Features

Whitefly
Abdelilah Hamdouchi
Translated by Jonathan Smolin
Cairo: Hoopoe/AUC Press, 2016
Pp. 136 

Moroccan writer Abdelilah Hamdouchi is a pioneer of police fiction in Arabic, but he doesn’t limit himself to crimes and how they get solved. In the tradition of the Swedish partner-writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, many of his stories have social and political overtones. “Whitefly,” originally published in Arabic in 2000, is no exception. 

Much is packed into this relatively short, fast-paced novel. Detective Laafrit’s efforts to unravel a puzzling crime take him from dilapidated police stations to fancy nightclubs and mansions, from the streets of Tangiers to isolated rural areas, from the sea to the mountains. Cooperation with the Spanish police leads across the Straits of Gibraltar to the miserable camps of immigrant farmworkers in Almeria, and plays no small part in unlocking the puzzle. With sparse, well-chosen words, Hamdouchi gives a taste of life in all these settings, and manages to make even secondary characters come alive, including a belly dancer, a reformed human trafficker and a couple of Sufi policemen. 

Many aspects of modern-day Morocco are on display, including its place in the triangle of agricultural competition with Spain and Israel. This is not the Tangiers which inspired many American and European writers and artists in the past, but the Tangiers of modern globalisation. While the city retains a certain beauty, like Morocco itself, it is plagued by unemployment, poverty, drug smuggling, human trafficking and remnants of colonialism. As one policeman says, “Here’s Morocco today, a country without fish because Spanish fleets have cleaned out our seas. Thousands of their fishermen make their living off our shores while our children fatten their fish with their corpses.” (p. 22)

Meanwhile, a mysterious blight is destroying tomato crops — a main export and staple of local food. 

Police detective Khalid Ibrahim, whose nickname, Laafrit, means crafty in Moroccan Arabic, is the hero of the story, but he is not Superman. He suffers from everyday ailments — the difficulties of quitting smoking, upset stomachs and problems with his wife. His reputation and nickname derive from his intellect and devotion to his job. As the only cop in Tangier who speaks Spanish fluently, he is designated to work with the Spanish police to fight drugs and illegal immigration. That is why he is called in when four bodies wash up on the shores of Tangiers. It is assumed they are “harraga” — illegal immigrants who throw away their IDs and crowd into pateras, hoping to cross the Mediterranean to Spain and get work, but sometimes drowning instead.

Still, the case is unusual because most immigrants no longer embark from Tangiers but from the Spanish enclaves, Ceuta (Sebta) and Melilla, vestiges of colonialism on Moroccan soil. This causes Laafrit to examine the bodies more closely, and he discovers that one of them was shot before being dumped into the sea, making the case even more unusual because of the use of a gun. Here one learns something interesting about Morocco: Unlike in many countries of the world, possessing a gun is highly exceptional. Even big drug smugglers don’t ordinarily have one, making one of Laafrit’s assumptions about the crime’s motive — a drug deal gone bad — questionable. Indeed, while drugs and human trafficking are involved, the network he discovers is much more complex. 

The opening pages of the novel not only reveal the crime but are also infused with hints about the prevailing socioeconomic and human rights situation. As Laafrit heads for the commissioner’s office, he encounters demonstrations of unemployed youth and university graduates “raising long banners written years ago, still bearing the same slogans, all of them demanding work and criticising the government.” (p. 3)

With this small detail, Hamdouchi shows that the problem of unemployment is pervasive and persistent. The street is crowded with police and vans ready for anticipated arrests. It is assumed that the police will break up the demonstrations violently. Indeed, throughout the novel, it is clear that the police enjoy extensive powers. They have no need for warrants to search or arrest. On the other hand, their offices are shabby; they have no cafeteria and do not receive overtime pay. Still, a flashback into the youth of Laafrit and his wife, who met at Marxist student gatherings, shows that much has changed since the cruel persecution of the opposition at that time. 

“Whitefly” is one of the first titles to be published by Hoopoe, a new division of The American University of Cairo Press, which bills itself as “an imprint for engaged, open-minded readers hungry for outstanding fiction that challenges headlines, re-imagines histories, and celebrates original storytelling”. Judging from “Whitefly”, this is a new source of exciting reading.

Scientists have devised a wearable sweat monitor that keeps tabs on your health by monitoring the chemical composition of your perspiration.

The new device, recently described in Nature, is flexible enough to move with the body and has Bluetooth capabilities so it can send information in real time to a smartphone.

Someday it could alert sweat drenched users to risks of dehydration, fatigue, stress and other physical ailments, making activity monitors like Fitbit look awfully basic.

“The goal, ultimately is to have a pathology lab right on the body,” said Ali Javey, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and the senior author on the paper.

For now, the group’s monitor can track the levels of four biomarkers in sweat including electrolytes like sodium and potassium, and metabolites like glucose and lactate. It also has a sensitive temperature sensor.

The authors note that low levels of sodium and potassium in sweat could signal the onset of muscle cramps and dehydration, while monitoring glucose in sweat could provide clues to glucose levels in the body. Sweat lactate levels have been shown to be correlated with low blood flow in certain parts of the body.

But this is only the beginning, Javey said. The team is already looking at an array of other proteins, molecules and ions that could offer more clues to a person’s physical well-being.

For decades, doctors have relied primarily on blood, and to a lesser extent urine and saliva, to get information about how well the body is functioning in a specific moment in time. Sweat was one bodily fluid largely missing from that panel, mostly because collecting enough perspiration to use in a chemical analysis was challenging.

The new monitor still requires the user to be perspiring, but they do not have to be dripping with sweat for the sensors to work. Javey explained that the sensors can get accurate measurements from just 1/10th of a droplet of perspiration. In the future, he’d like to see that amount get even smaller.

“The long-term goal is to see if we can work with minimum amount of body liquid, so you won’t need to exercise for the monitor to work,” he said.

The new device is not the first wearable sweat monitor, but it is one of the first to measure a suite of biomarkers at the same time.

Javey said the group had two major challenges. First, they had to design four sensors that each track a single chemical in the complex chemical world of perspiration. Then, they had to make sure that those readings were interpreted correctly as environmental factors like temperature changed.

“A change in temperature can change the output of a sensor,” he said. “When you start to sweat your temperature drops — that’s how the body dissipates heat. But as you keep exercising your temperature goes back up.”

To ensure the readings are accurate over time, his group built a small, flexible computer that can calibrate the temperature reading with the sensing data.

The sensors are plastic based and disposable, and rest on the skin. They attach to a flexible circuit board that can be reused. The entire system can be tucked into an athletic wristband or headband to make wearing it more comfortable.

Jason Heikenfeld, an electrical engineer at the University of Cincinnati, said the new sweat monitor looks impressive.

“Making a wearable band that electrochemically senses sweat analytes is extremely difficult,” he wrote, in a News and Views article in Nature.

He notes that more work needs to be done before sweat monitors become commercially available but adds that the remaining challenges to not seem insurmountable.

In the future, he predicts, we may no longer remember how we lived without our personalised sweat trackers.

Computers may trounce humans at games like chess and Go, but there’s one game we’ve still got a lock on: quantum physics. Scientists who had people play an online video game that mimicked a troublesome quantum mechanical problem found that the gamers were far better than the computers at working out viable solutions.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, offer a surprisingly effective method of dealing with still-puzzling problems in quantum mechanics — and show that artificial intelligence may still have a lot to learn from the power of human intuition.

Scientists have been working to develop quantum computers, which takes advantage of the bizarre ways in which matter behaves at the tiniest of scales. Quantum computers have the potential to vastly outstrip the abilities of conventional devices, allowing them to perform a wide range of complex tasks, from cracking encrypted codes to operating self-driving cars.

But the very qualities that make quantum computing such an appealing way to store and process information also make its components exceedingly difficult to work with.

“If you’re not confused about quantum physics, that’s because you haven’t understood it,” said lead author Jacob Sherson, a quantum physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark, echoing a sentiment notably expressed by legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr. “And that’s why no one thought you could think intuitively or rationally about quantum mechanical processes.”

Classical physics describes the physical world as we experience it at large scales (including the scales we humans operate in); quantum physics rules the world of tiny, particle-sized things, far beyond our perception. Quantum mechanics is built on uncertainties, and on rules that have no analogue in the day-to-day world in which we operate.

For example, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, you can’t perfectly know a particle’s speed as well as its momentum at the same time. The more accurately you know its position, the more uncertain its momentum, and vice versa. And Schrodinger’s famous feline thought-experiment illustrates how a given object can be in two mutually exclusive states at the same time: A possibly poisoned cat in a box is living and dead — until you open the box to observe it. (Of course, this isn’t actually the case with cat-sized things; this effect only works on exceedingly tiny scales.)

For this paper, a team of Danish scientists was trying to deal with the pesky problem of moving atoms around without wrecking the information they contained. The scientists suspended them in “light crystals” and then would use optical tweezers to move them around. But there’s a problem: These atoms easily lose the information they carry.

“We had atoms in arrays like eggs in an egg tray, and we wanted to pick up atoms and move them around,” Sherson said. “But atoms, they are not really balls; they are more like waves. So as soon as you pick them up, they start to slosh and have motion, and it’s very hard to move these things fast.”

Sherson compared the problem to walking with a cup of coffee: If you walk slowly, it’s easy; but if you have to hurry, then it’s very hard to avoid spilling some of that liquid. The same goes for the particle wave: The faster that atom is moved from one location to another, the more likely it is to lose precious information.

So why not just move those atoms at a more sedate pace? Because they can’t hold onto their information for long, and can drop it at the slightest disturbance. If the researchers move too slowly, their particles lose the information anyway.

So researchers have had to rely on powerful computers to try and find tactics allowing them to move the atom at that Goldilocks pace, neither too fast nor too slow. The problem is that computers really aren’t up to this complex task, Sherson said.

If you give a computer this task, it will try to find the answer by checking every single possible solution — a gargantuan task that it would never finish in time. Humans, on the other hand, have a real knack for forgetting, or filtering, information — tossing out irrelevant bits and focusing on the parts that might really matter.

The researchers turned to a fount that many scientists have dipped into in recent years: citizen science, pulling on the collective efforts of lay folk to tackle a given problem. Galaxy Zoo asks people to help classify large numbers of galaxies, and video games such as Foldit have been used to help researchers study protein folding.

“One can do things in games that cannot be done in reality, so gamers are used to experimenting with possibilities that go beyond the classical laws of physics,” Sabrina Maniscalco of the University of Turku in Finland, who was not involved in the study, wrote in a commentary. “Perhaps this ability to think outside the box allows them to make the creative leap necessary to tackle quantum problems.”

The researchers designed a game platform called Quantum Moves. In one of the games, called BringHomeWater, players are asked to transport a moving, water-like wave to a target area as fast as possible without spilling it. They found that the players developed solutions that were far more effective than their computer could — and they did so at speeds that, according to the researchers’ computer simulation, they’d thought impossible.

Their solutions drew upon what Sherson called a “perfect mixture” of classical mechanics, as well as quantum mechanics — even though they’re two very different ways of describing the world. On the classical side: Accelerating an object down a steep slope will get it to move faster. On the quantum side: If a particle knocks at a barrier enough times, it can eventually appear on the other side — a phenomenon known as “tunnelling”.

“The players somehow have some sort of intuition for this research problem that we didn’t imagine you could use intuition for,” Sherson said. “But placing it in this context of a game enabled humans to sort of look through the complexities of all that quantum-shmantum that we talk about.”

The researchers are continuing to use the human generated solutions to improve the methods that could help make quantum computing a commercial reality one day. And they expect that different games can help scientists better understand a host of different quantum-mechanical quandaries.

“Whether [the authors’] method will be applicable to a wide range of problems in quantum physics is currently an open question,” Maniscalco wrote. “But because we are on the verge of a new era of quantum technologies, this approach is definitely worth pursuing.”

The findings, Sherson added, also raise questions about human intuition — how it does what it does and whether it’s possible to replicate it in artificial intelligence. 

“What I think is we are inherently survivors. … Survival and adaptation are just built into our being,” Sherson said. “In this ever-changing world, we will always adapt to it.”

MURANG’A, Kenya — Samuel Kinuthia knows how to make the most of technology. Using a technique called basin terracing, he has boosted his income at his farm in Murang’a county, and helped provide Kenyans as far away as Nairobi with better access to clean drinking water.

Kinuthia and a group of 300 farmers in Kiaruta village are turning hilly land into more productive farmland through basin terracing. It also reduces soil erosion, which can choke central Kenya’s rivers and pollute drinking water.

On a sunny morning, Kinuthia and two employees are preparing a fresh strip of land to sow crops on his three-acre farm.

First they dig across a hilly patch to make it into a flat terrace. They then dig square holes to form basins on the strip, where Kinuthia will plant vegetables.

“I used to plant maize and beans but I could not harvest much,” he said. “With basin terracing, I can plant fresh produce like tomatoes, kale and onions. Both the harvest and the resulting income improve because there is a ready market.”

Fred Kihara, water fund manager in Kenya for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an international environmental organisation, explained that the technology reduces the amount of soil being eroded away into rivers.

“It also increases the amount of water that is being retained in the soil,” he added.

A 2015 study by TNC says the Upper Tana basin — which provides water to an estimated 9 million Kenyans — is a watershed under pressure.

About 65 per cent of the farmers questioned by the group said the productivity of their land had declined even though they use more fertilisers than five years ago. Overall, 80 per cent reported a decrease in rainfall in recent years.

From Kinuthia’s farm in the Upper Tana basin, the view is of stretches of hilly terrain that have been stripped bare of trees. The red soil is easily blown away or eroded.

Protecting source water

Farming on hilly land has increased the amount of soil ending up in rivers that feed the country’s largest water reservoir, the Ndakaini dam, in central Kenya.

In Nairobi alone, 85 per cent of water — or 70 million cubic metres — is supplied by the dam, around 80 kilometres away, according to officials from the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company. More sediment turns the water cloudy, they say.

Soil run-off can include manure and fertiliser used on farms, which may pollute drinking water and make people sick, said Philip Muthui, the company’s production manager.

He hopes that the use of basin terracing by farmers will reduce erosion into rivers, thus protecting Ndakaini water.

Currently, the cost of removing the sediment and treating water at Ndakaini ranges between 6 and 7 Kenyan shillings ($0.06-$0.07) per cubic metre, which Muthui says is too high.

“Reducing sediment load into rivers has cut the cost of treating water by about 3 per cent,” he added.

Efforts to reduce erosion in the Upper Tana basin have been supported by the Nairobi Water Fund, a $10 million public-private partnership between TNC, the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company and the Kenyan government, among others.

“Water security is likely to pose a bigger challenge as climate change leads to less water in the dry season and heavier deluges in the rainy season,” said Eddy Njoroge, the fund’s president.

“This is compounded by population growth that reduces the amount of water available per head,” he said, adding that the fund was set up to tackle these issues.

The project aims to improve water quality in the Tana basin, safeguard Nairobi’s main water source and improve the incomes of thousands of people through sustainable land management, he said.

Kinuthia has been using basin terracing for just over a year. He is grateful it has opened up a new revenue stream for his family through fresh produce farming.

On a good day, for example, he can harvest 8kg of kale. A 5kg bundle of kale can fetch him 1,000 shillings ($10), while the rest is eaten at home.

When he was farming maize and beans, “the little that I harvested would end up being consumed by the family”, leaving him with nothing to sell, he explained.

Is it the end of the traditional fixed phone? Is it going to become as exceptionally used as the diehard fax system? 

By now and in a general manner, we’re using mobile phones more frequently than fixed land sets to make calls. At home the trend is obvious, for it is easier to make a call from wherever we may be sitting or standing, instead of moving to where the fixed set is and reaching out for it. It is not just about laziness, it is about speed and convenience.

Even at work, at our desk where the good old traditional phone is at reach, we still tend to use mobile phones more often, for a number of good reasons: the convenient contacts list and the eventual wireless earphone, to name only two of the great functionalities we have become accustomed to thanks to smartphones and that very few fixed installations come fitted with.

Regardless of what we think or feel about it, of the fact that sometimes a long, important and clear communication can only be achieved through a fixed line, there are signs here and there that a change is going to come soon. One such tangible sign regarding this matter comes directly from none else than Orange France, the giant telecommunication company that is also operating in Jordan. The company plans to start gradually discontinuing regular land phone lines by 2020 in France. This is big news, though more or less expected.

It is not only regular mobile telephony that is slowly, but surely killing fixed telephony, but the countless channels and services that use your mobile phone and the Internet, especially when you are calling abroad. Skype, Viber and WhatsApp are three of the main such services. So in a way it is actually the Internet that is directly triggering the change, although it is happening indirectly via your smartphone.

Confirming that it is indeed through the Internet that most everything happens today, Orange has made it clear that there will still be “fixed lines” to use in the workplace or at home. However, they won’t go anymore through old traditional analogue cable lines but through digital subscriptions the kind of ADSL and the like. In other words they will be Web-based. Yes, it’s the Web — again!

Many enterprises are already equipped with digital PBX (Private Branch Exchange) telephone systems for their offices. Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens, NEC, Avaya, Nortel, Cisco and Panasonic are some of the big names in the game and they all can offer equipment that is tailored for real large enterprises, as well as some that suit small companies and offices. Digital PBX paves the way for the future of web-based, fixed telephone systems.

Expect to use words like “cloud”, “IP address”, “upload/download”, “gigabytes and terabytes”, and other terminology usually reserved to computers and networks, when dealing with your future digital fixed telephone at home or at work. We can reasonably assume that the sets to come will have much in common with smartphones, except that they will be fixed and placed on a table or a desk and won’t need to be recharged. Functionality and convenience, along with large colour screens, and of course the so-important contacts list, will be part of the set-up. Let us just hope that spam messages won’t join in the game.

With traditional analogue fixed telephony going away, it will be one more major shift from analogue to digital, after music and photography.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Glenn Martin was sitting in a bar with his college buddies 35 years ago when they got to wondering: Whatever happened to flying cars and jetpacks?

The next day, the New Zealander began looking for answers in the science library, triggering a lifelong quest to build a jetpack. But today, with the company he created seemingly on the verge of triumph, Martin worries his dream is slipping away.

Martin Aircraft Co. says it will deliver its first experimental jetpacks to customers this year, a big development for the new technology. But the jetpack is being designed for first responders like firefighters, an outcome that falls short of Martin’s vision of a recreational jetpack that anybody could fly.

The inventor has now left the company he founded. What’s more, he says, he’s asked for his name to be removed.

“All us guys know what a jetpack’s for,” he says with a smile at his Christchurch home. “With a jetpack, you save the world and you get the girl. Right?”

Jetpacks have often been portrayed that way in books and movies. They have formed part of humanity’s utopian future vision for the past century. Fictional characters from Buck Rogers to Elroy Jetson have used them, and a real jetpack wowed the crowds at the opening of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Martin, 56, grew up in the South Pacific, thousands of kilometres from Houston. But he followed the space race avidly.

“I still remember sitting in class and listening to Neil Armstrong step onto the moon,” he says. “And I believed, I suppose, that we would all have flying cars and jetpacks and bases on Mars by the time I was an adult.”

Storied though they may be, jetpacks have a troubled history. The Bell Aerospace rocket belt, developed in the 1960s, showed it was possible. However, that jetpack couldn’t carry much weight and could remain airborne for less than 30 seconds. It was for show, nothing more.

In the mid-1990s, three Houston men decided they’d try to make one. Instead, they made a mess. They fell out over money and their venture ended with an unsolved murder, an abduction, a man in jail and a device that had vanished.

Peter Coker, Martin Aircraft’s chief executive, says he believes the best business plan is to make jetpacks for first responders and later for other commercial operators. Once all the supply chains are in place, he says, the company can then turn its attention to building a personal jetpack.

“We are now an aviation company,” Coker says. “Before, it was very much the kiwi dream. But you have to take that commercial path.”

Glenn Martin’s vision still holds true, Coker says: Creating and selling a personal jetpack remains part of what the company is all about.

But Martin doubts the company will ever make one.

When he began his research, he wanted to improve on the Bell rocket belt and make a jetpack that could lift a solidly built guy like himself and a safety parachute, then stay airborne for at least 30 minutes. He decided to use ducted fans, making the word jetpack something of a misnomer.

During the 1980s, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry and built prototypes in his garage. He sponsored two university students to check his math. By 1997 he needed a lightweight pilot, so he enlisted his wife, Vanessa, to make the inaugural flight. It lasted a few seconds.

More refinements eventually allowed the jetpack and its pilot to remain airborne for several minutes and complete controlled turns. Martin took inspiration from reading the Wright brothers’ journals; in 2008, he took a prototype to the Experimental Aircraft Association Air Show in Wisconsin.

He says he decided to build his jetpack with straightforward components, including a piston engine that uses standard gasoline. He wanted to keep it small enough to be classified as ultralight aircraft, which in the US don’t typically require a pilot’s licence to fly. He figured anyone could learn to fly one after a three-day course and be kept safe with a built-in parachute which would automatically deploy in an emergency.

But as he sought to raise funds for his fledgling company, Martin says, he began losing control. Along came investors, venture capitalists and plans for an Initial Public Offering.

The company was listed on the Australian stock market in February last year, and is now majority owned by a Chinese company, KuangChi Science. It’s valued at about 180 million Australian dollars ($138 million), showing that investors are taking the concept of a commercial jetpack seriously.

Disillusioned with the direction the company was taking, Martin resigned as a director in June. He still owns a 10 per cent stake, which he cannot sell before February.

“I’d picked up the rugby ball and taken it almost to the finish line and felt it was time for other people to do the rest,” he says.

Coker, 60, a former officer in Britain’s Royal Air Force, has increased the staff from six to 58 since taking the reins three years ago.

By late 2016, he plans for the first customers to begin using the jetpack prototype in real-time operations while providing feedback for further improvements. The company is also developing an unmanned jetpack, which will be used for transporting goods.

The company has signed preliminary agreements with several agencies, including Dubai’s civil defence department. Coker says Dubai and others are interested in jetpacks that can rescue people from skyscrapers, or put out fires in them. He says jetpacks can get much closer to buildings than helicopters, and some people are calling them “high-rise lifeboats”.

Obstacles remain. The jetpack will need to be cleared by aviation authorities. Martin Aircraft has been working with New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority on a new category for jetpacks, which Coker hopes will provide a template for other nations.

Coker says Martin has not formally asked for his name to be removed from the company, and he can’t recall any informal approach. If the founder made an official request, Coker says, the board would consider the impact on branding and marketing before making a decision.

And Glenn Martin? Yes, he’s disappointed he didn’t see the concept all the way through. On the other hand, he enjoyed a summer holiday with his family this year for the first time he can remember.

“Jetpacks are a funny thing. They create a lot of passion,” he says. “Everybody loves the idea of a jetpack. But the reality is that it’s a lot of hard work.”

The jetpack may look bulky, but Martin says you don’t notice that when you’re airborne — an experience he likens to living out his childhood dreams.

“The jetpack is all behind you. You can’t see it,” he says. “All you can see is your hands. It’s like some magic hand has lifted you up, and you’re flying.”