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"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

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.

" 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

Contains reference to the Matrix.

SINCE THE END of November, this is some of what has sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean: vacuum cleaners; Kate Spade accessories; at least $150,000 of frozen shrimp; and three shipping containers full of children's clothes. "If anybody has investments in deep-sea salvage, there's some beautiful product down there," Richard Westenberger, chief financial officer of the children's clothing brand Carter's told a conference recently.

BPA is an organic compound made from fossil fuel sources. The industrial chemical has been used to make plastics and resins since the 1950s, and products made with it are cheap to make, clear, flexible and strong. BPA can be found in a variety of products, including water bottles, storage containers and sports equipment. It's also widely used in the linings of food and beverage cans and in sales receipt paper. It's one of the most commonly synthesized chemicals today with more than six million tons created in 2018 alone.

Aerosols are suspensions of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in a gas. Clouds, for example, are aerosols because they consist of water droplets dispersed in the air. Such droplets are produced in a two-step process: first, a condensation nucleus forms, and then volatile molecules condense onto this nucleus, producing a droplet. Nuclei frequently consist of molecules different to those that condense onto them. In the case of clouds, the nuclei often contain sulphuric acids and organic substances. Water vapor from the atmosphere subsequently condenses onto these nuclei.

"The Empire Will Strike Back But in case there is any doubt that the battle for controlling the administrative state is not yet won, consider the opinion in the census case written by the four liberals on the Court. They would have disallowed the citizenship status question whatever the sincerity of the administration's reasons. They argued that it was arbitrary and capricious, despite the fact that the exact same question had been included before and that similar questions are included by many other nations. Crucial to their reasoning was the creation of a technocratic baseline for "reasonableness"-a standard that would elevate the judgement of the career civil servants who believed that the cost of reducing responses outweighed the benefits of getting a more accurate account of immigration status. This is a truly radical view, one that would further embolden the career bureaucracy by requiring political appointees to provide special reasons to override the decisions of their subordinates."

There is a need to better understand the contribution of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections (those with no symptoms at all throughout the infection) in driving the current pandemic. However, there are caveats that in our opinion are pertinent when interpreting the reported findings of this review, including the lack of a clear definition of asymptomatic infection and selective inclusion of cross-sectional studies. In addition, there is a problematic interpretation of a narrative review containing a dearth of poor-quality evidence resulting in an overestimate of asymptomatic infections, which might misinform policy response.

Even before Covid-19, the world was facing a care crisis. The plight of often neglected, under-appreciated, under-protected and poorly equipped 'frontline' health personnel working to contain the pandemic has drawn attention to the tip of the care crisis iceberg.

In December, Antarctica lost its status as the last continent free of COVID-19 when 36 people at the Chilean Bernardo O'Higgins research station tested positive. The station's isolation from other bases and fewer researchers in the continent means the outbreak is now likely contained.

In the flagship article, The ENCODE Project Consortium et al.5 provide a bird's-eye view of the updated encyclopedia, which contains newly added data sets from 6,000 experiments, performed on around 1,300 samples. By integrating these data sets, the consortium has created an online registry of candidate CREs. Most are classified as promoters or enhancers - CREs respectively located at or some distance from the genomic site at which transcription of a gene begins. The consortium tracked the activity of each candidate CRE, along with the proteins that bind to it in many different samples from various tissues. They used chromatin-looping data to link enhancers to genes that they might regulate. This online registry marks a true milestone, turning an overwhelming amount of genomic information into a searchable, filterable and retrievable encyclopedia of DNA elements, which is freely accessible at https://screen.encodeproject.org.

]. "The narrow strip of soil around the plant's root teems with millions of microorganisms, making it one of the most complex ecosystems on earth. To determine whether the composition of this "root microbiome" triggers changes within the plant, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elisa Korenblum and other members of a team headed by Prof. Asaph Aharoni of Weizmann's Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, created a hydroponic set-up in which they split the roots of tomato seedlings in two. In a series of experiments, the researchers placed one side of the split roots in vials, progressively diluting the soil suspensions several times. Each dilution altered the soil's microbial composition and reduced the diversity within the microbial community, so that the different suspensions ended up containing root microbiomes with high, medium and low diversity levels. The other side of the roots was submerged in a vial with a clean, soil-free solution. If the soil microbes communicate with the plant, one would expect to detect signs of their messages on both sides of the root system. That was exactly what the scientists found…. 'Our ultimate goal is to decipher the chemical language - one could call it 'Plantish' - used by plants and the soil to interact with one another,' Korenblum

When they are strict and prolonged, the public health and social measures to contain Covid-19 have proven difficult to respect. This column gives evidence of the different outcomes, as of 23 May, across a sample of 20 tourist-dependent island states with populations of between 100,000 and 10 million. If tourist-dependent islands have been hit hard by the shock, most have fared well, particularly those - like Mauritius - that acted early and imposed a strict lockdown.

COVID-19 is a wicked problem for policy makers internationally as the complexity of the pandemic transcends health, environment, social and economic boundaries. Many countries are focusing on two key responses, namely virus containment and financial measures, but fail to recognise other aspects. The systems approach, however, enables policy makers to design the most effective strategies and reduce the unintended consequences. To achieve fundamental change, it is imperative to firstly identify the "right" interventions (leverage points) and implement additional measures to reduce negative consequences. To do so, a preliminary causal loop diagram of the COVID-19 pandemic was designed to explore its influence on socio-economic systems. In order to transcend the "wait and see" approach, and create an adaptive and resilient system, governments need to consider "deep" leverage points that can be realistically maintained over the long-term and cause a fundamental change, rather than focusing on "shallow" leverage points that are relatively easy to implement but do not result in significant systemic change