Capstonex

Oil & Gas Market

In the last decade, the competition for owning energy resources aroused synchronously with the significant geopolitical transformations on the world map as it is the central pillar of maintaining and developing the energy security of giant economies, this explains why oil and gas markets are susceptible to global changes and events. Generally, the key relationship that governs the oil and gas market is termed by “Supply & Demand” relationship, so it is important to shed light on the difference between oil markets and gas markets in terms of dynamics, and how the markets of oil and gas interact with geopolitical changes and how that is reflected by the fluctuation of oil and gas prices.  Observing the prices of various markets termed by the name of crude oil like Brent & WTI, it is clear that the prices are nearly unified with very slight differences, and at the same time, the correlation reflects the rate of fluctuations of oil prices between a region and other region is very high, such that if the price of oil increase in a country at the east extreme of Asia it will be observed that the oil price will increase in the same manner at Canada for example. On the other hand, it is observed that there are clearly different markets for the gas commodities in the way of pricing, for example, you can find the prices of gas in Asia are triple that in Europe and that America has the least prices. For gas markets the difference in prices is very high with the absence of correlation of fluctuation also, say for example a tornado stroked America and that supply of gas are hindered and the demand increased this will influence the price of gas increasingly for America alone, but it will not change significantly for Korea that is buying LNG (liquified natural gas). The point with gas is that it is a commodity that is not easily transported and stored, that different gas markets evolved around the world. While in Asia, where most industrial countries import their needs from LNG suppliers that are limited in number and represented dominantly by countries for example Qatar Gas, this reduces the chances of competition and thus enables suppliers to control the prices of LNG. This type of LNG market is termed by Oil Linked Market which is characterized by long-term deals and very high prices. Lorem In America and a part of Europe, gas prices in retail markets reflect competition between internal suppliers. For example, the diversity in producers in Texas creates a competitive reflection on the prices, and as it is known as the competition increases the prices of gas tend to approach the ceiling “cost of production”. In this type of market which is termed by (Gas to Gas markets), the customer has the chance to choose between multiple suppliers which result in liquidity of the market and thus maintains prices as low as possible.  Briefly, Gas-to-Gas markets are achieved if the suppliers of gas are abundant “diversity” and not far away from customers, adding to that the presence of good regulators and free markets (liberalized). Other than that, it is called an Oil-Linked Market or Subsidized market. written by: Ali Nasser September 21, 2022 On the Dynamics of Oil and Gas Markets In the last decade, the competition for owning energy resources aroused synchronously with the significant… Neuralink: Elon Musk’s Venture After SpaceX rockets and Tesla’s electric cars, Elon Musk announced his future neuroscience technology… Enigma Machine An Enigma machine is a famous encryption machine used by the Germans to transmit coded messages during… Be A Diamond In A World Full Of Graphites! You may have covered in your elementary school  chemistry course that some elements in nature may… LEO COMPUTERS “LEO” the world’s first business computer you may not have heard of! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0yYDxjBnTM… Europe is Gas-Thirsty in Winter! It is the most extreme energy crisis that has ever occurred in Europe as experts in global gas markets… How Is Rubber Made? WHAT IS RUBBER? Rubber is an elastic material made from petroleum, natural gas, or natural plant exudates… Natural Rubber Shortage: A Crisis at the Gates Natural rubber with all its chemical and physical properties is considered a main building block for… FIBONACCI SEQUENCE AND THE GOLDEN RATIO OF BEAUTY It is realized mathematically that everything in nature starting from the smallest atoms to the most… BlockChain What is BlockChain Technology? Blockchain technology is a sort of distributed ledger that offers a shared,… No posts found 1 2 3 4 5 Follow US Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Linkedin

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Neuralink: Elon Musk’s Venture

After SpaceX rockets and Tesla’s electric cars, Elon Musk announced his future neuroscience technology Neuralink which is expected to provide humans with the capability to operate machines with their brains and cure brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. So, what is Neuralink? And how it works? What is Neuralink? Neuralink simply is a device that will be surgically implanted into the brain tissue using robots operated by neurosurgeons. In this process, a chip called the link is implanted in the skull. From this chip a number of insulated wires extends from the electrodes that are used in the process. This device can then be utilized to operate smartphones and computers without having to touch it.  https://neuralink.com/ How Neuralink Works? Before getting into the mechanism of Neuralink, let’s first understand the science behind the human brain. The brain consists of neurons or nerve cells that transmit electric signals to cells in the body like muscles, nerves, glands and other neurons to stimulate them to do an activity commanded by the brain. Every neuron consists of three parts, the dendrite which receives signals from other neurons, the soma or the cell body which processes these signals and the axon which transmits the signal to other cells.’ The neurons are connected to each other by synapsis which releases neurotransmitters, which are the chemical substances sent to another neuron’s dendrite causing the flow of electric signals across the neuron. The electrodes extending from the Neuralink chip will detect the electric signals that are generated by several neurons in the brain. The signals are then transformed into action or movement.  What does Neuralink do? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HybO3yzmGGA As mentioned before, Neuralink is expected to cure brain diseases, and also it can be used as a link between the human brain and technology. This means that people with paralysis can easily operate their smartphones and computers directly with their brains. Its main goal is to help people to communicate through text or voice messages and other activities.  Prepared by: Ali Nasser 15 September 2022 1 2 3 4 5 Follow US Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Linkedin

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Enigma Machine

An Enigma machine is a famous encryption machine used by the Germans to transmit coded messages during WWII. An Enigma machine can encrypt a message in billions of different ways, making it extremely difficult for other nations to decipher German codes during the war — for a while, the code appeared unbreakable. But Alan Turing and other researchers exploited a few flaws in the Enigma code implementation and gained access to German codebooks, allowing them to construct the Bombe machine, which assisted in cracking the most difficult versions of Enigma.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CspaXNkC2ec It used a sequence of rotors to allow the operator to encrypt or decrypt a message using electricity, a light bulb, and a reflector. The original position of the rotors, which was set with each encryption and was based on a preset sequence that was dependent on the calendar, allowed the machine to be utilized even if it was compromised. When the Enigma was in use, with each consecutive key press, the rotors would shift out of alignment from their predetermined places, producing a different letter each time. The operator would enter each character into the machine by pressing a typewriter-like key while holding a message in his hand. The rotors would align, and a letter would illuminate, informing the operator of what the letter was. Similarly, during enciphering, the operator presses the key, and the lit letter is the cipher text. The constantly changing internal flow of electricity that caused the rotors to alter was not random, but it did create a polyalphabetic cipher that was unique each time it was employed. Enigma Encryption Enigma employs a type of substitution cipher. When the rotors turn, a new set of three numbers/letters appears. A message recipient can decode the message using the initial set of three numbers/letters (meaning the numbers/letters on the sender’s machine when they began typing the message) by setting their (identical) Enigma machine to the initial settings of the sender’s Enigma machine. Each rotor contains 2626 numbers/letters. The Germans were able to switch rotors, selecting from a set of five, resulting in thousands of different combinations for an Enigma system. Substitution encryption is a simple method of encoding communications, although these codes are quite easy to crack. A Caesar cipher is a simple example of a substitution encryption technique. A Caesar cipher changes each letter of the alphabet by a certain number of positions. With a shift of 11, a Caesar cipher would encode an A as a B, a M as an N, and a Z as an A, and so on. For Example: using the simple substitution method “Capstonex” with a shift of 5 can be encrypted with this scheme as :  “hfuxytsjc” For the real Enigma “Capstone-X” is written as “WRFO UADZ Y”. Use this converter to encrpt to Enigma: https://v2.cryptii.com/text/enigma Share with us your encrypted name in the comments. However, Enigma devices are far more powerful than simple Caesar ciphers. Consider how the entire encoding scheme would change each time a letter was mapped to another. The rotors move after each button push, and pressing the same button again conducts current along a new path to a different revealed letter. Mechanism of Enigma: Encoded messages would be a certain scramble of letters on a specific day that would convert to an understandable sentence when unscrambled. When a key is pressed on the keyboard, one or more rotors move to establish a new rotor configuration that encodes one letter as another. Current runs through the machine, lighting up one of the lamp board’s display lamps, which displays the output letter. So, if the “K” key is hit and the Enigma machine encodes that letter as a “P,” the “P” on the lamp board will light up. Enigma operators got codebooks every month that stated which settings the machine would use each day. The coding would vary every morning. There are three main parameters or configurations to set: – Plugboard settings: A/L-P/R-T/D-B/W-K/F-O/Y – Rotor (or scrambler) arrangement: 2-3-1 – Rotor orientation: D-K-P To know more details visit this website: https://brilliant.org/wiki/enigma-machine/   How Enigma was Cracked? The Enigma code had a severe weakness in that a letter could never be encoded as itself. In other words, a “M” would never be encoded as a “M,” which was a major problem in the Enigma code because it provided codebreakers with information that might be used to decrypt messages. If the codebreakers could guess a word or phrase that would most likely appear in the message, they may begin breaking the code. Because the Germans routinely delivered a weather report at the start of the letter and usually included the phrase “Heil Hitler” at the end, decrypters understood what to look for. Decoders could compare a given phrase to the letters in the code, and if a letter in the phrase matched one in the code, they knew that part of the code did not include the phrase. The decoders might then start cracking the code through a process of elimination. Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman created the Bombe machine, which employed electric circuits to decipher an Enigma encoded message in less than 20 minutes. The Bombe machine would attempt to determine the settings of the Enigma machine’s rotors and plugboard used to convey a specific coded message. The conventional British Bombe machine was simply 36 Enigma devices connected together to simulate numerous Enigma machines at the same time. The majority of Enigma machines had three rotors, and to mimic this in the Bombe, each Enigma simulator had three drums, one for each rotor. Types of Enigma Machine: A selection of seven Enigma machines and paraphernalia exhibited at the USA’s National Cryptologic Museum. From left to right, the models are: 1) Commercial Enigma; 2) Enigma T; 3) Enigma G; 4) Unidentified; 5) Luftwaffe (Air Force) Enigma; 6) Heer (Army) Enigma; 7) Kriegsmarine (Naval) Enigma — M4. Enigma Blurprints: Check the links below to view the blueprints: – Blueprint of Rack: http://enigma.hs-weingarten.de/downloads/rack_10.pdf    – Blueprint of Reflector: http://enigma.hs-weingarten.de/downloads/reverse_roll_300.pdf – Blueprint of Rotor: http://enigma.hs-weingarten.de/downloads/roll_400.pdf Data Security

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Be A Diamond In A World Full Of Graphites!

You may have covered in your elementary school  chemistry course that some elements in nature may form various allotropes, simply it refers to different structural forms of the same element. Carbon among all the 118 elements in the periodic table is a fundamental building block of many vital molecules that compose life on earth, for example the DNA the double helical molecule formed of different nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, thymine and gaunine), another molecules are carbohydrates, proteins and many of other important organic compounds. Another interesting forms of pure carbon are the two allotropes diamond and graphite. Yes don’t be shocked the two forms that are in terms of economic value very different are in reality structured from the same element carbon. So what differentiate graphite from diamond? It is chemistry! The fascinating world of studying matter, it’s structure and the changes that happens to it.   Graphite as we know is a black and very soft material used to manufacture lead pencils. What explains this soft behavior is nothing other than the weak chemical bonds between the single layers of graphene composing the graphite, where each layer of graphite called “graphene” is a matrix of carbon atoms bonded to each other in a hexagonal pattern. On the other hand, diamond which is also made of pure carbon that are structured in 3D space in a complex compact pattern which explains why diamond is one of the hardest materials on earth and is used other than luxury jewels, in manufacturing of medical surgery equipment, also used in making drilling bits used to drill oil and gas wells and many other uses.. So interesting to know that it’s just a matter of structure which differentiate an expensive diamond from a cheap graphite.  What determines how the same element can take different forms? It is just the physical properties such as temperature and pressure to which the element is exposed. Diamond is formed in extreme geological conditions in the crust of the earth when carbon is exposed to high pressures and high temperatures which forces carbon atoms to take its complex 3D structure, while graphite being is formed in less extreme medium.  Scientists in the lab had succeeded to grow synthetic diamonds from graphite in well engineered devices (HPHT) that can simulate the extreme conditions of pressure and temperature happening deep in the earth. There is a high probability that the diamond ring of your wife is from a synthetic origin! But for your benefit synthetic diamonds are not in the purity of natural diamonds, so it is easily detected by those working in jewelry.  Away from chemistry which reveals us some lessons and projections from matter, it is nice to know that hard working in extreme conditions towards noble goals is what differentaite a successful person from failure person who is still in his comfort zone.  Be a diamond in a world full of graphites!    Written by Ali Nasser 1 September 2022 Be A Diamond In A World Full Of Graphites! You may have covered in your elementary school  chemistry course that some elements in nature may… LEO COMPUTERS “LEO” the world’s first business computer you may not have heard of! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0yYDxjBnTM… Europe is Gas-Thirsty in Winter! It is the most extreme energy crisis that has ever occurred in Europe as experts in global gas markets… How Is Rubber Made? WHAT IS RUBBER? Rubber is an elastic material made from petroleum, natural gas, or natural plant exudates… Natural Rubber Shortage: A Crisis at the Gates Natural rubber with all its chemical and physical properties is considered a main building block for… FIBONACCI SEQUENCE AND THE GOLDEN RATIO OF BEAUTY It is realized mathematically that everything in nature starting from the smallest atoms to the most… BlockChain What is BlockChain Technology? Blockchain technology is a sort of distributed ledger that offers a shared,… NASA: PICTURE OF THE DAY NASA’S WEBB DELIVERS DEEPEST INFRARED IMAGE OF UNIVERSE YET Picture of the day ! With the amazing declaration… No posts found 1 2 3 4 5 Follow US Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Linkedin

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LEO COMPUTERS

“LEO” the world’s first business computer you may not have heard of! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0yYDxjBnTM The story behind leo computers The story starts back in the 1920s. J. Lyons & Co. were a family-run business established in the late 1800s to provide for important events such as the yearly Buckingham Palace garden party. It expanded fast, acquiring bakeries, ice cream, hotels, tea blending and packing, and the well-known teashops and Corner Houses. Keeping control of such a broad mix of enterprises required exceptional management. Lyons’ hired a young Cambridge graduate, John Simmons (who had graduated as a ‘wrangler’ – a first-class mathematician), as a management trainee and statistician in the early 1920s. His primary responsibility was to supervise improved methods of structuring company operations and management information. Simmons rapidly built a name for himself through a succession of inventions that changed several traditional methods. In 1932, he founded the Systems Research Office, which became a breeding ground for new methods. Following WWII, Simmons dispatched two of his junior managers, Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson, to evaluate office practices in the United States. They returned full of enthusiasm for electronic computers. The technology had recently been declassified by American authorities, and it was met with enthusiastic headlines about ‘electronic minds’ on both sides of the Atlantic. Thompson and Standingford had also discovered that Maurice Wilkes was creating a computer, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, at Cambridge University at the time (EDSAC). EDSAC’s electronics were thermionic valves (or vacuum tubes), and its memory was kept in mercury delay lines, which were mercury tubes that conveyed pulse trains in a more condensed form than copper wires. Simmons promptly established an agreement with Wilkes to provide £3000 as a fund to the project if Lyons could create a working replica. EDSAC was duly delivered, and in 1949, John Pinkerton, a Cambridge engineer hired by Lyons to lead the project, started working on LEO with a small team. Thompson began recruiting a team of programmers at the same time. David Caminer, Lyons‘ Head of Systems Research, created flowcharts of the sequence of instructions and information to be provided to the computer in an understandable fashion. To know more about the detailed story, we invite you to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw0Vq35aIw0&t=3s LEO Computers Capabilities: In November 1951, LEO, which took up the entire floor of a big room, was ready to launch its first business program. It was named Bakery Valuations, and it calculated the costs of all the components used to make bread and cakes at the Lyons factory in Cadby Hall, west London. This is regarded as the world’s first routine, real-time office program. Soon after, LEO began to process payment for Lyons’ employees, and despite the machine’s inherent instability, a strict testing and maintenance schedule ensured that no one was ever paid late. The efficiency of the teashops was critical to the company’s profitability. Each customer spent a tiny amount, possibly a few pennies on a bun and a cup of tea. Because the transaction’s profit was so little, it was critical to reduce waste while increasing sales. Manageresses had to complete out documents in six different order books to resupply. Deliveries took more than a day to arrive at the stores, by which time their requirements may have altered. To increase efficiency, David Caminer created the Teashops Distribution role, which was implemented in 1953. He developed a standard order for each teashop based on its previous performance and implemented a daily telephone update to guarantee the orders were correct. Using the telephone was a brilliant idea, allowing for real-time, online connectivity long before the internet. LEO was also kept busy with contract work, such as computing missile trajectories for the Ministry of Defence and processing payroll for thousands of workers at Ford’s Dagenham plant. In 1954, the Lyons board of directors resolved to establish a subsidiary, Leo Computers Ltd, to build and sell computers. Only three versions were released! LEO I LEO II LEO III LEO II differed little from LEO I, except the last few were equipped with more compact magnetic core storage. In the early 1960s, Leo Computers used transistor technology for the first time, creating the LEO III, a cutting-edge machine. SOURCE: Meet leo, the world’s first business computer. Science Museum. (n.d.). Retrieved August 27, 2022, from https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/meet-leo-worlds-first-business-computer   LEO COMPUTERS “LEO” the world’s first business computer you may not have heard of! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0yYDxjBnTM… Europe is Gas-Thirsty in Winter! It is the most extreme energy crisis that has ever occurred in Europe as experts in global gas markets… How Is Rubber Made? WHAT IS RUBBER? Rubber is an elastic material made from petroleum, natural gas, or natural plant exudates… Natural Rubber Shortage: A Crisis at the Gates Natural rubber with all its chemical and physical properties is considered a main building block for… FIBONACCI SEQUENCE AND THE GOLDEN RATIO OF BEAUTY It is realized mathematically that everything in nature starting from the smallest atoms to the most… BlockChain What is BlockChain Technology? Blockchain technology is a sort of distributed ledger that offers a shared,… NASA: PICTURE OF THE DAY NASA’S WEBB DELIVERS DEEPEST INFRARED IMAGE OF UNIVERSE YET Picture of the day ! With the amazing declaration… No posts found 1 2 3 4 5 Follow US Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Linkedin

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