulnerable to market cyclicality.
IRM‘s dividend yield of 6.8% is about 11% above its 5-year average dividend yield of 6.13%. While the REIT’s dividend safety score is on the low end at 52 (Borderline Safe), I think the 6.8% yield compensates me sufficiently for the somewhat higher risk. I paid $34.86 per share and I notice the stock is now trading above $36 per share, so my timing seemed to be good.
Finally, it is not often that one can buy MMM at a discount to fair value. I missed an even better opportunity in December 2018, but I’m happy that I grabbed 15 shares at $206.08 in March. The stock now trades at $216 per share. MMM has a Very Safe dividend safety score of 86 and boasts a 5-year dividend growth rate of 16%.
The net effect of my March transactions is that DivGro’s PADI decreased by about $198. However, I believe my portfolio’s risk profile has improved in the process and I’m happy that I replaced the somewhat riskier OHI with safer alternatives.
Markets
Here is a summary of various market indicators, showing the changes over the last month:
In March, the DOW 30 increased slightly, the S&P 500 increased by 1.79%, and the NASDAQ increased by 2.61%. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.414%, while CBOE’s measure of market volatility, the VIX, decreased to 13.71.
Portfolio Statistics
Based on the total capital invested and the portfolio’s current market value, DivGro has delivered a simple return of about 47% since inception. In comparison, DivGro’s IRR (internal rate of return) is 14.5%. (IRR takes into account the timing and size of deposits since inception, so it is a better measure of portfolio performance).
I track the yield on cost (YoC) for individual stocks, as well as an average YoC for my portfolio. DivGro’s average YoC decreased from 3.98% last month to 3.92% this month.
On the other hand, DivGro’s projected annual yield is 4.73%. This is down from last month’s value of 4.84%. I calculate the projected annual yield by dividing PADI ($25,376) by the total amount invested.
Percentage payback relates dividend income to the amount of capital invested. DivGro’s average percentage payback is 13.5%, up from last month’s 13.1%.
Here’s a chart showing DivGro’s market value breakdown. Dividends are plotted at the base of the chart so we can see them grow over time:
Looking Ahead
I’ve been working on creating a database of weekly dividend yields covering a period of 12 years. For now, the database covers dividend-paying stocks in my portfolio. In time, I’d like to add high-quality dividend growth stocks I don’t yet own.
Maintaining the database will allow me to create yield channel charts at any time to help guide investment decisions. Furthermore, I’ll be able to do a quick fair value estimate for stocks in the database by comparing the current dividend yield with the historical average dividend yield over a period of, say, five years.
I’m hoping to get back to writing monthly DivGro Pulse articles and share yield channel charts of stocks trading at or near extreme historical yields.
Please see my Performance page for various visuals summarizing DivGro’s performance.
Thanks for reading and take care, everybody!
Disclosure: I am/we are long AAPL, ABBV, ADM, AFL, AMGN, APD, AVGO, BA, BLK, CB, CMCSA, CMI, CSCO, CVS, CVX, D, DGX, DIS, DLR, EPR, ES, EXR, FDX, FRT, GD, HD, HON, HRL, IBM, INTC, IP, IRM, ITW, JNJ, JPM, KO, LMT, LOW, MAIN, MCD, MDT, MMM, MO, MRK, MSFT, NEE, NNN, O, PEP, PFE, PG, PM, ROST, RTN, SBUX, SKT, SPG, SWK, T, TJX, TROW, TRV, TXN, UNH, UNP, UPS, V, VLO, VZ, WBA, WEC, WPC, XOM. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
New Post has been published on http://ritzywordpressthemes.com/want-to-know-how-to-build-a-better-democracy-ask-wikipedia/
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
Pity the poor public-relations specialist hired to influence what is said about his clients on Wikipedia. The sprawling, chaotic storehouse of knowledge is governed by thousands of independent-minded volunteers committed to being neutral and allergic to self-serving manipulators.
The barriers are formidable, but so is the temptation to do some reputational polishing there. What appears on Wikipedia matters. Daily traffic to the English site has barely grown in years, but that is because Wikipedia articles are so reputable that they are baked into the Internet—particularly Google’s results pages. A biographical capsule Google publishes on me, for example, has all its facts taken straight from Wikipedia, except for my age being 20, which Google came up with on its own. When YouTube tried to contain proliferating conspiracies, it turned to Wikipedia. Of course men landed on the moon, it says so right here on Wikipedia!
Attempts to influence the site are, as the recent college admissions scandal shows, sadly inevitable; there are few areas immune to power of wealth and status. How long can Wikipedia resist?
Noam Cohen
About
Noam Cohen is a journalist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which uses the history of computer science and Stanford University to understand the libertarian ideas promoted by tech leaders. While working for The New York Times, Cohen wrote some of the earliest articles about Wikipedia, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.
Throughout Wikipedia’s history people have tried to nudge the content in their favor. There have been elaborate nonprofessional campaigns to promote nationalistic causes, such as what to call the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Likewise, there have been examples of stealth editing, presumably by the subjects of Wikipedia articles, as well as contributors secretly paid to polish the reputations of certain clients. These actions are considered conflicts of interest, prohibited along with a bunch of other sketchy practices as a threat to the Wikipedia’s ideal of a neutral point of view.
A recent account in The Huffington Post highlighted a novel approach by one marketing executive hired to influence what appears on Wikipedia: Instead of paid editing, Ed Sussman provides paid advocacy. Sussman, who is CEO of the marketing firm Buzzr.com, represents a range of clients, including the Axios news website, NBC, and the Facebook PR team. For NBC, he has focused on minimizing controversies, such as the question of whether NBC News handled allegations against Matt Lauer properly. In the case of one Facebook executive, Sussman’s goal was to get an article about her published.
For his fee, Sussman does not personally publish or edit the articles his clients care about; he won’t do that, he explains, because he has an obvious conflict of interest. As he writes on his Wikipedia user page: “If you ever think any of my work doesn’t conform to Wikipedia policy, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it!”
Instead, Sussman, who is a lawyer by training, prepares drafts of revised articles, or in the case of the Facebook executive, the entire article, which he posts on the pages used to discuss how to improve Wikipedia. His work is well written and well sourced. He then tries to persuade editors to make those changes themselves. After all, a frequent concern of Wikipedia editors is that articles are too short and too thinly sourced, and Sussman is doing his part to reduce that problem.
Indeed, for many dedicated volunteers, Sussman poses few problems, because he is so transparent about his motives. On reading the HuffPo headline, one Wikipedia administrator, Swarm, wrote that the news seemed “extremely alarming, and I was ready to crucify this guy.” Digging deeper, Swarm came to the opposite conclusion: “Most of the supposed ‘whitewashing’ seems to be mundane matters that don’t harm articles at all, if not actual improvements.”
The flip side of this embrace of transparency by Sussman, however, is that Wikipedia editors have tried, and in at least one case, succeeded, in transparently informing readers that the articles have been advocated for by a paid Wikipedia editor. The Axios article was edited to mention the news site had hired an advocate to “beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign—if largely flattering—stats about Axios’ accomplishments).” Including such a sentence, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose of hiring an advocate; the best lobbyists blend into the background.
When Wikipedia editors complain about Sussman they, in essence, say he is behaving like an overly excited, and legally trained, flack. His arguments are long and have oodles of sources. One editor, kashmiri, a non-native-English speaker, pleaded for mercy: “May I kindly ask you to be more concise? I agree English is a beautiful language, but requiring other editors to read walls of text from you on every single issue is tad daunting, sorry.” While a good advocate tries to make every argument they can think of, in case one of them sticks, among Wikipedians the tactic is called bludgeoning and is frowned on.
Taking a step back, what could be wrong with making a case for a client with rigor and a broad range of sources, hoping that it gets adopted by the community? It’s not the careful attention that is the problem, but that the careful attention only goes to those who can pay. When different standards apply based on status and wealth, in areas as important as education and criminal justice, as well as relatively trivial ones like Wikipedia, poof, there goes the fairness crucial to a functioning democracy.
Wikipedia’s approach is collective, not individualistic. To come up with a solution, the community deliberates and seeks a consensus. Those deliberations, ideally, are driven by people far removed from the issues and parties involved. There is a belief in a type of karmic justice for those who try to game the system, which played out in the Axios article. It’s called the Streisand effect, so named in the wake of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home. Her efforts to deny access to those images only created more interest. Imagine a world where the more you try to manipulate the system, the more you are exposed!
By contrast, we know that large social networks respond to manipulations by those who have power and ignore those who don’t. Facebook, for example, fails to hire translators as genocide rages in Myanmar, yet personally apologizes in front of Congress when called out by conservatives for determining that the extreme rhetoric from a pair of Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, was not safe for its community. Likewise, Twitter’s decision to allow President Trump to break its community standards for harassment and bullying, because as president what he says is newsworthy, is the ultimate example of a two-tiered system.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has witnessed firsthand how Facebook bends in the face of a powerful critic—herself. Facebook took down a Warren ad for supposed technical violations and then quickly restored it after an uproar. The experience left a bad taste: “You shouldn’t have to contact Facebook’s publicists in order for them to decide to ‘allow robust debate’ about Facebook,” she wrote on Twitter. “They shouldn’t have that much power.”
Perhaps the just-the-facts folks at Wikipedia can teach us all something.
More Great WIRED Stories
0 notes
Text
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
New Post has been published on http://rentts.org/want-to-know-how-to-build-a-better-democracy-ask-wikipedia/
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
Pity the poor public-relations specialist hired to influence what is said about his clients on Wikipedia. The sprawling, chaotic storehouse of knowledge is governed by thousands of independent-minded volunteers committed to being neutral and allergic to self-serving manipulators.
The barriers are formidable, but so is the temptation to do some reputational polishing there. What appears on Wikipedia matters. Daily traffic to the English site has barely grown in years, but that is because Wikipedia articles are so reputable that they are baked into the Internet—particularly Google’s results pages. A biographical capsule Google publishes on me, for example, has all its facts taken straight from Wikipedia, except for my age being 20, which Google came up with on its own. When YouTube tried to contain proliferating conspiracies, it turned to Wikipedia. Of course men landed on the moon, it says so right here on Wikipedia!
Attempts to influence the site are, as the recent college admissions scandal shows, sadly inevitable; there are few areas immune to power of wealth and status. How long can Wikipedia resist?
Noam Cohen
About
Noam Cohen is a journalist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which uses the history of computer science and Stanford University to understand the libertarian ideas promoted by tech leaders. While working for The New York Times, Cohen wrote some of the earliest articles about Wikipedia, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.
Throughout Wikipedia’s history people have tried to nudge the content in their favor. There have been elaborate nonprofessional campaigns to promote nationalistic causes, such as what to call the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Likewise, there have been examples of stealth editing, presumably by the subjects of Wikipedia articles, as well as contributors secretly paid to polish the reputations of certain clients. These actions are considered conflicts of interest, prohibited along with a bunch of other sketchy practices as a threat to the Wikipedia’s ideal of a neutral point of view.
A recent account in The Huffington Post highlighted a novel approach by one marketing executive hired to influence what appears on Wikipedia: Instead of paid editing, Ed Sussman provides paid advocacy. Sussman, who is CEO of the marketing firm Buzzr.com, represents a range of clients, including the Axios news website, NBC, and the Facebook PR team. For NBC, he has focused on minimizing controversies, such as the question of whether NBC News handled allegations against Matt Lauer properly. In the case of one Facebook executive, Sussman’s goal was to get an article about her published.
For his fee, Sussman does not personally publish or edit the articles his clients care about; he won’t do that, he explains, because he has an obvious conflict of interest. As he writes on his Wikipedia user page: “If you ever think any of my work doesn’t conform to Wikipedia policy, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it!”
Instead, Sussman, who is a lawyer by training, prepares drafts of revised articles, or in the case of the Facebook executive, the entire article, which he posts on the pages used to discuss how to improve Wikipedia. His work is well written and well sourced. He then tries to persuade editors to make those changes themselves. After all, a frequent concern of Wikipedia editors is that articles are too short and too thinly sourced, and Sussman is doing his part to reduce that problem.
Indeed, for many dedicated volunteers, Sussman poses few problems, because he is so transparent about his motives. On reading the HuffPo headline, one Wikipedia administrator, Swarm, wrote that the news seemed “extremely alarming, and I was ready to crucify this guy.” Digging deeper, Swarm came to the opposite conclusion: “Most of the supposed ‘whitewashing’ seems to be mundane matters that don’t harm articles at all, if not actual improvements.”
The flip side of this embrace of transparency by Sussman, however, is that Wikipedia editors have tried, and in at least one case, succeeded, in transparently informing readers that the articles have been advocated for by a paid Wikipedia editor. The Axios article was edited to mention the news site had hired an advocate to “beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign—if largely flattering—stats about Axios’ accomplishments).” Including such a sentence, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose of hiring an advocate; the best lobbyists blend into the background.
When Wikipedia editors complain about Sussman they, in essence, say he is behaving like an overly excited, and legally trained, flack. His arguments are long and have oodles of sources. One editor, kashmiri, a non-native-English speaker, pleaded for mercy: “May I kindly ask you to be more concise? I agree English is a beautiful language, but requiring other editors to read walls of text from you on every single issue is tad daunting, sorry.” While a good advocate tries to make every argument they can think of, in case one of them sticks, among Wikipedians the tactic is called bludgeoning and is frowned on.
Taking a step back, what could be wrong with making a case for a client with rigor and a broad range of sources, hoping that it gets adopted by the community? It’s not the careful attention that is the problem, but that the careful attention only goes to those who can pay. When different standards apply based on status and wealth, in areas as important as education and criminal justice, as well as relatively trivial ones like Wikipedia, poof, there goes the fairness crucial to a functioning democracy.
Wikipedia’s approach is collective, not individualistic. To come up with a solution, the community deliberates and seeks a consensus. Those deliberations, ideally, are driven by people far removed from the issues and parties involved. There is a belief in a type of karmic justice for those who try to game the system, which played out in the Axios article. It’s called the Streisand effect, so named in the wake of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home. Her efforts to deny access to those images only created more interest. Imagine a world where the more you try to manipulate the system, the more you are exposed!
By contrast, we know that large social networks respond to manipulations by those who have power and ignore those who don’t. Facebook, for example, fails to hire translators as genocide rages in Myanmar, yet personally apologizes in front of Congress when called out by conservatives for determining that the extreme rhetoric from a pair of Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, was not safe for its community. Likewise, Twitter’s decision to allow President Trump to break its community standards for harassment and bullying, because as president what he says is newsworthy, is the ultimate example of a two-tiered system.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has witnessed firsthand how Facebook bends in the face of a powerful critic—herself. Facebook took down a Warren ad for supposed technical violations and then quickly restored it after an uproar. The experience left a bad taste: “You shouldn’t have to contact Facebook’s publicists in order for them to decide to ‘allow robust debate’ about Facebook,” she wrote on Twitter. “They shouldn’t have that much power.”
Perhaps the just-the-facts folks at Wikipedia can teach us all something.
More Great WIRED Stories
0 notes
Text
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
New Post has been published on http://therushrace.com/want-to-know-how-to-build-a-better-democracy-ask-wikipedia/
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
Pity the poor public-relations specialist hired to influence what is said about his clients on Wikipedia. The sprawling, chaotic storehouse of knowledge is governed by thousands of independent-minded volunteers committed to being neutral and allergic to self-serving manipulators.
The barriers are formidable, but so is the temptation to do some reputational polishing there. What appears on Wikipedia matters. Daily traffic to the English site has barely grown in years, but that is because Wikipedia articles are so reputable that they are baked into the Internet—particularly Google’s results pages. A biographical capsule Google publishes on me, for example, has all its facts taken straight from Wikipedia, except for my age being 20, which Google came up with on its own. When YouTube tried to contain proliferating conspiracies, it turned to Wikipedia. Of course men landed on the moon, it says so right here on Wikipedia!
Attempts to influence the site are, as the recent college admissions scandal shows, sadly inevitable; there are few areas immune to power of wealth and status. How long can Wikipedia resist?
Noam Cohen
About
Noam Cohen is a journalist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which uses the history of computer science and Stanford University to understand the libertarian ideas promoted by tech leaders. While working for The New York Times, Cohen wrote some of the earliest articles about Wikipedia, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.
Throughout Wikipedia’s history people have tried to nudge the content in their favor. There have been elaborate nonprofessional campaigns to promote nationalistic causes, such as what to call the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Likewise, there have been examples of stealth editing, presumably by the subjects of Wikipedia articles, as well as contributors secretly paid to polish the reputations of certain clients. These actions are considered conflicts of interest, prohibited along with a bunch of other sketchy practices as a threat to the Wikipedia’s ideal of a neutral point of view.
A recent account in The Huffington Post highlighted a novel approach by one marketing executive hired to influence what appears on Wikipedia: Instead of paid editing, Ed Sussman provides paid advocacy. Sussman, who is CEO of the marketing firm Buzzr.com, represents a range of clients, including the Axios news website, NBC, and the Facebook PR team. For NBC, he has focused on minimizing controversies, such as the question of whether NBC News handled allegations against Matt Lauer properly. In the case of one Facebook executive, Sussman’s goal was to get an article about her published.
For his fee, Sussman does not personally publish or edit the articles his clients care about; he won’t do that, he explains, because he has an obvious conflict of interest. As he writes on his Wikipedia user page: “If you ever think any of my work doesn’t conform to Wikipedia policy, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it!”
Instead, Sussman, who is a lawyer by training, prepares drafts of revised articles, or in the case of the Facebook executive, the entire article, which he posts on the pages used to discuss how to improve Wikipedia. His work is well written and well sourced. He then tries to persuade editors to make those changes themselves. After all, a frequent concern of Wikipedia editors is that articles are too short and too thinly sourced, and Sussman is doing his part to reduce that problem.
Indeed, for many dedicated volunteers, Sussman poses few problems, because he is so transparent about his motives. On reading the HuffPo headline, one Wikipedia administrator, Swarm, wrote that the news seemed “extremely alarming, and I was ready to crucify this guy.” Digging deeper, Swarm came to the opposite conclusion: “Most of the supposed ‘whitewashing’ seems to be mundane matters that don’t harm articles at all, if not actual improvements.”
The flip side of this embrace of transparency by Sussman, however, is that Wikipedia editors have tried, and in at least one case, succeeded, in transparently informing readers that the articles have been advocated for by a paid Wikipedia editor. The Axios article was edited to mention the news site had hired an advocate to “beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign—if largely flattering—stats about Axios’ accomplishments).” Including such a sentence, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose of hiring an advocate; the best lobbyists blend into the background.
When Wikipedia editors complain about Sussman they, in essence, say he is behaving like an overly excited, and legally trained, flack. His arguments are long and have oodles of sources. One editor, kashmiri, a non-native-English speaker, pleaded for mercy: “May I kindly ask you to be more concise? I agree English is a beautiful language, but requiring other editors to read walls of text from you on every single issue is tad daunting, sorry.” While a good advocate tries to make every argument they can think of, in case one of them sticks, among Wikipedians the tactic is called bludgeoning and is frowned on.
Taking a step back, what could be wrong with making a case for a client with rigor and a broad range of sources, hoping that it gets adopted by the community? It’s not the careful attention that is the problem, but that the careful attention only goes to those who can pay. When different standards apply based on status and wealth, in areas as important as education and criminal justice, as well as relatively trivial ones like Wikipedia, poof, there goes the fairness crucial to a functioning democracy.
Wikipedia’s approach is collective, not individualistic. To come up with a solution, the community deliberates and seeks a consensus. Those deliberations, ideally, are driven by people far removed from the issues and parties involved. There is a belief in a type of karmic justice for those who try to game the system, which played out in the Axios article. It’s called the Streisand effect, so named in the wake of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home. Her efforts to deny access to those images only created more interest. Imagine a world where the more you try to manipulate the system, the more you are exposed!
By contrast, we know that large social networks respond to manipulations by those who have power and ignore those who don’t. Facebook, for example, fails to hire translators as genocide rages in Myanmar, yet personally apologizes in front of Congress when called out by conservatives for determining that the extreme rhetoric from a pair of Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, was not safe for its community. Likewise, Twitter’s decision to allow President Trump to break its community standards for harassment and bullying, because as president what he says is newsworthy, is the ultimate example of a two-tiered system.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has witnessed firsthand how Facebook bends in the face of a powerful critic—herself. Facebook took down a Warren ad for supposed technical violations and then quickly restored it after an uproar. The experience left a bad taste: “You shouldn’t have to contact Facebook’s publicists in order for them to decide to ‘allow robust debate’ about Facebook,” she wrote on Twitter. “They shouldn’t have that much power.”
Perhaps the just-the-facts folks at Wikipedia can teach us all something.
More Great WIRED Stories
0 notes
Text
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
New Post has been published on http://resellerwebhostingproviders.com/want-to-know-how-to-build-a-better-democracy-ask-wikipedia/
Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia
Pity the poor public-relations specialist hired to influence what is said about his clients on Wikipedia. The sprawling, chaotic storehouse of knowledge is governed by thousands of independent-minded volunteers committed to being neutral and allergic to self-serving manipulators.
The barriers are formidable, but so is the temptation to do some reputational polishing there. What appears on Wikipedia matters. Daily traffic to the English site has barely grown in years, but that is because Wikipedia articles are so reputable that they are baked into the Internet—particularly Google’s results pages. A biographical capsule Google publishes on me, for example, has all its facts taken straight from Wikipedia, except for my age being 20, which Google came up with on its own. When YouTube tried to contain proliferating conspiracies, it turned to Wikipedia. Of course men landed on the moon, it says so right here on Wikipedia!
Attempts to influence the site are, as the recent college admissions scandal shows, sadly inevitable; there are few areas immune to power of wealth and status. How long can Wikipedia resist?
Noam Cohen
About
Noam Cohen is a journalist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which uses the history of computer science and Stanford University to understand the libertarian ideas promoted by tech leaders. While working for The New York Times, Cohen wrote some of the earliest articles about Wikipedia, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.
Throughout Wikipedia’s history people have tried to nudge the content in their favor. There have been elaborate nonprofessional campaigns to promote nationalistic causes, such as what to call the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Likewise, there have been examples of stealth editing, presumably by the subjects of Wikipedia articles, as well as contributors secretly paid to polish the reputations of certain clients. These actions are considered conflicts of interest, prohibited along with a bunch of other sketchy practices as a threat to the Wikipedia’s ideal of a neutral point of view.
A recent account in The Huffington Post highlighted a novel approach by one marketing executive hired to influence what appears on Wikipedia: Instead of paid editing, Ed Sussman provides paid advocacy. Sussman, who is CEO of the marketing firm Buzzr.com, represents a range of clients, including the Axios news website, NBC, and the Facebook PR team. For NBC, he has focused on minimizing controversies, such as the question of whether NBC News handled allegations against Matt Lauer properly. In the case of one Facebook executive, Sussman’s goal was to get an article about her published.
For his fee, Sussman does not personally publish or edit the articles his clients care about; he won’t do that, he explains, because he has an obvious conflict of interest. As he writes on his Wikipedia user page: “If you ever think any of my work doesn’t conform to Wikipedia policy, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it!”
Instead, Sussman, who is a lawyer by training, prepares drafts of revised articles, or in the case of the Facebook executive, the entire article, which he posts on the pages used to discuss how to improve Wikipedia. His work is well written and well sourced. He then tries to persuade editors to make those changes themselves. After all, a frequent concern of Wikipedia editors is that articles are too short and too thinly sourced, and Sussman is doing his part to reduce that problem.
Indeed, for many dedicated volunteers, Sussman poses few problems, because he is so transparent about his motives. On reading the HuffPo headline, one Wikipedia administrator, Swarm, wrote that the news seemed “extremely alarming, and I was ready to crucify this guy.” Digging deeper, Swarm came to the opposite conclusion: “Most of the supposed ‘whitewashing’ seems to be mundane matters that don’t harm articles at all, if not actual improvements.”
The flip side of this embrace of transparency by Sussman, however, is that Wikipedia editors have tried, and in at least one case, succeeded, in transparently informing readers that the articles have been advocated for by a paid Wikipedia editor. The Axios article was edited to mention the news site had hired an advocate to “beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign—if largely flattering—stats about Axios’ accomplishments).” Including such a sentence, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose of hiring an advocate; the best lobbyists blend into the background.
When Wikipedia editors complain about Sussman they, in essence, say he is behaving like an overly excited, and legally trained, flack. His arguments are long and have oodles of sources. One editor, kashmiri, a non-native-English speaker, pleaded for mercy: “May I kindly ask you to be more concise? I agree English is a beautiful language, but requiring other editors to read walls of text from you on every single issue is tad daunting, sorry.” While a good advocate tries to make every argument they can think of, in case one of them sticks, among Wikipedians the tactic is called bludgeoning and is frowned on.
Taking a step back, what could be wrong with making a case for a client with rigor and a broad range of sources, hoping that it gets adopted by the community? It’s not the careful attention that is the problem, but that the careful attention only goes to those who can pay. When different standards apply based on status and wealth, in areas as important as education and criminal justice, as well as relatively trivial ones like Wikipedia, poof, there goes the fairness crucial to a functioning democracy.
Wikipedia’s approach is collective, not individualistic. To come up with a solution, the community deliberates and seeks a consensus. Those deliberations, ideally, are driven by people far removed from the issues and parties involved. There is a belief in a type of karmic justice for those who try to game the system, which played out in the Axios article. It’s called the Streisand effect, so named in the wake of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home. Her efforts to deny access to those images only created more interest. Imagine a world where the more you try to manipulate the system, the more you are exposed!
By contrast, we know that large social networks respond to manipulations by those who have power and ignore those who don’t. Facebook, for example, fails to hire translators as genocide rages in Myanmar, yet personally apologizes in front of Congress when called out by conservatives for determining that the extreme rhetoric from a pair of Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, was not safe for its community. Likewise, Twitter’s decision to allow President Trump to break its community standards for harassment and bullying, because as president what he says is newsworthy, is the ultimate example of a two-tiered system.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has witnessed firsthand how Facebook bends in the face of a powerful critic—herself. Facebook took down a Warren ad for supposed technical violations and then quickly restored it after an uproar. The experience left a bad taste: “You shouldn’t have to contact Facebook’s publicists in order for them to decide to ‘allow robust debate’ about Facebook,” she wrote on Twitter. “They shouldn’t have that much power.”
Perhaps the just-the-facts folks at Wikipedia can teach us all something.
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In an Eye-Opening Interview, the President of Delta Air Lines Just Revealed an Amazing Plan to Change Everything Passengers Think About Flying on Delta
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In an Eye-Opening Interview, the President of Delta Air Lines Just Revealed an Amazing Plan to Change Everything Passengers Think About Flying on Delta
This is a story about Delta Air Lines, and about the most fundamental question any business has to ask itself. It’s also about the intriguing answer Delta seems to have found.
That question is: “What, exactly, do you sell?”
Do you sell a simple product? Or do you sell an experience, or maybe a convenience — a solution to customers’ problems?
It’s a philosophical difference, but it has a lot of real-world repercussions. In the airline world, it’s a big issue.
Should an airline think of itself as selling a commodity — a seat on a plane? Or should it think of itself as selling something bigger?
No need for baggage claim?
“Right now, we still sell airline tickets,” Delta Air Lines president Glen Hauenstein recently told the 3 Things podcast, hosted by Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias. “What we really want to sell is the journey.”
For example, as Hauenstein proposes, your “journey” would include not just the flight, but airport transfers and even luggage delivery–so that you could seamlessly book a trip from your home in Atlanta to your hotel in Los Angeles–and have your luggage delivered to you, so you never even have to go to the baggage claim.
“[We want] your luggage to find its way to your mode of transportation, and show up at your hotel or place of residence,” Hausenstein said. “If you use Lyft for ride-sharing, if you use Hilton or Marriott as your preferred hotel vendor, we need to know that. Then, we can provide you a curated experience from start to finish. That’s where we’re headed.”
The plans are apparently for what the airline would be like in about 2025. Not so long from now.
(The podcast isn’t actually available yet, but Hauenstein’s remarks were reported by Darren Murph of The Points Guy. TPG is also owned by Red Ventures.)
Best ‘Major Airline’
I read all this after having just reported on the airlines that fared best in TripAdvisor’s 2019 Travelers’ Choice Awards, which are based on the rankings and reviews that thousands of TripAdvisor users give various airlines during the past year.
As I wrote recently, Southwest Airlines was far and away the winner among U.S. airlines in the rankings. In fact, it was the only U.S. airline that placed in the top 10 worldwide.
If you look at the reviews that TripAdvisor quoted in announcing its placement, you can see why.
Nobody is talking about the commodity parts of Southwest’s business: things like on-time performance, or the fact that you can usually change flights without an additional fee.
Instead, they’re talking about the intangibles: the “friendly staff,” that “really cares about you and it shows.”
While Southwest took the overall top prize for North America, Delta Air Lines came in first in that ranking for its category: “Major Airlines.” (Southwest is considered a “Low Cost Airline.”
And it’s It probably isn’t surprising to see that the accompanying Delta reviews are fairly close in tone to the Southwest ones. It’s not so much about the product or the service. It’s about the feelings that the product and service inspire in the customers.
Getting past the numbers
Interestingly, moving away from a commoditized airline product doesn’t necessarily mean squeezing either more or less money out of the product itself.
For example, as Gary Leff at View From the Wing points out, Delta seats passengers nine across in some aircraft configurations, when rival airlines like United and American flying the same plane fit 10 in the same space.
So Delta ostensibly gives up revenue for passenger experience in that case.
But Southwest goes the other way sometimes. For example, it gets lots of good press for offering free bags and itinerary changes, but most passengers don’t fully use them. By bundling the features, Southwest arguably makes more money than it would by stripping them out and selling them as-needed.
Either way, it doesn’t really matter in a vacuum. Passengers who care mostly about price, schedule and features can get all that information in an instant now, and they make a pure commodity decision.
But lots of people don’t think that way. They go past the numbers, and they make decisions more on how an airline–or any company–makes them feel as a whole.
Was the trip pleasant? Did the employees seem like they wanted to be working? Is there anything about the company’s public persona that doesn’t square with my personal values?
In most cases, those are the customers you want. Because while you have to work a little harder to get them, they’re the ones who won’t abandon you quickly simply because another competitor offers a slightly lower price, or a slightly more convenient schedule.
In fact, as Delta seems to understand, you’re probably better off getting them to stop thinking about flying with you as simply “buying a ticket.”
Figure out instead how to make them think about “the journey”–and then inspire them to take it with you.
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United Airlines President Says It's Customers' Own Fault the Airline Is Shoving More Seats Into Planes
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United Airlines President Says It's Customers' Own Fault the Airline Is Shoving More Seats Into Planes
Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
United Airlines has been trying.
This doesn’t mean United’s customers have stopped complaining.
Recently, I talked to a United Million Miler who was enraged about delays, not being able to get upgrades and several other apparently annoying elements.
What, though, do United’s customers complain about most?
Poor WiFi is the number one complaint from our frequent travelers and it’s definitely something we want to get fixed.
And there you were thinking that customer service would be the most irritating part of flying.
For me, I confess, the worst is airlines shoveling more and more seats onto planes, so they can make more money.
For Kirby, though, it’s customers’ own fault that United now has 10 seats across a Boeing 777 in Economy Class. He said:
Quite simply it costs us the same to fly a 777 across the Atlantic with 10 or 9 abreast. You have find what people care about and what they are willing to pay for. If you have only 9 abreast, you’d have to charge everyone 11 percent more to break even. So are people willing to pay an extra $110 on a $1000 transatlantic fare to sit in a row with one less seat? The answer is unequivocally no.
It’s tantalizing, isn’t it?
Kirby apparently has data showing that you, dear, customer, don’t mind being squished to within an inch of a lung.
He insists, indeed, that most of the world’s airlines agree with him and fly 777’s with 10 seats across.
But then there’s Delta.
The airline had decided that no, it wouldn’t shove 10 seats across its Boeing 777-200 planes.
Even more startling was the fact that it was going to make those Economy Class seats wider.
Could it be that Delta’s customers are prepared to pay a little more for greater comfort?
Could it also be a general sense of superior customer service allows Delta to introduce all kinds of touches that enhance human experience and encourage loyalty?
It’s an enticing thought, isn’t it?
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An Open Letter from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook
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An Open Letter from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook
Time passes quickly and the WiFi is spotty here in Trāyastriṃśa, so I apologize for taking so long to check out how you’ve been doing with our company.
Of course, truth be known, Apple was already on that trajectory when I handed you the company, but props anyway.
Beyond that, though, I feel I must ask: Is that ALL you could manage with that money and talent? Seriously?
OK… Let me calm down… Deep breath… Nam Myoho Renge Kyo… Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.. That’s better.
Look, Tim, I don’t want to go all heavy on your case, but here’s what you need to do to make Apple great again:
1. Invest in new technology.
You let our cash on hand get all the way up to $245 billion??? Earning maybe 3% interest? Are you out of your mind?!?! With those deep pockets, we should be making huge investments and acquisitions in every technology that will comprise the world of the future. You’ve let that upstart Musk make us look like IBM. That’s just plain wrong.
2. Attack and cripple Google.
Google is our new nemesis, remember? They attacked our core business model with that Android PoC. But, Tim, c’mon… Google is weak. They can’t innovate worth beans and most of their revenue still comes from online ads, which are only valuable because they constantly violate user privacy. You could cut their revenues in half if you added a defaul 100% secure Internet search app to iOS and Mac OS. Spend a few billion and make it faster and better than Google’s ad-laden wide-open nightmare. This isn’t brain surgery.
3. Make the iPad into a PC killer.
WTF? The iPad was supposed to be our big revenge on Microsoft for almost putting us out of business. All it needed was a mouse and could have killed–killed!–laptop sales. Sure, it would have cut into MacBook sales, but that’s the way our industry works. I let the Macintosh kill the Lisa, remember? And the Lisa was my personal pet project. The iPad could have been the next PC… and it still might not be too late.
4. Give our engineers private offices.
I get it, Tim. You’re not a programmer. You built your career in high tech but it was always in sales and marketing, which are the parts of the business where a lot of talking and socializing make sense. But if you’d ever designed a product, or actually written code, you’d know engineering requires concentration without distractions. Programmers and designers don’t belong in an open plan office. Give them back their private offices before it’s too late.
5. Don’t announce trivial dreck.
A credit card? Seriously? Airbuds with ear-clips? A me-too news service? Is that best you can do? And what was with Oprah And Spielberg at the event? Hey, the year 2007 called and wants its celebrities back. Look, when you gin up the press and the public up for a huge announcement and it’s just meh tweaks to existing products or me-too stuff, it makes us look lame and out of touch. If we don’t have anything world-shaking, don’t have an announcement!
6. Stop pretending we’re cutting edge.
There was a time–I remember it well–when people would line up for hours just to be the first to get our innovative new products. Heck, we even had “evangelists” who promoted our products to our true-believers. But that’s history. Until we come out insanely great new products that inspire that kind of loyalty, dial down the fake enthusiasm.
7. Make Macs faster, better, cheaper–more quickly.
I’m honestly embarrassed what you’ve done with the Mac. You’ve not released a new design in years. Sure, MacBooks were cool back in the day, but now they’re just average. And where’s our answer to the Surface? Tim, you actually let Microsoft–Microsoft again!–pace us with a mobile product. That’s freakin’ pitiful.
8. Diversify our supply chain out of Asia.
Tim, Tim, Tim… I love Asia, but you’ve bet our entire company on the belief that there will never be another war (shooting or trade) there. Meanwhile, China has become more aggressive and there’s a madman with nuclear weapons perched a few miles from our main supplier for iPhone parts. Wake up! We need to sourcing our parts in geographical areas where war is less likely.
9. Fix our software, already.
This was the one that surprised me the most. I knew that iTunes, iBooks, Music, and AppStore was a crazyquilt but I figured we could fix that in a future release. But here we are, ten years later, and we’re still asking people to suffer through this counter-intuitive bullsh*t? And what’s with the recent instability with our operating systems? And that wack Facetime security hole?
10. Make some key management changes.
Delete your account.
Beatifically,
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