Most western media have commented on the political (PR) aspects of this event. All such space efforts are political, in China or elsewhere. This project is interesting because of the contrast to the International Space Station (ISS), the decades-long effort by a consortium of countries. In this case China is following a resolutely go-it-alone approach. Although the program relies heavily on Russian space technology, there is nothing collaborative about it.

What’s more interesting is that the Chinese space effort is not being used in an organized way to flagellate the public into support for NASA or other western space agencies. There’s no Sputnik effect. Why?

One possibility is that experience with the ISS has taught NASA and others that until the problem of costly and dangerous transport between station and Earth surface is more than marginally improved, large permanent space facilities are not worth it. The amount and quality of research produced by the ISS is nowhere near what was expected. The Russians, in their blunt fashion, suggested that the ISS consortium let the $100 billion station fall into the ocean in 2020. So if the Chinese wish to build their own albatross for prestige purposes…let them have at it.

There is also speculation that the Chinese have military purposes in mind. However, space platforms such as the ISS are too public, too complicated and inconveniently multipurpose to be very appealing for the military. I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s more likely the Chinese military will use specialized and highly secret satellites, just like the military elsewhere.

It’s most likely that the Chinese have chosen their space program to mark their national ascendency in science, technology and wealth. The U.S. and Soviet Union did that for a while, but the Russian economy collapsed and the Americans lost focus. Now we get to watch what the Chinese can do when faced with the same problems.

The ‘numbers,’ always important in supercomputer contests, are impressive: The old champ, China’s Tianhe 1a, managed 2.507 petaflops. [SciTechStory: Tianhe 1a: China and the world’s fastest supercomputer] A petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point calculations per second. The new champ can do 8.2 petaflops. This is a smashing win. To achieve this, Fujitsu used 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with a total of 548,352 chip cores – double the nearest competitor. The performance is roughly equivalent to a million desktop computers connected into one system. Only, of course, a million desktop computers would never perform like this. Truth is, the secret to a super-fast supercomputer is software, specifically hyper-specialized forms of network software. That’s where Fujitsu has taken the lead. Developing this kind of software is a monumental intellectual and practical task where even the most minute inefficiency in the programming can cost gigaflops.

The race continues, of course. Three U.S. computers (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Cray, and IBM) have already been announced as 2012 entries that are expected to achieve about 20 petaflops and China is not sleeping.

There are very few countries where it is not considered legitimate for government to have a role in Internet access. There are crooks and terrorists to catch, lots of them, and they all hang out on the Internet just waiting for government sleuths to ferret them out. Snark aside, this kind of on-line police work exists and is useful. However, while there’s no way to know, I’d wager that a lot more money is spent by governments to monitor political dissidents and various political conspiracies than is spent on typical police work. Much of this is done behind the cover of ‘normal’ government regulation and surveillance.

Of course, what is ‘normal’ varies, just as forms of government vary. Tapping the Internet remains technologically challenging for many governments. The rapid growth of phone-based satellite and Wi-Fi delivered Internet access complicates the picture for would-be snoops. Politically, it is sometimes inexpedient or even illegal for government to undertake mass monitoring of Internet traffic. So between the costs, technical difficulty and political/legal barriers many governments have gone to some effort to do what in many other circumstances they refuse to do: They’re learning from other countries’ experience and using another country’s model, China’s.

The model that seems to be spreading most rapidly is China’s. With more Internet users than there are people in the United States (380 million +), the thinking goes, “If China can keep a reign on the Internet, then any country can.” The Chinese model, which is of course unofficial, is relatively simple to outline:

1. Monitor, filter, and analyze Internet traffic. While the volume of Internet traffic is immense, technology for accessing, filtering, and analyzing has steadily become better and less expensive. The results are not ‘perfect’ from a surveillance point of view, but this is a game of percentages. Capturing and accurately analyzing around 50% of the traffic usually provides enough of a picture to be effective. Smart countries pick their surveillance targets with care and don’t waste resources.

2. Create laws and regulations that either directly or indirectly legitimizes surveillance, censorship and punitive action. It’s easier, even in a police state, to justify Internet intervention on the basis of what appear to be reasonable laws or regulations. These are often grounded on ‘moral and religious standards,’ ‘disturbance of the peace,’ and ‘fairness in business’ tenets sufficiently broad and fuzzy to cover any situation. Most of them are guaranteed to hold up in court, if indeed, there is any pretense of working within the law.

3. Enlist the support of Internet users. The business of co-opting the users to help monitor government targets takes on two main forms: Paid informers whose business it is to infiltrate and observe target activity, and voluntary monitoring, often within the proceedings of social networking, forums, blogs and other relatively informal areas where information is exchanged.

4. Establish a pattern for selectively blocking, apprehending, and intimidating Internet sources. Technically this is simply another side of monitoring and analyzing traffic. National firewalls, selective site blocking, ISP control (as in nationally owned access), and selective content blocking are typical censorship techniques. In more belligerent countries, the technical aspect is buttressed with harassment, arrest and other forms of intimidation to get compliance. In general, however, the Chinese model prefers to have ‘voluntary compliance.’

5. Prepare action protocols for emergency or ‘campaign’ style blocking. As has been dramatically demonstrated by the recent revolts in the Middle East, governments see the need to be prepared for quick and massive action in the face of uprisings. This calls for relatively elaborate and funded plans for emergency situations. The emergencies can also be natural disasters, so the plans can be made to do double duty. China has reportedly been rapidly putting into place such plans as a reaction to recent events.

If these seem like a formidable array of tools for governments to control the flow of information on the Internet, that’s because it is. It’s not perfect by a long shot, to repeat, this is a numbers game. Catch enough content (and people) to make enforcement a real threat; that will inhibit activity, possibly reducing it to ineffectiveness. That’s the goal.

It should be clear that this goal is not limited to authoritarian regimes. Many western-style democracies have all or some of the China model in place – usually minus the more brutal police action.

There is something of a technology race, remindful of security hackers versus security software (pretty much the same approach to the technology). But when it comes to government interference in the Internet, the ground-rules are not fair, in fact those who choose to fight are more like the one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

Those who wish to get around government censorship and prevention have three big allies: Volume, technical options and deception. Two of these often work together. Huge volumes of Internet traffic make it easier to hide risky communication through deception. One approach that is gaining favor is called steganography, or hiding information in plain sight. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the spies’ playbook. Unlike encryption, which tends to call attention to itself, steganography embeds the message in what appears to be normal language. There is even publicly available software, such as the academic project Collage, to help conceal the messages in typical social networking chatter, email, and tweets.

Another approach is based on a system of proxy servers, fake routers, and other technical means for concealing the actual flow of traffic. Somewhat like the Internet itself, these systems are designed so that if one node is compromised the messages can be rerouted through other nodes. This approach is very popular, often used more in the service of accessing pornography than for political purposes. Many of the proxy server ‘workarounds’ are more vulnerable than people think, but there are sophisticated approaches that are difficult for governments to detect.

The problem is, whether some kind of message concealment or technical fakery, these approaches are not for the un-initiated. They require a considerable amount of expertise, patience and often money – all of which may be in short supply. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but the advantage in the struggle for freedom of Internet access and information goes to the determined government. In most countries, most people, most of the time will not be able (or even want to) circumvent government censorship.

And the point is? Focus on #2 above in the China model. It is almost impossible to stop governments from exercising the technical aspects of Internet monitoring and censorship, nor will most people be able to resist or even want to resist the approved channels of Internet use. What needs to happen is that laws and regulations, which aid and abet Internet censorship, are not enabled – either in the first place or they are repealed. Of course, in many countries this is a pipe dream. Of course, it’s hard enough to do this even in countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States. However, it remains perhaps the best method to take the teeth out of Internet censorship. (Good luck and keep trying.)

Related articles/posts:

SciTechStory: Government censorship on the rise
The Guardian: Silence of the dissenters: How south-east Asia keeps web users in line
The Economist: A new way of beating the web’s censors
Technology Review: Censorship Circumvention Tools Aren’t Widely Used

That China would develop a top supercomputer is not a surprise, although it looked like another machine, the Nebulae supercomputer based in Shenzhen would be the first to grab the honors. Tianhe-1A, developed by the China’s National University of Defense Technology and located in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin (port city for Beijing) made the leap from sixth on the Top 500 list (compiled by Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee, USA) over the top U.S. entry, the Cray Jaguar system. (The Top 500 list is issued twice a year, the next due on November 1, 2010.)

By the numbers:
Sustained performance: 2.507 petaflops (thousand trillion floating point calculations per second), compared to the U.S. Jaguar at 1.75 petaflops.
Processors: 7,168 Nvidia (USA) Tesla M2050 graphics processing units and 14,336 Intel (USA) six-core Xeon CPUs.
Compared power: Equivalent to 175,000 laptops.
Theoretical performance: 4.669 petaflops (at full graphics capability).

At one level, development of the world’s fastest supercomputer is a race between the United States, China, and Japan although Europe, India and other countries also participate. The race does have a point: The faster the supercomputer, the more intensive the computing problems it can solve. This capability can be used for a wide range of real-world applications including meteorology, national defense, nanotechnology, high-finance, scientific modeling, oil and gas exploration, and product development. At another level, the capability to produce a top supercomputer is an indication of the depth, wealth, and coordination of a large scientific endeavor – in short, a very exclusive club. National pride is involved.

The ‘race’ to develop the world’s fastest supercomputer is remindful of the ‘space race’ of not too many years ago – with just a few more players. It was once the almost sole domain of the United States, but in a way the advent of the microprocessor changed the design of supercomputers completely, and made it possible for worldwide competition.

Once the top level of supercomputing is achieved, the issue becomes one of utilization. Speed alone does not make the supercomputer useful. The skills that combine hardware and especially software to achieve super high speeds are not the same as interfacing those capabilities with real-world applications. However, one follows the other. Computer scientists who have learned how to make software integrated thousands of processors come from the same schools and basic training as the applications programmers. That is the depth that a country’s computer science infrastructure must provide, if the moniker of ‘world’s fastest computer’ is to represent more than a temporary acclaim.

I juxtapose these two so far unnamed countries, not out of a sense of wagging a finger or trying to make one look better than the other (at least not much), but because in this evolving world of alternative energies the pathways are becoming clearer (the outcomes, not, of course). Wind power has come with its share of detractors, and some real world difficulties, coastal wind farms in particular. So it’s not unrealistic to point out that shoreline wind power is not necessarily appropriate. On the other hand, those who favor wind power…well, let’s dig into this a bit.

The United States has no wind farms with feet in the waters of the Atlantic. It could have them, of course. A new paper by researchers at the University of Delaware and Stony Brook University makes the case for a coordinated system of wind farms along the Atlantic coast.

The researchers analyzed five years of wind observations from 11 monitoring stations along the U.S. East Coast from Florida to Maine. Based on wind speeds at each location, they estimated electrical power output from a hypothetical five-megawatt offshore turbine. After analyzing the patterns of wind energy among the stations along the coast, the team explored the seasonal effects on power output.

“Our analysis shows that when transmission systems will carry power from renewable sources, such as wind, they should be designed to consider large-scale meteorology, including the prevailing movement of high- and low-pressure systems,” [Willette] Kempton [professor, University of Delaware] said.

[Brian] Colle [associate professor, Stony Brook University] explained the ideal configuration. “A north-south transmission geometry fits nicely with the storm track that shifts northward or southward along the U.S. East Coast on a weekly or seasonal time scale,” he said. “Because then at any one time a high or low pressure system is likely to be producing wind (and thus power) somewhere along the coast.”

[Source: EurekAlert]

The paper addresses one of the common complaints about wind generation, which is variability. Like solar energy, which makes a good compliment to wind power, there are days without much energy production, and days with perhaps too much. This can be overcome by having the wind farms geographically distributed according to meteorological patterns, as would be the case along the U.S. east coast.

It would also be true for the Pacific along China’s coastline. The Chinese (People’s Republic of China) are about to inaugurate their first 102 megawatt wind farm, located at the mouth of the Yangtze River.

Chinese officials announced plans last month to request bids for three to four large-scale offshore wind power projects generating up to 1,000 megawatts total. Beijing-based energy consultancy Azure International predicts that China will install 514 megawatts of offshore wind over the next three to four years, and by 2020 will have invested $100 billion to install up to 30,000 megawatts. That’s equal to all of the onshore wind farms currently installed in China, already the world’s largest market for wind power.

[Source: Technology Review]

The plan is to build ten regional wind farms by 2020 and tie them to the grid. Like the United States’ east coast, the winds coming from the continental land mass are less energetic than those that blow off the oceans in the west. However, for both countries a large concentration of population is along the coast, and power needs are pressing.

The Chinese are developing their own wind generation equipment, mostly by Sinovel, and have run into quality problems – some in the export market, which have hurt them. However, the long-term commitment and government support has kept both the incentive and pressure to improve.

Companies in the United States are also planning for east coast wind farms, but the projects (such as the Cape Wind project off Nantucket in Massachusetts) have been tied up in regulatory process. The NIMBY factor (Not In My Back Yard – locals who object to the large windmill towers blocking or changing cherished views) has been important. There is still concern about the cost competitiveness of wind power, although development of the technology and the mass production of large scale installations are lowering cost ratios. Some countries, notably Denmark, Portugal, and Spain are producing above 10% of national energy requirements with wind power. Globally, wind accounts for about 2% of energy use – a figure that has doubled in the last three years.

Of course, there is skepticism.

Building anything between London-Beijing-Singapore – 6,750 miles (10,863 km) is a colossal undertaking, much less something as technically demanding as a train line that can accommodate high speed trains. At this point most of the countries along the route don’t even use the same railroad gauge (track width); just one detail, although high speed trains often require unique track in any case. Three routes have been named, though unspecific: South to Vietnam and Cambodia, South East to swing through India, Burma, Thailand to Singapore, and North through Russia – replacing the Transiberian Railway – to Northern and Central Europe. Looking at a map, the rail lines must pass over some formidable mountain ranges, cross deserts, and jungles, and worst of all, run through highly populated areas. Some of the roadbed already exists, albeit in no condition for high speed trains.

Then there’s the politics. What have countries along the line to gain? (Access to Chinese markets.) What will China gain? (Access to the neighbor’s raw materials.) Since when does China make these kinds of negotiations with nominally unfriendly neighbors such as Vietnam, India, or Russia? What about political upheavals? There are revolutions and wars going on in these areas; do they not complicate such a world-spanning scheme that is so…ground hugging and vulnerable?

It all adds up to a lot of money. There is no formal estimate, but it obviously amounts to many billions (dollars, Euros, Yuan, or whatever). The Chinese say completion by 2020 is possible. It will take many years, decades probably, which is partly a function of money, but other factors apply.

It won’t all be done at once, of course. Several segments (Burma, Vietnam, Russia) are already in funding negotiations. The Chinese are working on the segments within China now. It’s in the middle of a $600 million domestic railway expansion that will connect all major cities with high-speed lines. This includes the world’s fastest train, the Harmony Express, which has a top speed of 250 mph (400 km/h). The technology for this train is from Siemens (Germany) and Kawasaki (Japan), but built entirely by the Chinese – by way of developing their manufacturing infrastructure. The Harmony Express travels 660 miles (1062 km) from Wuhan to Guangzhou in three hours. That’s a round trip from London to Edinburgh or a trip roughly from New York to Chicago.

One could debate the merits, the cost, the feasibility, the politics, and the PR value – forever – and we probably will, sporadically, for as long as China and other countries stick with the idea. Stick with it they probably will, as every year Asia seems to add credibility to inter-Asian cooperation.

However, I’m not sure the main point is whether this project ever gets started, or is partially started, or is partially completed, or whatever. Where this ‘grand design’ for linking China with Europe and the rest of Asia really has impact is perception. China gets credit for the ‘big momentum’ from having the vision to propose (or support) the idea and for having the technical confidence to pull it off. Not good, of course, if it fails in the technology.

This is not the China of old, nor is it the China of isolationism. It is China flexing its growing technical, industrial, and financial muscle. Impressive, if possibly a tad unrealistic; but then a lot of things that make a big impact on the future didn’t look realistic when they started.

Tiangong-1 was scheduled to launch by the end of 2010, but was delayed for technical reasons. It represents the culmination of a larger project, Project 921, started by the Chinese space program in 1992.

It’s been almost an article of faith that the free, open, all-inclusive Internet is, one: the only way the Internet can be, and two: righteous. The real-world says otherwise. Internet traffic is monitored or censored in more countries than not. At least fifteen countries fully censor all aspects of the Internet. The censorship of the Chinese government is not exceptional except in its relative competence. More importantly, the line between the political and ideological censorship; and the willing acceptance of censorship for nationalistic reasons is already sometimes indistinguishable in China.

For those who are interested in how the dynamic force of the Internet is, or isn’t, affecting China, I recommend a good article in the London Financial Times by Kathrin Hille: The internet: A missing link. It’s about China, its government paranoia and drive to isolate information, but also the differences compared to most of the world between China, its culture, and the way its people use the Internet. Here are a few samples:

At the forefront was Google, the world’s richest media and internet company. Justifying their decision to bow to censorship four years ago, its executives argued that this was the first step towards a freer Chinese web, with their local search service one of the main forces helping break down barriers to the flow of information.

They were wrong. Instead, China has developed its own cyberspace. It is growing less like the internet in the rest of the world, not more like it. And it is not just the baleful presence of a vast, assertive and highly flexible censorship apparatus that accounts for this evolution: the formative forces of “.cn” also include cultural preferences and social structures that are very different from those of the west. Google itself has often struggled to adapt to these differences.
…

One reason for these difficulties is that US companies took a long time to realise that Chinese people use the web differently from their counterparts in other markets. Simply put, they tend to roam the web like a huge playground, whereas Europeans and Americans are more likely to use it as a gigantic library. Recent research by the McKinsey consultancy suggests Chinese users spend most of their time online on entertainment while their European peers are much more focused on work.

[Source: ]

Losing China from the Internet (as most of the world knows it) has some immediate consequences – the loss of commercial activity and opportunity, which is relatively easy to quantify, and a great many intangible losses – loss of personal contacts, loss of important information (both ways), the end of collaborative projects. The long-term impact on China may be greater than for any other country. Unfortunately, the intangible losses are easy to state, hard to quantify. Besides, in all likelihood China will continue to allow some elements of the ‘mainstream’ Internet, so that a total blackout of all things outside of China is unlikely. (The Chinese, like so many of this world, are enthralled by Western, which is to say American, pop culture.)

What many other countries will be watching, is how China weighs the balance between using the Internet for its own purposes, and keeping out that which does not serve its purposes. This is often as much a technical question, as it is one of policy. How will China do it? What are the effects? Does imposed censorship work, or is it necessary to instill self-imposed censorship? All good questions for the authoritarian governments of the world. China will be the laboratory…as in so many other things, the great experiment in social engineering.

Stem cells are different than cars, of course; but bear with this comparison: Stem cell research and the technologies that flow from it have great potential, especially in the area of regenerative medicine (repairing damaged body parts). At the moment that potential is mostly prognostication and a few controversial applications. It can be argued that what stem cell research and application needs is commitment, and that the greatest commitment is happening in China. Commercial interests, including many private clinics, are jumping into not only stem cell research, but also applications. The Chinese government is pouring money into stem cells with guidelines unencumbered by the quasi-religious controversy that dogs stem cell research in many Western countries. Worldwide, people have noticed that China is the place to go for ‘last-effort’ stem cell procedures. They have voted with their feet in a form of medical tourism.

As of 2008, China is the fifth most productive provider of stem cell regenerative medicine research papers (in order: United States, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, China). Chinese papers on regenerative medicine, the practical aspect of stem cell research, increased in number from 37 in 2000 to 1,116 in 2008. A paper published by The McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health at the University Health Network and the University of Toronto has considerable detail on the rise of Chinese regenerative medicine, and is well worth reading:

While unorthodox activities at Chinese clinics and controversial drug approvals have raised eyebrows both in and outside China, dedicated researchers in the country’s labs have been making remarkable contributions to the field.
Among the country’s scientific firsts:

• By transferring the nucleus of a human skin cell into the immature ovum cell of a rabbit, researchers from a Shanghai hospital successfully produced embryonic human cells (a finding popular scientific journals held off publishing for two years due to skepticism and of mistrust Chinese scientific integrity).
• China to date has created at least 25 human embryonic stem cell lines (some estimate over 70 stem cell lines), four of which are of a specialized type that at that time only two other groups worldwide had managed to create.
• A Shanghai hospital cultivated and reintroduced human brain tissue in 2002 after taking a sample from the end of a chopstick implanted in a patient’s frontal lobe following a disagreement at a restaurant.
• Several human tissue types created artificially include blood vessel, tendon, bone, cartilage, skin, cornea and muscle fiber.

[Source: EurekAlert]

There has been much said about the lax ethical practices associated with Chinese stem cell medicine. International organizations, such as the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) have taken China to task for not following sanctioned practices. There has also been criticism within China, particularly by academic stem cell researchers, that China has been too eager to turn stem cell research into profitable medical procedures. The result has been a flurry of tightened governmental guidelines. Implementation of the guidelines waits upon regulatory details and funding for mechanisms of supervision. (In colloquial American-speak, like many countries, China knows how to drag the feet and fudge the details.)

It seems clear that China is intent on making advances in stem cell research turn into practical (and profitable) procedures. That’s where the bulk of its governmental support is going, and why so many clinics throughout China have seen the green-light of GO, if through a veil of government admonition.

Since it’s becoming increasingly apparent that stem cells, in their many and various types, will impact the treatment of, among other things: Type 1 diabetes, heart attacks, artery obstruction, liver and neural diseases, Parkinson’s disease, heart, liver and blood diseases, eye cataracts, and to combat aging; expect the Chinese to have a prominent, if not dominant position in the roll-call of leading nations in regenerative medicine. Expect also, that China will use its most prominent resource – manpower – in ways not available to most other countries.