#supervisory controller and data acquisition

[soapdispensersalesman]

[asteamtechnosolutions]

PLC, SCADA, and AVEVA: How They Work Together in Automation

PLC, SCADA, and AVEVA: How They Work Together in Automation

Coordination and smooth communication between various systems are essential in the field of industrial automation. Three key elements—PLC, S

PLC :- programmable logic controller

SCADA:- Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

[emwrote]

Writing fantasy set in the real world, had to google bed sizes because I can't remember the word for a bed where two people fit. Neither in Finnish or English.

Pommel, crossguard, dead standing tree, supervisory control and data acquisition, and flying buttress I know, but words describing the mundane? Nah.

[thissimplefeelingzine]

regarding your inexperienced w zines mod team- do u at least have somebody handling finances that has experience w a completed zine? that’s SUPER important, especially now, and I would urge you to reach out if not and find somebody to handle that positon. looking forward to this zine!

Hello anon,

I am Mod Dogfeathers*, and while posting directly to our socials is somewhat rare for me, I am This Simple Feeling's current Finance Mod, and so I thought it very important that I address your concerns directly, myself. I am very shy, I am neurodivergent, and I have severe social anxiety, and so most of the work I've done for This Simple Feeling thusfar has been infrastructural and supportive, somewhat away from wider visibility. However, I am extremely aware of the awesome responsibility that falls squarely on my shoulders as finance mod, and that the community around our zine– from my fellow mods and our potential contributors to the fans who will be cheering us on and reading issue 6 next year– must be able to depend on me to manage our finances through every stage of This Simple Feeling's production. The success of our project requires the community's collective confidence in me, and I am extremely keen to build that trust.

So, first, I want to apologize for the length of time that you've had to wait for this reply, and assure you we've been taking your concerns very seriously. Much of this time has been spent in deliberative reflection as to whether or not I should remain in this role. I love this project, and I have invested a prodigious amount of time and effort and affection into it since Head Mod @menecio approached me in early November 2020; I desperately want it to succeed. I have never wavered that I want to remain in this role, and my fellow staff have not wavered in their conviction that I should remain here, too. That said, I am aware that the success of our zine does not particularly care about what I want or what feels good, and so I took some time to seriously assess my own capabilities, to strenuously question my resolve, and to seek advice from people with zine experience who I trust. We have determined that I shall remain Finance Mod, but I want to stress that this was neither an easy nor an immediate decision– I did not let it be an easy or immediate decision, because what has always mattered to me is what's best for the zine. In the end, that determination was made based on the work that I've already done and the trust that my team has in my abilities.

Nevertheless, we want to emphasize that we continue to take your concerns seriously; we recognize that my lack of zine experience is both significant and reasonable cause for concern. We are taking additional measures to address that lack, beyond those that I insisted upon when I accepted this role. I will shortly lay out some of my relevant experience, but in recognition that it is limited and that it may not be sufficient to assuage your concerns, I want to make clear one of the additional measures that I requested during this period of consideration.

My husband and my partner of ten years, Tom, is a trained accountant, and he will now be supervising my work for this project directly. He had already agreed to assist me informally, and had– with supreme patience– already conducted a few intense, 6 hour long sessions to explain the ways that double-entry bookkeeping and Microsoft Access can be used to manage a project of this nature. He will continue to do that, but he will also be keeping an eye on my work and checking up that work periodically. I will still be managing our accounts, my name will still be on our books, and this will still be my job, but Tom will be actively present to confirm that I am doing this correctly. He does not have zine experience, he is not involved in fandom, and he does not have fandom-relevant socials– he has no specific pull towards fandom participation, the way I do– but he has worked for several years as one of two accountants for the library of one of the USA's top 40 public research universities, managing the extremely complex and surprisingly variable needs of such a massive nonprofit, and has been responsible for controlling several million dollars of public acquisitions spending in that capacity. (His way of describing this: "Each year we spent about the same amount as the budget for 10 Things I Hate About You, and I was in charge of a little over half of it.")

As part of this supervisory role, Tom is also going to maintain a presence in our server. He is not a mod and plays no part in decision making beyond occasionally giving us financial advice when asked, but he has appropriate server roles to provide direct access to mod discussions, so that he can be present to pay attention when I bring financial data to the team, and to answer our collective financial questions, should any arise that are beyond my personal capacity. When his schedule permits, he is also available to our contributors and mods to answer their questions directly in server.

What follows is a non-comprehensive, but hopefully thorough, summary of my relevant experience.

By training and professionally, I am a studio artist with an MFA, the terminal degree in my field. I manage my own studio practice. This is a complicated, variable job that requires a great deal of flexibility, responsiveness, and skill– most of which does not actually involve the hand-skills necessary to create the literal artwork the studio practice ostensibly produces. As an artist, I am a sole proprietor, and my studio is my business, but with very specific needs not necessarily found in other businesses, and I run it without assistants. I maintain my inventory and my supplies, I purchase and manage equipment necessary to create work, I manage my work through various states of creation and exhibition and– sometimes– publication, I take on clients for commission, I apply to shows (for which there is always a fee), I work with gallerists and curators, I research and make connections with different platforms and specialist logistics businesses (PayPal/money handlers, banks, streaming platforms, printers, data storage). All of those affect my studio's finances, and so they must be managed carefully, in addition to sales of prints and original artwork (thusfar handled privately, as is fairly normal– we are often encouraged not to maintain digital storefronts, because it can dissuade potential gallerists from representing us; I am in the process of threading that needle.) In this capacity, I have no employer: I am responsible for taxes– both knowing what they are and paying them– and fees, I am responsible for my costs, and I am responsible to my business partners. There is no external buffer– if I fail any of this, I am the only party responsible for making it right.

Because I believe in the transformative power of art (and, for that matter, fandom), I try to work with local arts organizations and nonprofits when possible, particularly when it comes to showing my work and engaging in community arts efforts. I prefer to support group projects that elevate multiple artists, and/or organizations that serve diverse communities. Prior to COVID, I was doing a volunteer-intensive residency with local community arts nonprofit whose mission is to bring art and heritage craft skills to communities that would not otherwise be able to access such training; COVID has necessitated a change in my ability to serve them, but I do still work for them in a more limited capacity, usually grantwriting.

Though I prioritize nonprofits, I have also worked as an assistant/intern for urban galleries using for-profit and co-op funding structures, which involved both basic work associated with gallery assistantship (manning desks, running errands, calling support businesses, promotion, show installation, etc), and sometimes work on specific projects that required knowledge of the institution's fiscal state and available funds (from contacting local businesses about the replacement of a gallery's floor and helping to plan the launching of a new residency, to more routine tasks, such as contacting local bakeries about catering or hosting satellite shows, and ordering promotional material from printers.) All galleries run on extremely tight budgets, and having been exposed to a variety different gallery funding structures (with concomitantly different priorities and audiences) gives me an awareness of the work and the precision required to achieve ambitious goals with extremely limited finances. They are why I price things out on three levels: the ideal, the nearly-ideal, and the most affordable that still meets our high bar for quality.

I have experience writing grants, both for myself and (more notably) for the nonprofit at which I am an AIR (artist in residence). The most ambitious of these grants has reached the second stage of consideration, which is notable both because the granting organization is not arts specific, the deciding board is composed mostly of bankers with deep fiscal expertise, and we were asking for funds significantly in excess of what that grant usually offers. That decision is expected in June of next year. Grant-writing is less of an abstraction on the skills necessary for a zine than it might initially seem: both involve my operation as an agent representing the organization for which I requesting money; art grants are usually for very specific projects with very specific constraints; they usually require that our funding comes from multiple sources that are then pooled to enact the project; the projects have a specific lifespan and a schedule on which key stages must be completed; they require extremely precise budgeting; we are directly accountable for both the project and the precise management and tracking of said funding; and we must be ready to provide statements and proof of the project's progress and funding at every stage of the project's active lifespan, as well as a summary report at the end.

I have curatorial experience with local and regional art shows, usually organized by a small independent team working closely with a local, preferably-nonprofit gallery who is lending us their space; those roles are very analogous to the XO/logistical role I am currently fulfilling for This Simple Feeling. Though we worked with local galleries, and could sometimes make use of some of their equipment (such as hammers and nails and– if we were very lucky– leftover paint), we were responsible for every aspect of the actual hosting of the show and associated costs. This included equipment rental, installation costs, costs to repair & repaint to walls from the normal damage of installation, catering, sometimes utilities and space rental, etc. All of those costs were additional to the cost of recruiting artists, hosting calls, managing the artists and their work, managing sales of the work throughout the duration of the show, managing the sales of any prints the artists or merch the artists wanted to offer alongside the work, and organizing any publications or promotional materials released for the shows. Each show had different financial needs, but they all required budgets prior to their beginning, modified when necessary as the project came closer to realization and new constraints presented themselves. The businesses we solicited quotes from and our cost-reduction strategies varied from show to show, but all of the teams I worked with were semi-formal groups of friends and collaborators, similar to the teams that design zines, and so we did not have a pool of institutional capital to use for funding– we had to generate or barter for all of that ourselves. We did it because we loved it and we believed in it, not because it was potentially lucrative (community art shows almost never are, even less than zines; the point is celebration of our community.)

And that, honestly, is one of the most relevant bits of experience I've accumulated to date, tangential but applicable to a project like this: the awareness that this kind of project is done for love, not money. Issue 6 is being produced for charity, but even wildly successful for-profit zines will almost never be able to make enough profit to adequately compensate the cost of the staff's time, which would be upwards of $20k, if you paid them $10/hr, which is below the cost of living in most parts of my country. The cost to hire freelance writers is, at minimum, $.10 a word. The artwork in zines would cost in the hundreds– and, more realistically, thousands– of dollars, in a professional illustrative or fine art context. The writers and artists who contribute to zines absolutely make work that reaches (and exceeds) the professional standards required to participate in those industries. Our contributors have trained for years to hone their skills, and they put those skills towards making work for us, for free; our staff similarly donate their time to accomplish very complex tasks to support that creative work; that time could be spent producing work for those professional contexts, but instead they give it to us, and they do that because they believe in us and our community, and they want to celebrate a fandom and a ship– Star Trek and K/S– that have brought us together, and (with Trek and K/S specifically) have supported fandom engagement for over five decades. They give that work to us, and the only thing they ask is for us to make a zine out of it. I am an artist and a writer, I have formal training in both disciplines, and I understand these costs: I cannot express how seriously I take the gift of their time and energy, and how profoundly I am humbled to be trusted with it.

If I sound zealous, it's because I am, and because I am excruciatingly aware that from the moment our staff begins working on this project and our contributors start making their works, the financial responsibility for taking all that gifted energy and skill and effort becomes solely my own. If I fail as finance mod, I do not fail only myself, as would be the case in my studio practice– I also fail my fellow mods and every single one of my contributors, and I fail the community responsible for the generation of work that has provided me solace for decades. If I fuck up as finance mod, it is solely my responsibility to make it right.

As I said before, your concerns are absolutely reasonable– I share many of them– and all of this experience is tangential, and zines are different projects to those that I've worked on before, with different constraints and needs. I have thus taken action and structured my own work as a mod to assuage these concerns in myself, in ways that I hope will concomitantly assuage some of your concerns as well. I am paying attention to my own inexperience, I am preventing myself from functioning on auto-pilot, I am taking nothing for granted, and I am being actively vigilant for the inevitable gaps in my own expertise.

That's easy to say, but what does it look like? Thusfar, it takes the form of huge amounts of research, and the connection to a extant network of experienced zinesters, both of which are repositories of information with which I am trying to plug some of my gaps. I know well, as an academic who also practices disciplines (art and writing) that are precarious by their nature, that there is a big difference between external research and experience– but if everyone starts somewhere, then I have gone to great lengths to map out the place where I'm starting as thoroughly as possible. I have read (and often annotated) literally every resource on the production and staffing of fandom zines that I could find. When I have a question, I check these sources and I also look for examples of whatever I'm curious about 'in the wild'. To determine the likely price of our zine, for example, I looked through seven pages of tags on popular hub/promotion blogs on Tumblr, and generated a comprehensive Excel sheet from one such session that allowed me to compare prices against the number of pages and the kinds of merch offered alongside the zines in question. To balance the holes in that mode of data collection, I have also sought contacts and tried to build a relationship with communities around zine production: i have close friends who work on zines (and who initially got me interested in this kind of project– you know who you are, and my thanks is infinite for your patience and your willingness to act as resource), and I regularly make a pest of myself by asking strange questions to folks in Discord servers dedicated to the topic (I am also grateful to these communities, in similar terms). When possible, or if the question is specific enough, I try to go directly to the source: when I was uncertain what, specifically, could be used to verify a PayPal account, and found conflicting answers in their documentation, I spent three days talking to various help desk personnel until I found a solid answer on which to proceed. All of this is basic, and deserves no accolades.

If I am anything in my personal art practice, it is a colorist, and so I already had fairly deep knowledge of color theory prior to my involvement here– however, because color accuracy is so important to printed artwork, and depends so much on printer technology, the capacity and setup of individual print shops, and digital color spaces, I have spent time researching this too. I have requested printing samples from 7 different printers, and I have peppered the ones that meet the zine's standards with esoteric questions about what kind of printing presses they use and what ICC profiles their digital presses are set up to handle. I have done this because when it comes time (very shortly) for our Art Mod (@i-drive-a-nii-san) and myself to make some final determinations on which printers we want to use, it is important to me personally that we have the most comprehensive data available with which to make that decision. The zine that we publish needs to be pragmatically affordable– but within the scope of that pragmatism, I want the best quality possible, so as to do justice to the contributions that will live on its pages. 

I am aware that all of my experience is tangential, and that the direct relevance that it has on this situation is limited. I am aware that there are gaps in my knowledge. I am aware of the awesome responsibilities I have as finance mod, and that I am a potential bottleneck upon which this project either breaks and fails or through which it passes and succeeds. I am aware of the gift inherent in every work we receive and every moment of staff working time, and the legacies at play with K/S specifically. I am aware that all the book-learning in the world has limited bearing on the actual experience of doing something on the ground. I find my experience lacking, and for that reason, I very seriously considered stepping down. I am humbled by the responsibility required by this position; I decided to stay because the trust my team expressed in me was also humbling.

My experience may be tangential, but there is a final element that I strongly suspect is applicable to my role as finance mod (and mod generally): in a project like a zine, done for love and for community, there are a myriad ways in which trust matters, small enough to overlook but overwhelming in their accumulation. The trust of the external fandom/zinester community matters, and for that reason I am being as honest as possible, and almost ceded my position to someone with greater experience; the trust of one's fellow staff and collaborators also matters in significant ways. An administrative team that trusts each other– that has confidence in each others' abilities and convictions, that understands each others' outlooks and that communicates well, and that deeply believes that that they will mutually have each other's backs– that kind of administrative team is an awesome thing, and their confidence is often perceptible to the contributors in very real ways, who then trust the administrative team to have their backs and to support them as necessary. Collaborators and administrators who have established that trust with each other tend to work together more effectively, and produce stronger work as a result, especially in a creative capacity. Good work requires creative risk-taking, which in turn requires the certainty that administration can support the necessary risk-taking and facilitate its success. The establishment of such trust is not automatic– we must work for it, actively– but the team involved in issue 6 of This Simple Feeling has that trust in each other, and the willingness to build it with both our collaborators and the wider community around our zine.

My confidence in the rest of my team is unshakeable. They have, in turn, expressed their confidence in me, that I am able to do the tasks and handle the responsibility involved with being finance mod on a project as specific and complex as a fandom zine for charity; I will trust them, and I will continue to work to earn their trust. I will also trust the broad community of zinesters around me, and solicit their expertise to help me navigate unfamiliar waters, and I will trust the professional expertise of my partner, who I have asked to donate his time. I will not lie, and so I make no promise that I won't fuck up in this role– but I will absolutely promise that if I do, I will make it right, and I will do everything in my power to prevent such fuckups from occurring in the first place.

I encourage you or anyone else to contact me if you have further questions; I can be reached through the contact forms on my personal Carrds– both linked on This Simple Feeling's staff bio on the Carrd– or alternatively you can request my Discord handle via DM on This Simple Feeling’s Tumblr or Twitter.

- Mod Dogfeathers/42/booleanWildcard/NAB

* I write fanfiction under the name booleanWildcard, and I am known socially as 42 or */asterisk. I post drawings as Dogmachine. I sign my visual work as NAB, my initials.

* We are using Microsoft Access instead of Excel, because Access is more flexible and comprehensive with its ability to cross-reference multiple fields. We will use it to generate reports for release, including possibly ones that can be plugged into Excel/Google Sheets

[didanawisgi]

China's push to control Americans' health care future

U.S. officials say the Chinese government is trying to collect Americans' DNA, and they believe a recent offer from a Chinese company for assistance in COVID-19 testing was suspicious. Jon Wertheim reports.

China's push to control Americans' health care future

U.S. officials say the Chinese government is trying to collect Americans' DNA, and they believe a recent offer from a Chinese company for assistance in COVID-19 testing was suspicious. Jon Wertheim reports.

For all the polarization that grips Washington, here's a source of rare consensus: the emerging threat of China's push to acquire our health care data, including the DNA of American citizens. U.S. officials tell us the communist regime's aggressive collection of our most personal information presents a danger both to national security and our economy. As alarm bells ring across agencies, parties, and presidential administrations, different branches of government have taken action over the past year to stem the tide of our medical data flowing to China. The quest to control our biodata – and, in turn, control health care's future – has become the new space race, with more than national pride in the balance. Our investigation begins with an unsolicited and surprising proposal that came from overseas at the onset of the COVID crisis.

Early last March, the state of Washington was the site of the first major coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. As COVID rates and the need for tests were spiking, BGI Group, the world's largest biotech firm - a global giant based in China - approached the state of Washington with an enticing offer.

In a strikingly personal letter to the governor, BGI proposed to build and help run state-of-the-art COVID testing labs. BGI would quote "provide technical expertise," provide "high throughput sequencers" and even "make additional donations."

It seemed like an offer the state couldn't refuse, especially given the desperate need. But officials were suspicious about BGI and its connections to the Chinese government.

Bill Evanina: They are the ultimate company that shows connectivity to both the communist state as well as the military apparatus.

Bill Evanina recently stepped down as the top counterintelligence official in the U.S., a veteran of both the FBI and CIA. He was so concerned by BGI's COVID testing proposals, and who would ultimately get the data, that he authorized a rare public warning: "Foreign powers can collect, store and exploit biometric information from covid tests."

Bill Evanina: We put out an advisory to not only every American, but to hospitals, associations, and clinics. Knowing that BGI is a Chinese company, do we understand where that data's going?

Jon Wertheim: Tens of millions Americans getting COVID tests this year, you don't think a lot of them are thinking, "Boy, where is this data going, what third party's involved in this?"

Bill Evanina: I would proffer no one's thinking that. But this shows the nefarious mindset of the Communist Party of China, to take advantage of a worldwide crisis like COVID.

Evanina suspects these lab offers are modern-day Trojan horses. BGI comes to the U.S. bearing gifts, but harboring other motives. It's unclear whether BGI, or any COVID tester, would get DNA from nasal swabs, he says, but the labs are a way to establish a foothold, to bring their equipment here, start mining your data, and set up shop in your neighborhood.

Edward You: You have to take a step back and ask yourself who has access to that data.

Supervisory Special Agent Edward You is a former biochemist turned FBI investigator.

Edward You: And with that, there's a very uncomfortable truth that comes out, that in the last decade or so, you'll see that China has heavily invested, through the purchase or acquisition of actual companies, access to our data.

Jon Wertheim: If the question is where is this data going, all roads lead to China?

Edward You: They are the biggest player right now.

The authoritarian government of China and its leader Xi Jinping have been boldly open about their ambitions to beat the west and reap the benefits of advances in DNA science and technology. The communist regime even has a published manifesto with a catchy name.

Edward You: They have something called Made in China 2025. And in these national strategies, they absolutely call out wanting to be the dominant leader in this biological age. So wanting to be the leader and being able to develop vaccines, precision medicine.  

For all the classified briefings about China that Bill Evanina received, the threat really hit home when he called home.  

Bill Evanina: This is the argument I would have with my dad. Is ten years from now-- my dad gets a phone call and is told, "Hey, by the way, we understand you're gonna develop hypertension. And you're on the verge of Parkinson's. Here are three medicines you should take moving forward to help alleviate some of the symptoms." My dad's gonna be like, "Well, how do they know this?" And the company's from China. Because they've already micro-targeted my dad based upon his DNA. And my dad says, "Okay, (CLAP) I'll do it."

Jon Wertheim: The devil's advocate argument would say, "Listen, if you're able to pinpoint something in my DNA, I'll sign up for that."

Bill Evanina: That's exactly what my dad said. (LAUGH) So my argument is, to him, from a long-term existential cost to our nation, do we want to do that? Do we wanna have another nation systematically eliminate our health care services? Are we okay with that as a nation? If we are as a nation, then so be it. But that's what's happening.

Our dependence on China during COVID - for PPE, for masks - will pale in comparison to our potential health care dependence going forward, according to Edward You of the FBI.

Edward You: What happens if we realize that all of our future drugs, our future vaccines, future health care are all completely dependent upon a foreign source? If we don't wake up, we'll realize one day we've just become health care crack addicts and someone like China has become our pusher.

Jon Wertheim: Health care crack addicts, you say?

Edward You: Right. If they're in a position to be able to offer you personalized, effective, low-cost health care, would we be in a position to say no, I don't think so?

Jon Wertheim: How close are we to that?

Edward You: I don't know how close we are, but I can feel it breathing down our neck.

Jon Wertheim: This sounds a little xenophobic. I mean, if China is the industry leader here, why wouldn't you do business with them?

Edward You: Well, at the end of the day, it's not about the Chinese people. It's about the Chinese government.

He says China's government understands that their future success hinges on accumulating large amounts of human DNA.

Edward You: They are building out a huge domestic database. And if they are now able to supplement that with data from all around the world, it's all about who gets the largest, most diverse data set. And so, the ticking time bomb is that once they're able to achieve true artificial intelligence, then they're off to the races in what they can do with that data.

Jon Wertheim: You're saying biggest data set wins?

Edward You: Correct.

Think of DNA as the ultimate treasure map, a kind of double-helixed chart containing the code for traits ranging from our eye color to our susceptibility to certain diseases. If you have 10,000 DNA samples, scientists could possibly isolate the genetic markers in the DNA associated with, say, breast cancer. But if you have 10 million samples, your statistical chances of finding the markers improve dramatically, which is why China wants to get so much of it.

Edward You: It is one-sided, though. China passed a law last year. The Chinese government has absolutely clamped down on any access to their biological data or their biological samples. So it is a one-way street.

Jon Wertheim: So, their data's not leaving China but they're sucking it in from all over the world?

Edward You: Right.

It's not just DNA, according to Bill Evanina. He and his colleagues have been tracking China as the country uses less-than-honorable methods to vacuum up all sorts of data from outside their borders.

Bill Evanina: They do it both legitimately and illegitimately. They steal some data, but they're very strategic in how they acquire it from around the world.

Jon Wertheim: You're saying at least in some cases, China's hacking to get this information.

Bill Evanina: China is number one in the world at any kind of hacking capability, and they're brazen about it.

In December, John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence, went so far as to name China as the number one national security threat to America, citing specifically, their theft of data and technology.

Bill Evanina: You have probably five or six health care companies the last five years who have been, I would say, penetrated, exfiltrated, hacked by China.

Jon Wertheim: What's the likelihood you and I have been hacked by China?

Bill Evanina: 110%.

Jon Wertheim: Personal data?

Bill Evanina: Personal data. Current estimates are that 80% of American adults have had all of their personally identifiable information stolen by the Communist Party of China.

The concern is that the Chinese regime is taking all that information about us - what we eat, how we live, when we exercise and sleep - and then combining it with our DNA data. With information about heredity and environment, suddenly they know more about us than we know about ourselves and, bypassing doctors, China can target us with treatments and medicine we don't even know we need.

Edward You: Think about the dawn of-- the Internet of Things and the 5G networks and the-- and smart homes and smart cities. There are going to be sensors everywhere. It's gonna be tracking your movement, your behavior, your habits. And ultimately, it's gonna have a biological application, meaning that based on the data that gets collected, they'll be able to analyze that and look at improving your health. That data becomes incredibly relevant and very, very valuable.

Jon Wertheim: You're describing data almost as-- as a commodity.

Edward You: Data is absolutely gonna be the new oil.

All this may sound like a premise for a dystopian futuristic science fiction movie, but U.S. government officials say the picture gets even scarier given how China is already using DNA strategically against its own citizens today.

Sophie Richardson: These are some of the most serious abuses that the Chinese government has committed in modern history.

Sophie Richardson, director of the China program for Human Rights Watch, says China has rounded up more than a million Uyghurs, Chinese citizens who are a Muslim minority, and jailed them in camps. The U.S. government calls this a crime against humanity.

Sophie Richardson: They're being subjected to political indoctrination. They can't use their own language. They're not allowed to worship. Those people are highly restricted in how they can live their lives.

Jon Wertheim: This is a population under constant surveillance?

Sophie Richardson: Yeah. It's-- it's a region that's awash in surveillance technology, ranging from, you know, facial recognition software, surveillance cameras, data doors, Wi-Fi sniffers.

Part of the social control includes the forced collection of DNA. Under the guise of free physicals for Uyghurs, Richardson says China is actually collecting DNA and other biometric data that's then used specifically to identify people, target other family members and refine facial recognition software. And those, national security officials say, are just the uses we know about.  

In response to the Uyghur repression, last July, the U.S. Department of Commerce sanctioned two subsidiaries of a Chinese biotech company. That company? BGI, the same one offering Washington state the COVID testing lab.  

Edward You: Those companies were identified to have been facilitating the collection of genetic information of ethnic Uyghurs. If anything, that should serve as a warning signal for all of us that that is potentially what can happen if our data gets out of our hands, how it could be used.

It's not a coincidence BGI is involved in the Uyghur crisis given the company's close relationship with the communist regime. In 2010, after receiving $1.5 billion from China's government, BGI was able to expand dramatically.

Bill Evanina: They're monstrous. They have contracts with over 60 countries globally to provide not only genomic sequencing, but also to provide analytics.

Jon Wertheim: They say, "We're a private company." Are they?

Bill Evanina: There's no such thing as a private company in the Communist Party of China.

Under a series of laws unthinkable in western democracies, Chinese companies like BGI are obligated to share data with the Chinese regime. It's as if, say, Google, Amazon and Facebook had to turn over their data to the CIA, on demand.

Jon Wertheim: So you're trying to tell me that the Chinese government, whether it's biotech or-- they can say, "Hey, we want your information. Please provide it."

Bill Evanina: Absolutely. You must provide any and all data that's asked for by the Communist Party in China. Which, the scary part is, sometimes it's not all their data. If you are in a joint partnership, a joint venture, their data is now susceptible to go to the Chinese Communist Party.

As BGI touts on its own website, the company has been steadily developing partnerships with hospitals and biotech companies inside the United States, giving BGI — and by extension, the Chinese government — potential access to our DNA data, sequencing technology and analytics.

Jon Wertheim: How does BGI partner with U.S. companies?

Bill Evanina: So they do it, first of all, with money. So investment. I wanna invest $10 million, $20 million, $80 million in your company. Every company says yes, come on in. At the same time they're gonna have an unwritten rule that they're gonna be able to take that data and your sequencing capabilities. And what they don't know is China's keepin' it and they're givin' you a copy back.

BGI declined our request for an interview and said in a statement, "the notion that the genomic data of American citizens is in any way compromised through the activities of BGI in the U.S. is groundless." They said they are "a private organization" founded "to benefit human health and wellbeing."

Remember BGI's proposal to build COVID labs for the state of Washington? 60 Minutes learned that the company made similar proposals to more than five other states, including New York and California…. And, after federal officials warned against partnering with BGI, each state said no to BGI's labs.

It's not just China that's recognized what a valuable commodity your DNA can be. As you'll hear: some of the fastest-growing U.S. tech companies are in this space, as well. In fact, you may have already surrendered your DNA by spitting in a tube.

[allanwalkerit]

I did it my way. (With a Little Help from My Friends)

‘I planned each charted course Each careful step along the byway And more, much more than this I did it my way’ - Sinatra

Over the last three years, I’ve built out some proof-of-concept data visualization applications for some large scale Enterprise clients, across a multitude of vertical markets.

These have included, in no particular order:

Semi-conductor manufacturing

Wearable technology manufacturing

Pharmaceutical distribution

Financial

Oil & Gas

Retail

Consumer Hardware & Software

Mobile Communications

Energy Utility

Without exception, every Enterprise client presented similar challenges - namely, how to visually represent data at scale in an insightful, and actionable format.

Here is my methodology.

I adopted a Data strategy:

Data as a service,

ETL as a service,

Data Science as a service, and

Data Visualization as a service.

Data as a Service (DaaS)

Data Acquisition

Technology is making acquiring data in an more automated manner arguably easier and relatively cheaper, increasing the volume and velocity of data produced. 

SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition devices), Bank ATM’s, merchant credit card swipe terminals, website forms, and sensors - such as Infra-red, Radar and Sonar - even when you compose a tweet...all examples of data acquisition. 

With more and more IoT (Internet of Things) devices becoming available, automation of data collection is becoming more even more universal and ubiquitous.

Data Storage     

If a record has a time-stamp, it can be recognized as an event, or a transaction; i.e. something happened at this time, on this day, in this month, in this year.  These records are (normally) stored in a database.

That was my bread and butter, making sense of events that have happened - or, what was happening in (near) real-time.  In recent engagements, it’s the latter that seemed to be more pervasive - sustaining ‘live’ data connections that are capable of very fast refresh rates - sometimes on a per second basis (but more often than not, updated daily).

Data as a Service at the Enterprise meant I’d be connecting to a “Data Lake” such as Hadoop/Hive, a Teradata warehouse on-premise database, or a cloud database like Redshift on the Amazon Web Services platform. 

Alternatively (or sometimes additionally), I’d be connecting to ‘NoSQL’ databases like Mongo and Cassandra, while location data was held in GIS (Geo-spatial Intelligence Software) databases like PostGIS or ESRI. 

There were also databases that are designed to take advantage of in-memory technologies, and are suited to analytical applications; such as SAP Hana, Memqsl, and Snowflake. 

My preferred solution for the foundation of a Data as a Service based architecture is Exasol, because it is proven to be capable of performing analytical tasks at scale, leveraging massively parallel processing and in-memory technologies, enabling rapid responses to intensive queries over massive data sets.  

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) as a Service

‘Extracting’ reads data from a source database (and potentially multiple other sources), ‘Transforming’ is the process of converting this data (joining, unions, performing calculations, cleansing and aggregating) and ‘Loading’ writes to the target database (or writing back to the source).

Business Intelligence applications such as Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy often require data to be ‘shaped’ or ‘structured’ in a certain way; usually in a columnar format.

This used to be an arduous task - involving writing batch scripts - but no longer.  There are a plethora of enterprise ETL solutions available such as AWS Glue, Apache Kafka and Informatica.

My preferred solution for the basis of an ETL as a Service based architecture is Alteryx, because it is proven to be capable of extracting data from multiple sources - including Hadoop/Hive, Mongo, ESRI and Exasol. 

Using an intuitive drag and drop GUI (Graphical User Interface) - it is possible to develop a repeatable, re-usable data transformation as an automated process (also known as a workflow) that can be run on a scheduled basis.

Data Science as a Service

Traditionally, Enterprises would refer complex analytical and statistical tasks such as predicting, modelling, forecasting and so forth to highly skilled data scientists.

It is now possible to automate some of these complex tasks - on Platforms like IBM DSx (accessing tools like Watson ML & Apache Spark), and AWS Domino (accessing tools like Python, Julia & Matlab) but my preference is again, Alteryx, because it is proven to be capable of generating highly accurate predictive models, simulations and forecasts (using the open source R) at scale, as an automated process.

Data Visualization as a Service

There are many Data Visualization tools and libraries available:  IBM Cognos, Plotly, Microsoft PowerBI - but here I have three preferences, and sometimes, depending on the scenario and use-cases, I’ll combine all three.

Tableau is proven to be capable of plotting huge amounts of data points on a HTML Canvas. The Server JavaScript and REST APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow integration with responsive design Bootstrap web applications and a consistent library of user interfaces.  Combined with an Exasol database connection, Tableau is capable of querying multi-million high granularity records - for example transactions - allowing for interactivity over multiple plots/charts.

D3 is my preference if I am using low granularity or summary data. Instead of a server responding to a query and returning that response, d3 downloads and processes data client side, in a browser.  D3 is capable of drawing elements on an HTML Canvas or rendering SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics).  It is cross-browser, platform agnostic, and ultimately, the most flexible library which allows for full customization.

Mapbox is my preference if I am using location data.  It is capable of rendering multi-million data points using vector tiles, which can be queried client side in a browser.

User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI)

jQuery UI  is my preference for a consistent User Interface library. I use Bootstrap to develop responsive design web applications.  I typically use client CSS and style guides to comply with typography, color palette and brand guidelines for the application.  

Charts and graphs typically remain in a grayscale color palette, with chart types conforming with Tufte/Few guidelines.

Example #1

Scenario: Four Dimensional Seismic Survey

Use-case: Predict magnitude of seismic activity over time for the different formations (horizons) in the anticline, and compare with actual values. 

Example #2

Scenario: Fleet Credit Cards 

Use-case: Predict churn and retention over time for different retail sites and compare with actual values, making the last data point actionable (alert site manager upon difference to target and/or outside normal parameters).

Example #3

Scenario: Demand and supply of products over time for different markets

Use-case: Predict origin and destination locations of logistical assets and compare with actual values over time, to inform a forecast model of product supply and demand.

Of course, I was being my normal flippant self when I sang ‘I did it my way’.  I had more than a little help from my friends - you know who you are of course, because I’ve tipped my hat to you on many occasions in previous blog posts.

‘What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song I will try not to sing out of key’ - Lennon/McCartney

The communities

Over the last three years, I’ve learned a lot from developers in various communities: 

The twitter-verse of data visualization practitioners, 

The Tableau community forum, 

The Alteryx community forum,

GIS Stack Exchange,

Stack Overflow,

GitHub,

Behance,

Dribbble, and

Codepen

‘What would you do if I sing out of tune, Would you stand up and walk out on me?‘

The Tableau ‘community’ as of late 2017, seems to be going through a radical period of introspection.  When I say ‘Tableau community’ - I’m really referring to the ‘Tableau twitterati’ - not the community forum participants per-se, but cliques such as MakeoverMonday and Women + Data, and the ultimate Tableau coterie - Zen Masters.  

In fact, Tableau themselves referred to these groups as ‘tribes’.

A culture, or sub-culture, can form behaviors and attitudes that stem from attachment and perceived loyalty to that clique.  Sectarianism is synonymous with tribalism, and is often an consequence of division.

When I read tweets haranguing other practitioners about plagiarism, and read blog posts with political statements to underpin an opinion, or examples of promoting gratuitous and egotistical self promotion, it gives me great pause for concern, and it’s very tempting to stand up, and walk out the door in disgust at what the community not only regards as acceptable, but normal.

‘Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song, I will try not to sing out of key’

I recommend that Tableau shutters the Zen Master program, and instead, promotes and grows the Tableau Foundation Data Fellowship.

I recommend that the Makeover Monday leadership and participants re-focus their efforts by contributing to the Tableau Foundation Projects and develop towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, volunteering their time to the Tableau Service Corps.

I recommend that Tableau welcome Women + Data members on the board of their diversity committees and judging panels of the ‘IronViz’ competitions and feeder contests.

I believe that these recommendations would foster an inclusive, collaborative culture, rather than accepting and promoting sectarianism as a norm; and would re-energize the wider Tableau community. 

[kavyarajblog]

A SCADA system is composed of interconnected components that work together to monitor and control industrial processes effectively. At its core is the Supervisory Controller, which acts as the central computer, managing data exchanges between Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs), Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), and Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). PLCs are microcomputers that collect and process data from sensors and other input devices, performing critical tasks like performance monitoring, equipment runtime calculations, and generating alarms for anomalies. RTUs, another type of microcomputer, are rugged and wireless, ideal for capturing data from remote locations. The HMI provides operators with a user-friendly interface, visualizing SCADA data through maps, icons, charts, and dashboards for real-time system monitoring. Additional components include Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), which enhance system capabilities, and communication systems that enable data transfer via cables, radio, or the Internet. SCADA systems also rely on programming languages, such as C, to create operational diagrams and process maps, ensuring seamless control and decision-making.