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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

" 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

Toothpaste, face creams, hair gel, mayonnaise and ketchup are household items that most people don't think twice about, but in terms of their flow behavior, they have unusual properties. They're all elasto-visco-plastic (EVP) materials, which behave like solids when at rest, but can yield to flow like liquids when placed under enough stress. Despite their ubiquity, the ability to model and predict their behavior relies on a theory that has only been shown to work under certain conditions.

"My colleague Jamie Robins and I are working on a book that provides a cohesive presentation of concepts of, and methods for, causal inference. Much of this material is currently scattered across journals in several disciplines or confined to technical articles. We expect that the book will be of interest to anyone interested in causal inference, e.g., epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, computer scientists… The book is divided in 3 parts of increasing difficulty: causal inference without models, causal inference with models, and causal inference from complex longitudinal data. We are making drafts of selected book sections available on this website. The idea is that interested readers can submit suggestions or criticisms before the book is published. To share any comments, please email me or visit @causalinference on Facebook. To cite the book, please use "Hernán MA, Robins JM (2018). Causal Inference. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC, forthcoming.""

"Everyone knows these statements aren't literally true, but although we might understand their figurative meaning, they continue to reflect, and influence, how we think. Even biologists, being quite human, too often think metaphorically and assign properties to genes that genes don't have. The metaphor works because our society has a deeply embedded belief in genes as clearly identifiable material things which explain our individual natures, making them inherent from the moment of our conception and thus predictable. If hydrogen and oxygen are the causal atoms of water, genes are the causal atoms of our existence."

The starting point is to note that, for people to be held responsible for their actions, they have to know about certain features of the world. In many cases, even this minimal condition for blameworthiness isn't satisfied. For example, Chow would have struggled to predict that the rise of ridesharing apps would crater the market for taxi medallions in New York City - but so, too, did most of us. By their very nature, technological disruptions are difficult to foresee; if they were easy to predict, early investors in these technologies wouldn't get so rich. Such a low bar for blameworthiness seems too harsh to be plausible; how can any of us be blamed for failing to spot trends that almost no one was able to see, despite the significant material incentives for doing so?

One way to harness solar energy is by using solar electricity to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen produced by the process is stored as fuel, in a form that can be transferred from one place to another and used to generate power upon demand. To split water molecules into their component parts, a catalyst is necessary, but the catalytic materials currently used in the process, also known as the oxygen evolution reaction, are not efficient enough to make the process practical.

Researchers at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) in Japan have designed a small 'body-on-a-chip' device that can test the side effects of drugs s on human cells. The device solves some issues with current, similar microfluidic devices and offers promise for the next generation of pre-clinical drug tests.

Now, a team of researchers at Osaka University has used flake-shaped Si nanopowder wrapped by ultrathin graphite sheets (GSs) to fabricate LIB electrodes with high areal capacity and current density. Generally treated as industrial waste, Si swarf is generated at a rate of 100,000 tons per year globally from Si ingots that are produced from silica through processes at 1000~1800°C. Water-based coolants and fixed abrasive grain wire saws are paving the way to the use of Si swarf as an anode active material with a high capacity at a reduced cost.

"Managing plastics has become a grand and complex environmental challenge, and plastic packaging clearly warrants current efforts on reductions and coordinated material recovery and recycling," said Gregory Keoleian, senior author of a paper published Aug. 25 in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Antigen tests don't amplify their protein signal, so they are inherently less sensitive. To make matters worse, that signal gets diluted when samples are mixed with the liquid needed to enable the material to flow across test strips. As a result, most antigen tests have a sensitivity of anywhere between 50% and 90%-in other words, one in two infected people might incorrectly be told they don't have the virus. Last month, Spanish health authorities returned thousands of SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests to the Chinese firm Shengzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology after finding the tests correctly identified infected people only 30% of the time, according to a report by the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

A type of nylon, the material's shape memory properties enable it to be stretched and molded but able to reform into its original shape when heated. This makes it useful for medical devices such as bone replacements, where minimally invasive surgery techniques require additional flexibility in implant materials.

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the "blue shift." In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.