Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
It had failed to adapt, disappointed its customers, and was ill-prepared to respond to new Chinese competition.
And there was that hack.
Huawei seized the moment.
Nortel's most valuable asset was the unmatched talent in its Ottawa research lab, known as the Canadian equivalent of the legendary Bell Labs.
For years, Huawei had been building up its research capacity, trying to shed its reputation as a low-cost provider whose tech came from purloining the discoveries of others. It had a number of R&D labs around the world.
Now, with Nortel's demise, it could pursue a bigger prize than market share:
technical mastery. And respect.
The head of research at Nortel's lab in Ottawa, #Wen#Tong, grew up in China and joined Nortel's wireless lab in 1995 after earning a doctorate at Concordia University in Montreal.
He had contributed to every generation of mobile technology and held 470 patents in the US.
If telecommunications companies staged a research scientist draft in 2009, Wen Tong would have been a first-round pick.
Now he was a free agent, and Google, Intel, and others courted him.
Tong picked Huawei. He wanted to keep his networking scientists together, and the team didn't want to leave Canada.
The Chinese company was happy to recruit the group and let them stay in place.
Huawei also promised them freedom to attack the signature challenge for networking science in the 21st century:
creating the infrastructure for #5G.
In this iteration of mobile platforms, billions of mobile devices would seamlessly connect to networks. It promised to transform the world in ways even the scientists could not imagine, and it would mean vast fortunes for those who produced the technology.
The race for #patents would be intense, a matter not only of profit but also national pride.
Not long after Tong joined Huawei, in 2009, a research paper came to his attention.
Tong had helped produce the technology that provided the radio-transmission error correction for the current standard, known as turbo codes.
He thought the polar codes concept could be its replacement in 5G.
But the obstacles were considerable, and Tong originally couldn't interest his Canadian researchers in attacking the problem.
Then, in 2012, Huawei asked Tong to restructure its communications lab in China.
He took the opportunity to assign several smart young engineers to work on polar codes.
It involved the none-too-certain process of taking a mathematical theory and making it actually work in practical design, but they made progress and the team grew.
With each innovation, Huawei rushed to the patent office.
In 2013, Wen Tong asked Huawei's investment board for $600 million for 5G research.
“Very simple,” Tong says. “20 minutes, and they decided.”
The answer was yes, and a good deal of that money went into polar codes.
After Huawei came up with software that implemented the theory, the work shifted to testing and iterating. Eventually hundreds of engineers were involved.
Tong was not the only information scientist who had seen Arıkan's paper. #Alexander#Vardy of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego says the paper achieved “something that people were trying to do for 60 years.”
The challenge was that polar codes were not suited for 5G's short blocklengths
—the amount of 0s and 1s strung together.
Vardy and his postdoc, #Ido#Tal of the #Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, modified the error-correcting technology so it outperformed other state-of-the-art codes when applied to 5G's short blocklengths.
Vardy says he presented his findings in a conference in 2011.
“Huawei was there in the audience, and right after that they ran with it,” he says, seemingly without rancor.
(UC San Diego owns Vardy and Tal's patent and has licensed it to Samsung on a nonexclusive basis.)
Today Huawei holds more than two-thirds of the polar code patent “families”
—10 times as many as its nearest competitor.
The general feeling in the field, Vardy said, was that Huawei “invested a lot of research time and effort into developing this idea.”
It seemed “all the other companies were at least a few years behind.”
But all that work and all those patents would be wasted if the technology didn't fit into the 5G platform.
“It has to be adopted by everybody,” Tong says.
“You have to convince the entire industry that this is good for 5G.”
If polar codes were to be the symbol of Huawei's superiority, there was one more hurdle:
“I had the responsibility,” Wen Tong says, “to make it a standard.”
Drôle d'histoire. On se croirait dans un polar!
À lire ce qui s'est passé, et nonobstant la présomption d'innocence, on a vraiment l'impression qu'il s'agit d'une exécution.extra judiciaire .
Abattre d'une rafale de pistolet mitrailleur un suspect non armé alors qu'on vient l'interpeller au petit matin... voilà qui est vraiment curieux !
📘 L'île du Serment (🏴 2014) est un #polar de Peter May.
📝 L'île d'Entrée, dans l'archipel de la Madeleine, à l'est du #Canada est peuplée de quelques dizaines d'habitants principalement d'origines écossaises. Sime Mackenzie est envoyé sur l'île pour enquêter sur le meurtre de James Cowell. L'auteur mêle habilement l'intrigue policière, l'histoire du peuplement de l'île et l'histoire personnelle de l'enquêteur. Une réussite.
If you are using Polars, I recommend you check the Awesome Polars repo. The Awesome Polars repo provides a curated list of Polars talks, tools, examples & articles.
#Antarctic update... ship has wedged itself into pack ice in order to damp out waves as we prepare to ride out next storm. The angle of this one leaves us with nowhere to hide. The sky is so dark partly because there is open water a little distance away #oceanography#polar#icebreaker
Kicking off the #WMO#polar and high mountain regions committee meeting in Oslo this morning. Long pre-meeting on #Antarctica yesterday to determine policy and strategy was pretty successful. Hoping it will get passed by full panel today.
WMO president Celeste Sauto giving us an online welcome. #PHORS24#ClimateDiary
It's winter half term holiday + I'm on my way to #Norway, not sadly with family but for a high level meeting of the #WMO#polar and high mountain regions committee.
Interesting + important meeting as we ramp up our #Antarctica efforts + seek to support preparations for @wcrp_climate#CMIP7
The Cookbook Polars for R, by Damien Dotta, is a new book that provides an introduction to the R version of Polar with practical examples. In addition, the book provides a side-by-side comparison, when applicable, to other data packages in R, such as base R, dplyr, and data.table.
(1/2) Tables in Python 🐍👇🏼
Great Tables is a fairly new Python library for creating a styled table. This package is the mirror of the gt R package, and it comes with similar functionality. The package supports both Pandas 🐼 and Polar 🐻❄️ DataFrames and enables the creation of highly customized tables. 🧵👇🏼
📘 Le mur des silences (🇮🇸 2020) est un #polar d'Arnaldur Indridason, 4e enquête de Konrad, ancien policier.
📝 Dans une vieille maison, un corps est retrouvé derrière le mur d'une cave tandis que Konrad continue à enquêter sur le meurtre de son père. L'auteur alterne efficacement les chapitres présents et passés avec en toile de fond la violence subie par les femmes et les enfants.
📘 Alors tout tombe 2e partie est la 7e aventure de #Blacksad#bd de Juan Díaz Canalès (🇪🇦 scénario) et Juanjo Guarnido (🇪🇦 dessin).
📝 John Blacksad enquête sur Salomon, le maître bâtisseur de New York, et découvre de sombres affaires. Il essaie d'innocenter Weekly, piégé et accusé de meurtre. Fin du diptyque. Une intrigue noire, des dessins magnifiques pour une série magistrale.
📖 "Il faut savoir quand être discret et quand parler haut et fort."
#VendrediLecture
Pour contre-balancer la mièvrerie charmante de Jane Austen, j'ai attaqué cette semaine "Datas sanglantes", un polar polonais de Jakub Szamalek, dans lequel une jeune journaliste d'investigation, un modérateur de réseau social et une attachée de presse explorent les arcanes et les recoins sombres des algorithmes qui nous gouvernent.
C'est un #polar tout à fait dans l'air du temps... 😖
Fraîchement arrivée sur Polar+ / @mycanal , DARK WINDS est une série très intéressante à suivre.
1971, en territoire Navajo, un lieutenant de, la police tribale et son nouvel adjoint vont devoir combattre leurs démons pour résoudre une série de meurtres. Une série produite par Robert Redford et G.R.R. Martin.
🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑 #tvshow#polar#thriller#navajo#natives#murders#robbery
Polar bear dies from bird flu as #H5N1 spreads across globe
"Ecosystems in #polar regions are particularly vulnerable to bird flu because they contain many animals found nowhere else in the world which have never been exposed to similar viruses. They are also among the places most affected by #climate breakdown."
Quelle instance francophone choisir sur Mastodon ?
Demande de conseils/tuyaux 😊
Quand je suis arrivé sur Mastodon il ya un peu plus d'un an maintenant, je n'y connaissais strictement rien et j'ai ouvert un compte sur la première instance que j'ai trouvée où j'ai pu le faire, en l'occurrence mastodon.social.
(Par la suite j'ai ouvert un deuxième compte sur une instance dédiée aux esperantophones esperanto.masto
host)...
2/2
Je dois maintenant conseiller ma sœur qui voudrait ouvrir un compte aussi, et elle ne sait pas sur quelle instance le faire (elle n'y connait rien en RS, n'étant même pas sur Twitter ou FB. )
Des suggestions ?
Si possible des instances qui acceptent encore les nouvelles inscriptions !
Les centres d'intérêt de la soeur (liste non exhaustive évidemment) :
Dernière #VendrediLecture de 2023, je suis toujours dans « Le veilleur du lac » de Nicolas Leclerc, qui n’a pas avancé cette semaine pour cause de maladie et de fêtes en famille. #polar#roman
Ce sera mon dernier livre de l’année et je n’aurai pas réussi à atteindre l’objectif de lectures 2023 que j’avais fixé à 90. Mais j’y suis presque, avec 8️⃣2️⃣ livres et sans mon quota habituel de livres du comité de lecture des Incos auquel je ne participe plus.
#vendredilecture "Strange Bedfellows" de l'Américaine Ina Park. La professionnelle de santé raconte les infections sexuellement transmissibles, en partant de son expérience de son médecin. C'est drôle, pas moralisateur et instructif, à la Maïa Mazaurette. Bcp aimé le chapitre sur les officiels américains qui traquaient les IST dans les années 1970, celui sur les postiches pubiens... Herpès, gonorrhée, VIH, syphilis, chlamydia... On se familiarise avec eux. L'insta d'Ina https://www.instagram.com/inaparkmd/
#bookstodon#vendredilecture#books#mastolivre#livre S.A. Cosby est actuellement l'un des auteurs de polars américains que j'ai le plus de plaisir à suivre (en français aux éd. Sonatine). Son roman, "All The Sinners Bleed", n'est pas le plus réussi des trois derniers, mais quand même un régal. Toujours un style percutant et âpre, une description sans concession du Sud des Etats-Unis, où le rapport aux Noirs reste entaché de racisme et de la nostalgie de la période esclavagiste #polar#SACosby