Saving Whales From Ship Collisions With Technology
September 24th, 2022
Via New York Times, a look at how scientists hope to use technology to help save whales from ship collisions:
Fran washed ashore in August, some 25 miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge. The beloved and much-photographed female humpback whale had a broken neck, most likely the result of being hit by a ship.
This latest instance of oceanic roadkill increased the tally of whales killed by ships near San Francisco this year to four. The true death toll is likely to be much higher as whale carcasses often sink to the sea floor.
Scientists and conservationists are trying to drive that number to zero. On Wednesday, Whale Safe, an A.I.-powered detection system, began operating around San Francisco Bay. Its goal is to warn large ships in the area’s waters when whales are nearby.
About 25 miles out to sea from the Golden Gate on Monday afternoon, a yellow buoy bobbed not far from the great white shark hunting grounds of the Farallon Islands. On a boat close by called the Nova, Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, donned a wet suit and snorkel and jumped into the brine to give the buoy some T.L.C. before its big day. The buoy, tethered to an underwater microphone, is an integral part of Whale Safe.
Researchers estimate more than 80 endangered blue, humpback and fin whales are killed by ships each year along the West Coast. With increasing global marine traffic, the problems created by thousands of massive ships crisscrossing waters that teem with ocean giants are expected to only worsen. Near San Francisco in particular, climate change has been shifting the whales’ food closer to shore, placing the whales in harm’s way more often, according to Kathi George, field operations manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif.
That’s why Dr. McCauley and a network of collaborators developed Whale Safe with funding from Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce, and his wife, Lynne. Whale Safe, which has been operating in the Santa Barbara Channel since 2020, provides near-real-time data on the presence of whales and sends out alerts to mariners, shipping companies and anyone else who signs up. The hope is that if ship captains get an alert saying there are lots of whales in the area, they might be more likely to shift course or slow their approach to port — a tactic that research suggests makes deadly collisions less likely.
“The near-real-time aspect of Whale Safe’s alerts and being able to have an idea of where whales are 24 hours a day is really unique and gives us a lot more information to share with ships coming in and out of the Bay,” said Maria Brown, superintendent of the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Expanding Whale Safe from the Southern California shipping lanes to San Francisco will cover the two busiest hubs in California and two epicenters of whale mortality from ship strikes.
In 2021, the first full year of Whale Safe’s operation in the Santa Barbara Channel, there were no recorded whale-ship interactions in the area, which Dr. McCauley called an encouraging sign.
Whale Safe also uses publicly available location data transmitted by ships to determine whether they slow down to 10 knots during trips through the whales’ feeding grounds, something NOAA has been asking large ships to do during whale season (usually May to November off California) since 2014. Whale Safe processes the information on vessel speed and assigns shipping companies a letter grade.
Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, earned a “B” for slowing down 79 percent of the time in the Santa Barbara Channel. But ships operated by Matson, a major player in Pacific shipping, slowed only 16 percent of the time and received an “F.”
A spokesperson for Matson said the company had long instructed its ships to participate in NOAA’s voluntary speed reduction programs “to the greatest extent possible, given our operational requirements. A large percentage of our vessels have been averaging less than 12 knots.”
On Monday afternoon at the buoy, Dr. McCauley used a kitchen scrubber and a plastic putty knife to scrape away algae and checked that various instruments were intact. The device’s underwater microphone was positioned some 280 feet beneath his flippers, listening for whales from the sea bottom and attached to its floating counterpart’s communications array with a beefy rubber-clad cable. This high-tech buoy was developed by Mark Baumgartner of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his team is using the same technology to listen for critically endangered North Atlantic Right whales along the East Coast.
Whale Safe uses three data streams: the buoy listens for and identifies the songs of blue, fin and humpback whales with an algorithm and beams its findings to a satellite; a mathematical model informed by present and past oceanographic and biological data predicts where blue whales are most likely to be; and citizen scientists and trained observers report whale sightings via an app called Whale Alert.
Whale Safe’s platform integrates these data sources and alerts ships to their likelihood of encountering whales that day.
In 2019, before the system’s Santa Barbara launch, 46 percent of vessels slowed down in the Southern California voluntary speed reduction zones, and now the percentage has risen to 60 percent in 2022. But those increases can also be credited to a financial incentive program called Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies that pays shipping companies that slow down for whales, as well as more than a decade of outreach from NOAA officials like Ms. Brown to shipping companies.
In the San Francisco area, cooperation rates with NOAA’s speed limits have been hovering around 62 percent for the last three years, and the hope is that Whale Safe can help get them higher.
“We are looking to industry to rise to the occasion voluntarily,” Ms. Brown said. “If they can’t do that, our council has asked us to consider making these speed limits mandatory like they are on the East Coast where they have 80 percent compliance.”
The response from shipping companies has been encouraging, Dr. McCauley said, with some of the world’s largest outfits asking for more information about the good or bad grade they received and on how to get Whale Safe’s alerts to their fleets most efficiently.
CMA CGM, the world’s third largest container shipping company, has created an automated pipeline to disseminate Whale Safe’s alerts straight to ship captains near the Santa Barbara Channel.
Whale Safe’s team is also working with Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilder, to bring the system’s data directly into the navigation systems of newly built ships, said Callie Steffen, a scientist at the Benioff Ocean Initiative and Whale Safe’s project leader.
Now that the system is switched on in two locations, Dr. McCauley said the immediate goal was to continue outreach with companies and try to reduce whale fatalities from ship strikes to zero in the places where Whale Safe is operating. Ms. Steffen and others aim to expand Whale Safe’s ship-speed monitoring to all areas of designated whale concern in the United States and Canada on both coasts.
On Monday, fog erased the horizon as the Nova motored away from the buoy. When the fog broke, the sea ahead of the boat erupted with whale spouts and leaping sea lions. The boat cut its engines, and Dr. McCauley whipped out a camera with a long lens to try to identify some of the nine humpbacks researchers spotted.
The air took on the fishy, primordial odor of whale breath as everyone on board marveled at the wildness on display. Then the radio crackled: Vessel Traffic Services, which manages ship movement in and out of the Bay, said the Nova needed to exit the shipping lane because a large vessel was coming through. The scientists radioed back that the big ship needed to be warned it was headed into an area where whales had been sighted.
While the Nova headed back to San Francisco, Dr. McCauley said that as he was framing up the feeding humpback whales for his photographs, he couldn’t help but think of the recently deceased Fran.
“That should have been her,” he said, with a slight catch in his voice.
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Read More »Tiny Solar Backpacks Could Help Save One of Australia’s Most Endangered Birds
September 20th, 2022
Via EcoWatch, an article on how tiny solar backpacks could help save Australia’s endangered plains-wanderer:
The plains-wanderer is a small, critically-endangered bird with a tawny marking on its chest that can only be found in south-eastern Australia’s arid grasslands. It is estimated that only 250 to 1,000 of these speckled birds are left in the wild, according to Bush Heritage Australia. The plains-wanderer is at risk of impending extinction and is the lone surviving species on its branch of the evolutionary tree.
In order to track this rare bird species, fifteen plains-wanderers have been released into their native habitat in New South Wales (NSW) wearing tiny solar-powered backpacks equipped with satellite tracking technology, a press release from the NSW Government’s Minister for Environment and Heritage said.
It is only the second time the birds have been released in NSW and is part of a joint government conservation effort between Southern Australia (SA), Victoria and NSW.
“This second-ever release of Plains-wanderers back into their native habitat in NSW is the culmination of years of conservation work aimed at bringing the species back from the brink,” said NSW Environment Minister James Griffin in the press release. “Plains-wanderers are a small, ground-dwelling bird that is particularly vulnerable to threats such as foxes and feral cats, and native grassland habitat loss. They’re a critical part of the ecosystem because their presence or absence is an indicator of the health of their native habitat.”
As part of the Saving our Species program sponsored by the NSW Government — which has $175 in funding over a ten-year period — the plains-wanderers were released into Oolambeyan National Park, a critical habitat for the rare bird species.
The solar-powered backpacks can provide as much as two years of satellite data. Earlier backpack tracking devices only had a battery life of 12 weeks and were only able to be tracked with field transmitters.
“These solar-backpack wearing Plains-wanderers are paving the way for us to gather important data, which will ultimately help us improve our conservation efforts for wild populations into the future,” Griffin said.
Before a drastic decline in numbers in the past decade, the plains-wanderer was apparent throughout eastern Australia, reported The Guardian. Much of their known remaining habitat is on privately-owned land.
The quail-like birds have very specific habitat requirements. The population isn’t able to sustain itself during droughts, when there are fewer insects and materials to make nests. But during periods of extreme rain, an excess of weeds can cause the birds to relocate, but researchers aren’t sure where the endangered birds go.
All of the fifteen plains-wanderers released into the wild were from conservation breeding programs — eleven from NSW’s Taronga Western Plains Zoo, three from SA’s Monarto Safari Park and one from Victoria’s Werribee Open Range Zoo, the press release said.
“Three of the recently released birds have come from Monarto Safari Park, and this project is a great example of our zoos working together across a number of jurisdictions with the help of private landholders to help save a native species,” said South Australia Minister for Climate, Environment and Water Susan Close in the press release.
The second NSW release follows a release of ten birds in March near Hay in NSW and 16 last year in Victoria in conjunction with a national recovery initiative to bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
“This is the first ever plains-wanderer release to use satellite technology to track the endangered species and the more we know about this elusive bird, the better chance we have at conservation success. This joint initiative is part of our record investment into protecting our precious biodiversity,” said Victorian Minister for Environment and Climate Action Lily D’Ambrosio in the press release.
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Read More »The World’s Fishermen as a Maritime Sensor Network
September 2nd, 2022
Via the U.S. Naval Institute, commentary on the potential – via use of a crowdsourcing platform – the world’s fishermen can become a martime sensor network to counter illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing:
As a topic, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing needs little introduction. The U.S. Coast Guard Commandant’s 2020 Strategic Outlook stated that IUU fishing “has replaced piracy as the leading global maritime security threat.”1 Indiscriminate IUU fishing techniques, such as drift net release and dynamite detonation, result in annual losses of $37 billion to maritime nations.2 Besides monetary losses, IUU fishing deprives indigenous coastal communities of needed sustenance, which increases poverty and the risk of low-intensity conflict.
Coincidentally, China is one of the world’s worst IUU fishing offenders. Furthermore, China has outfitted its industrial fishing fleet with hardware and collection capabilities that make its boats paramilitary maritime forces. It is a matter of national security to track and interdict these long-ranging fishing vessels, but thus far the U.S. Coast Guard has been unable to field a technology that offers sufficient density of coverage and microfidelity.
A Math Problem Satellites Cannot Solve
Tracking the Chinese fishing fleet largely amounts to a math problem. There currently are an estimated 17,000 high-endurance Chinese fishing vessels capable of operating both as swarms and as dispersed entities.3 Spreading these vessels out over the millions of square miles of other nations’ exclusive economic zones (EEZ) leads to a quintessential needle in the haystack problem.Existing tracking efforts rely heavily on “eye in the sky” technologies that find and ping Chinese fishing boats, where the data is then processed by specialized AI companies. These technologies can be broken into five buckets (see Figure 1) and boast impressive capabilities, but capability gaps remain (see Figure 2).
The Coast Guard has championed orbital technologies, as seen in the Defense Innovation Unit’s recent X3View challenge.4 However, the Coast Guard should also investigate prototyping and deploying low-cost crowdsourced data platforms to provide “ground truths” in addition to these overhead collections.
An Agile Solution
Crowdsourced data platforms should be publicly available, compatible with low-end smartphones, and free to use. Local fishermen can then report Chinese vessels engaging in IUU activities in those fishermen’s sovereign waters. Reports could be broadcasted back to other platform users, the partner nation coast guard (if applicable), and the U.S. Coast Guard. The most analogous way to think of such a platform would be like the driving app Waze, but instead of reporting traffic or speed traps, fishermen would report Chinese vessels engaging in IUU fishing.This nonstandard intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) could greatly augment the Coast Guard’s detection abilities when employed as a tip-and-cue model. A fisherman’s report would be the “tip,” which allows the Coast Guard to direct private satellite, synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), or radio-frequency operators to “cue” their satellites onto specific patches of ocean. Consistently generating tasking for space assets is far more efficient than sweeping large swaths of the ocean and hoping to get a cold hit. Given the number of fishermen in the Indo-Pacific, this form of ISR would have incredible density of coverage.
Furthermore, if the reports included pictures, then the Coast Guard could obtain valuable amplifying data, such as hull number and cargo on deck. Space assets cannot easily discern hull numbers or draft. In the longer run, data collected by such a platform could be combined with weather and overhead collections to build predictive models of where the Chinese fishing fleet will operate each month.
A crowdsourced platform also could be used in the information operations domain. Pictures and videos of the Chinese fishing fleet employing outlawed fishing practices could be used in press releases to emphasize China’s flagrant violations of good maritime stewardship. Interviews with fishermen in the Philippines reveal that they detest the Chinese fishing fleet presence yet feel like many of their fellow countrymen are unaware of their plight.8 Uniting local seafaring communities via technology would have additional positive effects.
Multiple Proceedings authors have discussed the need to address China’s gray-zone tactics with counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics.9 COIN relies heavily on a positive rapport between blue forces and the local populace. Providing maritime communities with free technology that makes their time at sea safer and more productive would be a good first step in building such a rapport.
The biggest challenge would be getting the fishermen to use the platform and make reports. For starters, the platform would be simple to use and free to download. Once downloaded, a fisherman could view the last known position of hostile Chinese vessels. This is highly valuable since an encounter with Chinese fishing vessels often results in the local fishermen getting their nets cut or vessels rammed.10 And by making reports, a fisherman would indirectly help their comrades avoid unexpected encounters with the Chinese fleet.
The use of crowdsourcing in a contested environment is not unprecedented; during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian civilians have increasingly used crowdsourcing applications to report the movements of Russian Army forces.11 The Philippine Navy has had limited success in getting Filipino fishermen to report Chinese maritime militia vessels over via radio, but expressed a need for a more centralized mobile platform.12
Technical Merit and Cost
It is relatively easy to develop a crowdsourced platform. Dozens of such apps exist, although this specific platform would have to be custom built to function offline.13 Basic security and encryption would be essential, and it also would be wise to not require fishermen to include personal identification information (other than an email) when creating an account. Sending the reports’ metadata to an established server provider such as Amazon Web Services would further increase the data’s security and ability to be integrated with Coast Guard dashboards. Back-end quality assurance/quality control programs would serve as filters if China tried to flood the platform with misleading reports.While space-based assets cost millions of dollars to launch and operate, a crowdsourcing platform could be built for $100,000 and maintained for even less. A team of Stanford University students working on a similar Hacking 4 Defense project were able to field a maritime domain awareness minimum viable product for only $20,000. Making the platform compatible with smartphones would remove the need for custom-built hardware and drive costs down. Furthermore, the potential user base is immense.
Deployment
The U.S. Coast Guard specializes in building partnerships with fishing communities and fisheries enforcement agencies, both domestically and internationally. Once the first version of the platform is built and beta tested, the Coast Guard should showcase it to partner nations. Since the platform would be easy to use, training would take a matter of minutes. Countries most affected by Chinese IUU fishing—such as Ecuador, the Philippines, Micronesia, and Fiji—already have established relations with the U.S. Coast Guard, making institutional buy-in all the easier.Looking Forward
IUU fishing is a problem for the entire Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.14 However, the Coast Guard is best positioned to take on the challenge. To make maritime domain awareness (MDA) more robust, the Coast Guard should prototype a simple crowdsourced MDA platform, which does not have the upfront cost of exquisite surveillance assets. Such a platform would improve the Coast Guard’s capability to interdict Chinese IUU fishing, while simultaneously mobilizing local communities. For years, the act of exposing IUU fishing has largely been done by governments and a few specialized non-governmental organizations. The scope of the problem now demands an all-hands-on-deck effort that incorporates simple reporting by concerned and impacted local watermen.1. U.S. Coast Guard, Illegal, Underreported, and Unregulated Fishing Strategic Outlook, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, September 2020.
2. “Illegal Fishing,” World Wildlife Foundation, 2022, www.worldwildlife.org/.
3. Ian Urbina, “How China’s Expanding Fishing Fleet Is Depleting the World’s Oceans,” Yale Environment 360, 17 August 2020.
4. “U.S. Government and Nonprofit Organization Host Prize Competition to Leverage the Latest Technology to Detect and Defeat Illegal Fishing,” Defense Innovation Unit, 22 July 2021
5. Uday Govindswamy, Planet Labs, interviewed by author, 26 March 2020.
6. Michael Boito, et al., “Metrics to Compare Aircraft Operating and Support Costs in the Department of Defense,” RAND Corporation, 2015.
7. Brendon Providence, Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, U.S. Department of Transportation, interviewed by author, 10 March 2020.
8. Joyce Hufton, Coral Movement, interviewed by the author, 13 December 2020; Yoyong Suarez, IMPL Project, interviewed by the author, 6 June 2020; and Dr. Francisco Buencamino, Tuna Canners Association of the Philippines, interviewed by the author, 25 March 2020.
9. Hunter Stires, “The South China Sea Needs a ‘COIN’ Toss,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 145, no. 5 (May 2019); and 2ndLt Robert German, USMC, “The Other Side of COIN,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 147, no. 2 (February 2021).
10. Anonymous U.S. Army Green Beret, interviewed by the author, 18 December 2020.
11. Drew Harwell, “Instead of Consumer Software, Ukraine Tech Workers Build Apps of War,” The Washington Post, 24 March 2022.
12. CDR Cyrus Mendoza, Philippine Navy, interviewed by the author, 13 January 2021.
13. Marguerite Reardon, “Can Dataless Smartphones Still Use GPS Navigation Apps?” CNET, 13 March 2013.
14. Dr. Joseph Felter, Stanford University, Hoover Institute, interviewed by author, 10 March 2020; CAPT Michael O’Hara, USN, U.S. Naval War College, interviewed by author, 19 June 2020; COL Leo Liebreich, U.S. Army, interviewed by author, 29 May 2020; and CAPT Chris Sharman, USN, interviewed by author, 5 March 2020.
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Read More »Swarms of Satellites Are Tracking Illegal Fishing and Logging
September 2nd, 2022
Via Wired, an article on how – in some of the world’s most inaccessible places – tiny satellites are watching—and listening—for signs of destruction:
Fishing boats kept washing up in Japan with dead North Koreans on board. Dozens were documented every year, but they spiked in 2017, with more than 100 boats found on the northern coasts of Japan. No one could explain the appearance of these ghost ships. Why were there so many?
An answer arrived in 2020. Using a swarm of satellites orbiting Earth, a nonprofit organization called Global Fishing Watch in Washington, DC, found that China was fishing illegally in North Korean waters, “in contravention of Chinese and North Korean laws, as well as UN sanctions on North Korea,” says Paul Woods, the organization’s cofounder and chief innovation officer. As a result, North Korean fishermen were having to travel further afield, as far as Russia, something their small ships weren’t suited for. “They couldn’t get back,” says Woods. China, caught out, promptly halted its activities.
The alarming discovery was made possible by the DC-based firm Spire Global, which operates more than 100 small satellites in Earth orbit. These are designed to pick up the radio pings sent out by boats across the globe, which are primarily used by vessels to avoid each other on the seas. Listening out for them is also a useful way to track illegal maritime activity.
“The way they move when they’re fishing is distinct,” says Woods of the boats. “We can predict what kind of fishing gear they’re using by their speed, direction, and the way they turn.” Of the 60,000 vessels that emit such pings, Woods says 5,000 have been found conducting illegal activities thanks to Spire, including fishing at restricted times or offloading hauls of protected fish to other vessels to avoid checks at ports.
Satellite constellations like Spire’s have seen huge growth in recent years, and novel uses like this are becoming more common. Where once satellites would be large, bulky machines costing tens of millions of dollars, technological advances mean smaller, toaster-sized ones can now be launched at a fraction of the cost. Flying these together in groups, or constellations, to conduct unique assignments has become an affordable prospect. “It’s now economically viable to deploy many, many more satellites,” says Joel Spark, cofounder and a general manager at Spire.
Before 2018, no constellations of more than 100 active satellites had ever been launched into Earth orbit, says Jonathan McDowell, a satellite expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US. Now there are three, with nearly 20 more constellations in the process of being launched and some 200 more in development. It is a “boom in constellations,” says McDowell.
The reasons for flying constellations are numerous. The most notorious is to beam the internet to remote locations, made famous by SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation. This vast swarm of 3,000 satellites accounts for nearly half of all those in orbit, and it will swell further to 12,000 or more. Others, like Amazon, have plans for vast space internet constellations of their own. Many are worried about launching so many satellites into orbit, significantly raising the risk of collisions and producing dangerous space junk.
Smaller satellite constellations have their problems too. Many of their satellites lack the ability to maneuver, for example, to avoid a collision. “I’m a little uncomfortable with it,” says McDowell, although their small size means most fall back into our atmosphere within a few years, naturally clearing the skies. For now we can cope, but stricter regulation will be needed in the future as more are launched.
Satellite constellations can encompass the globe, providing valuable data that single satellites cannot. Some can track illegal methane emissions, others can provide useful communications networks, and others still can provide constant imagery of our planet’s surface. “I definitely did not expect the diversity of use cases,” says Sara Spangelo, cofounder and CEO of Swarm Technologies in California, whose own constellation of 160 satellites allows small packets of data to be sent between devices around the globe, even from remote locations, creating a worldwide internet of things.
One organization—Rainforest Connection, based in Texas—has found a particularly novel way of using Swarm’s satellites: tracking illegal logging and poaching in more than 32 countries. In areas where loggers or poachers might operate, Rainforest places solar-powered acoustic sensors called Guardians high in treetops, designed to blend in with the tree from the ground. If the sensors pick up the sound of illegal activity up to 1.5 kilometers away (assessed by software on board the Guardians), such as chain saws or gunshots, they send a signal to one of Swarm’s satellites overhead, which relays the information back to a ground station.
This allows Rainforest Connection to alert law enforcement or locals to illegal activity, from villages in Sumatra to lands that are home to Indigenous tribes in Brazil. “In countries like Brazil and Malaysia, deforestation contributes to over 70 percent of their total greenhouse gas emissions,” says Bourhan Yassin, Rainforest’s CEO. “It’s a very large problem.”
Prior to working with Swarm, Rainforest relied on cellular networks to transmit data. While quicker, that limited its monitoring to regions near populated areas. “With Swarm, we can put the devices anywhere we want,” says Yassin. “It’s doubled up the capability we can do.”
Gai Jorayev at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, meanwhile, is using imagery from a constellation of more than 200 satellites run by the California firm Planet Labs to track Russia’s shelling of archaeological sites in Ukraine. Planet’s satellites take images of the entire Earth every day. This has enabled Jorayev, working with the Global Heritage Fund in California, to find that more than 165 sites have been damaged or destroyed by Russian shelling.
“Almost everywhere I look, I’m surprised by the levels of damage,” says Jorayev. “I did not expect it at this scale. The damage is very, very bad.”
Planet has provided its imagery free of charge to Jorayev and his team. “I’m exceptionally grateful,” says Jorayev. The hope is that Russia can be held accountable for its actions in future. That, however, “is a long process,” he says.
These are just a handful of ways satellite constellations are being used today: Spire says it has more than 700 customers, Planet also 700, and Swarm about 300. Concerns about collisions and the satellites’ potential to create space junk are well founded, but if we can find ways to adequately supervise these constellations, there are many ways they can prove useful.
“There are important roles that large constellations can play,” says McDowell. “It’s a question of managing it, and not having it be a free-for-all.”
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