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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

"This has fundamental implications for how one thinks about current challenges. Globalisation and technological change are often portrayed as exogenous forces sweeping across the rich countries, inexorably driving up inequality and forcing workers to accept wage stagnation (and often less security) if they are to hold on to their jobs. Instead, the variation in country experiences shows how much institutions and policy responses matter to how these forces - themselves subject to human agency rather than God-given - play out in the job market and affect household disposable incomes. Wage-setting institutions clearly have a critical influence. The Belgian combination of wages indexed to inflation, collective agreements covering most workers, and a high minimum wage underpinned significant wage growth across the distribution. In Australia, the extension of collectively negotiated employment terms and conditions over much of the work force, together with a very high minimum wage, play a key role. By contrast, the remarkably poor earnings performance of the UK over the last decade is in a context where wage bargaining has become individualised."

"The casual observer can hardly comprehend the value-extracting power of hedge fund activists. Technically, they are no more than minority shareholders. Yet they exert enormous influence, often forcing these companies to undertake fundamental restructuring and to increase stock buybacks and dividends substantially. For instance, Third Point Management and Trian Fund Management, holding only 2% of the outstanding stock of Dow Chemical and DuPont, respectively, engineered a merger-and-split of America's top two chemical giants at the end of 2015 that resulted in both massive layoffs and the closure of DuPont's central research lab, one of the first industrial science labs in the United States."

"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

"I will tell you without ceremony what the future actually holds for the inhabited terrain of North America. The big cities will have to contract severely and the process will be fraught and disorderly. The action will move to the small cities and small towns, especially the places that have a meaningful relationship with farming, food production, and the continent's inland waterways. The suburbs have three destinies, none of them mutually exclusive: slums, salvage, and ruins. The future has mandates of its own. If we want to remain civilized, we will be compelled to return to a landscape composed of relationships between town and country, at a scale that comports with the resource realities of the future. These days the failure of American imagination, especially at the university level, is epic."

The Forum's perspective on present and future technological and societal changes is captured in their 'Principled Framework for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.' Philbeck explained the four principles that characterize the Fourth Industrial Revolution. * Think systems, not technologies. Individual technologies are interesting, but it is their systemic impact that matters. Emerging technologies challenge our societal values and norms, sometimes for good, but sometimes also in negative ways; the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have civilization-changing impact-on species, on the planet, on geopolitics, and on the global economy. Philbeck suggested that wealth creation and aggregation supported by this phase of technological innovation may challenge societal commitments to accessibility, inclusivity, and fairness and create the need for relentless worker re-education. As Philbeck stated, "The costs for greater productivity are often externalized to stakeholders who are not involved in a particular technology's development." * Empowering, not determining. The Forum urges an approach to the Fourth Industrial Revolution that honors existing social principles. "We need to take a stance toward technology and technological systems that empowers society and acts counter to fatalistic and deterministic views, so that society and its agency is not nullified," said Philbeck. "Technologies are not forces; we have the ability to shape them and decide on how they are applied." * Future by design, and not by default. Seeking a future by design requires active governance. There are many types of governance-by individuals, by governments, by civic society, and by companies. Philbeck argued that failure to pay attention to critical governance questions in consideration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution means societies are likely to allow undemocratic, random, and potentially malicious forces to shape the future of technological systems and th

Antarctic iceberg melt could hold the key to the activation of a series of mechanisms that cause the Earth to suffer prolonged periods of global cooling, according to Francisco J. Jiménez-Espejo, a researcher at the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute (CSIC-UGR), whose discoveries were recently published in Nature.

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.

Ehre, a member of the UNC Marsico Lung Institute and the UNC Children's Research Institute, captured these images to illustrate how intense the SARS-CoV-2 infection of the airways can be in very graphic and easily understood images. Her lab conducted this research in collaboration with the labs of Ralph Baric, Ph.D., the William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, who holds a joint faculty appointment at the UNC Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and Richard Boucher, MD, the James C. Moeser Eminent Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Director of the Marsico Lung Institute at the UNC School of Medicine Covid-19

In hierarchical relationships-between employer and employee, parent and child, or teacher and student-social rank is understood and bolstered by social norms. In contrast, symmetric relations-between friends, neighbors, classmates, or coworkers- are equitable. One party can't claim dominance over the other. But when ambiguity persists about who holds the upper hand, the likelihood of conflict increases. Animal research yields parallel findings, suggesting that when two animals of the same species are similarly sized, conflict is more likely than when there is a size disparity.