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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

The analysis of questionnaires often involves representing the high-dimensional responses in a low-dimensional space (e.g., PCA, MCA, or t-SNE). However questionnaire data often contains categorical variables and common statistical model assumptions rarely hold. Here we present a non-parametric approach based on Fisher Information which obtains a low-dimensional embedding of a statistical manifold (SM). The SM has deep connections with parametric statistical models and the theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Firstly we simulate questionnaire responses based on a non-linear SM and validate our method compared to other methods. Secondly we apply our method to two empirical datasets containing largely categorical variables: an anthropological survey of rice farmers in Bali and a cohort study on health inequality in Amsterdam. Compare to previous analysis and known anthropological knowledge we conclude that our method best discriminates between different behaviours, paving the way to dimension reduction as effective as for continuous data.

The emergence of three lethal coronaviruses in <20 years and the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted efforts to develop new therapeutic strategies, including by repurposing existing agents. After performing a comparative analysis of the three pathogenic human coronaviruses severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 (SARS-CoV-1), SARS-CoV-2, and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), we identified shared biology and host-directed drug targets to prioritize therapeutics with potential for rapid deployment against current and future coronavirus outbreaks.

"The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes. The study made waves around the world and was covered across global media."

"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

Groups of firms often achieve a competitive advantage through the formation of geo-industrial clusters. Although many exemplary clusters are the subjects of case studies, systematic approaches to identify and analyze the hierarchical structure of geo-industrial clusters at the global scale are scarce. In this work, we use LinkedIn's employment history data from more than 500 million users over 25 years to construct a labor flow network of over 4 million firms across the world, from which we reveal hierarchical structure by applying network community detection. We show that the resulting geo-industrial clusters exhibit a stronger association between the influx of educated workers and financial performance, compared to traditional aggregation units. Furthermore, our analysis of the skills of educated workers reveals richer insights into the relationship between the labor flow of educated workers and productivity growth. We argue that geo-industrial clusters defined by labor flow provide useful insights into the growth of the economy.

"My long-term vision for a better rural farm policy in the future would include new wildlife corridors, agroforestry, walking paths and bike trails, natural prairies, restored wetlands, and a return to naturalized rivers. This would require returning some private land back to public land, of retiring a percentage of today's Midwestern farmland. These things would support wildlife, outdoors activities, and provide greater tourism opportunities in the Midwest. These things would protect the soil, water, and help with biodiversity compared to what it is today. They would also help to enhance the quality of life for those who are living in the Midwest and they would entice others to move there for new opportunities. And, more kids could grow up doing the outdoor activities that I did."

Most theoretical and empirical accounts of trade politics focus on political conflict among competing private interest groups and over policies between the dichotomy of trade liberalization and protectionism. This article challenges this conceptualization by arguing that issues of antitrust, market power, and competition are central to the politics over free trade, and that in this domain state actors are comparatively more important. Original archival evidence from the American New Deal and post-war foreign economic policy shows that post-war free-trade policies were heavily influenced by views, formed in the 1930s, about domestic industrial organization and antitrust. These preferences were then pushed into international economic policy during and after World War II through trade negotiations, extraterritorial application of American law, and pressure for domestic competition laws abroad. In one of the most prominent episodes of trade liberalization, an antitrust campaign and debate permeated trade issues, based in independent state learning and economic preferences.

The application of network science to biology has advanced our understanding of the metabolism of individual organisms and the organization of ecosystems but has scarcely been applied to life at a planetary scale. To characterize planetary-scale biochemistry, we constructed biochemical networks using a global database of 28,146 annotated genomes and metagenomes and 8658 cataloged biochemical reactions. We uncover scaling laws governing biochemical diversity and network structure shared across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole. Comparing real biochemical reaction networks to random reaction networks reveals that the observed biological scaling is not a product of chemistry alone but instead emerges due to the particular structure of selected reactions commonly participating in living processes. We show that the topology of biochemical networks for the three domains of life is quantitatively distinguishable, with >80% accuracy in predicting evolutionary domain based on biochemical network size and average topology. Together, our results point to a deeper level of organization in biochemical networks than what has been understood so far.

The application of network science to biology has advanced our understanding of the metabolism of individual organisms and the organization of ecosystems but has scarcely been applied to life at a planetary scale. To characterize planetary-scale biochemistry, we constructed biochemical networks using a global database of 28,146 annotated genomes and metagenomes and 8658 cataloged biochemical reactions. We uncover scaling laws governing biochemical diversity and network structure shared across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole. Comparing real biochemical reaction networks to random reaction networks reveals that the observed biological scaling is not a product of chemistry alone but instead emerges due to the particular structure of selected reactions commonly participating in living processes. We show that the topology of biochemical networks for the three domains of life is quantitatively distinguishable, with >80% accuracy in predicting evolutionary domain based on biochemical network size and average topology. Together, our results point to a deeper level of organization in biochemical networks than what has been understood so far.

In this Review, we outline the history and evolution of the burning embers and associated reasons for concern framework, focusing on the methodological approaches and advances. While the assessment framework and figure design have been broadly retained over time, refinements in methodology have occurred, including the consideration of different risks, use of confidence statements, more formalized protocols and standardized metrics. Comparison across reports reveals that the risk level at a given temperature has generally increased with each assessment cycle, reflecting accumulating scientific evidence. For future assessments, an explicit, transparent and systematic process of expert elicitation is needed to enhance comparability, quality and credibility of burning embers.

We think government lockdowns cause substantial collateral health damage. For example, hospital admissions in the USA for emergency treatment of acute ischaemic strokes have been substantially lower in February-March, 2020, than in February-March, 2019, resulting in delayed treatment.1 Compared with a historical baseline, UK nursing homes and hospices saw an increase in the number of deaths between February and June, 2020, associated with acute coronary syndrome (a 41% increase), stroke (a 39% increase), and heart failure (a 25% increase).2

Land use change-for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems-is widely recognized to influence the risk and emergence of zoonotic disease in humans1,2. However, whether such changes in risk are underpinned by predictable ecological changes remains unclear. It has been suggested that habitat disturbance might cause predictable changes in the local diversity and taxonomic composition of potential reservoir hosts, owing to systematic, trait-mediated differences in species resilience to human pressures3,4. Here we analyse 6,801 ecological assemblages and 376 host species worldwide, controlling for research effort, and show that land use has global and systematic effects on local zoonotic host communities. Known wildlife hosts of human-shared pathogens and parasites overall comprise a greater proportion of local species richness (18-72% higher) and total abundance (21-144% higher) in sites under substantial human use (secondary, agricultural and urban ecosystems) compared with nearby undisturbed habitats. The magnitude of this effect varies taxonomically and is strongest for rodent, bat and passerine bird zoonotic host species, which may be one factor that underpins the global importance of these taxa as zoonotic reservoirs. We further show that mammal species that harbour more pathogens overall (either human-shared or non-human-shared) are more likely to occur in human-managed ecosystems, suggesting that these trends may be mediated by ecological or life-history traits that influence both host status and tolerance to human disturbance5,6. Our results suggest that global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.

Many books have been written about our cosmic origins: the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago; the Big Bang and all that followed. The denouement, presumably tens of billions of years away, remains comparatively mysterious. How does it all end? For that matter, does it all end, or can we keep on in our merry way indefinitely? In "The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)," Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University, attempts to answer what might seem the most remote of scientific questions.

Mandates for mask use in public during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, worsened by global shortage of commercial supplies, have led to widespread use of homemade masks and mask alternatives. It is assumed that wearing such masks reduces the likelihood for an infected person to spread the disease, but many of these mask designs have not been tested in practice. We have demonstrated a simple optical measurement method to evaluate the efficacy of masks to reduce the transmission of respiratory droplets during regular speech. In proof-of-principle studies, we compared a variety of commonly available mask types and observed that some mask types approach the performance of standard surgical masks, while some mask alternatives, such as neck fleece or bandanas, offer very little protection. Our measurement setup is inexpensive and can be built and operated by non-experts, allowing for rapid evaluation of mask performance during speech, sneezing, or coughing.