Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “megadrought”

According to USA Today,

A group of researchers estimated in a new study published Wednesday that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, the odds of a monster drought ravaging the region for 35 years or longer this century would be between 70 percent and 99 percent, depending on a range of precipitation scenarios.

On the flipside, the scientists found that if steps are taken to aggressively reduce greenhouse gases, the risks of a decades-long drought could be cut nearly in half…

The researchers found that under a “business-as-usual” emissions scenario, the risk of a decades-long drought would be 90 percent in the southwestern U.S. if precipitation is unchanged. If there’s a modest increase in precipitation, the region would still face a 70 percent risk of a megadrought by the end of the 21 century. And if precipitation decreases under that warming scenario, the scientists estimated the risk at 99 percent.

Nice job, states like Utah and Arizona, voting to go back to “business as usual” just when, after 40 years of inertia when we already should have known better, we were taking some modest steps in the right direction. Perhaps your neighbors in Colorado, New Mexico (not to mention Old Mexico), and California have reasons to be less than happy with you.

technological unemployment

This New York Times Magazine article about an American returning home after living abroad is mostly fluff, but it did contain these few interesting paragraphs on technological unemployment.

One day, I drove down Highway 101 to Silicon Valley to meet Reid Hoffman, a partner at the venture-capital firm Greylock and the chairman of LinkedIn, the professional-social-networking company, which was then in the process of being sold to Microsoft for $26.2 billion. Hoffman founded LinkedIn the same year I left for Beijing; now he was a billionaire. He is politically active, having supported and advised Obama and raised money for and donated money to Hillary Clinton. I mentioned how the election had become a referendum of sorts on globalization and trade, yet there had been little discussion about the next big earthquake — artificial intelligence, or the approaching world of self-driving cars, smartphones that can diagnose a melanoma and much more. Globalization may have ravaged blue-collar America, but artificial intelligence could cut through the white-collar professions in much the same way.

Hoffman said the reactions to artificial intelligence range from utopian to dystopian. The utopians predict huge productivity gains and rapid advances in medicine, genetic sequencing, fighting climate change and other areas. The dystopians predict a “Robocalypse” in which machines supplant people and, possibly, threaten humanity itself. “My point of view,” he said, “is that it is a massive transformation and does really impact the future of humanity, but that we can steer it more toward utopia rather than dystopia with intelligence and diligence.”

Either way, another major economic shift is coming, perhaps sooner than people realize. Hoffman said that many of the jobs in today’s economy will change fundamentally during the next 20 years. On the same day I met with Hoffman, Uber announced a pilot program to test self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. It also bought a company developing self-driving trucks. “We have to make sure that we don’t have a massive imbalance of society by which you have a small number of people that own the robots and everyone else is scrambling,” he said.

If the current political upheaval in the U.S. and elsewhere is caused by the onset of technological unemployment, we could truly be in trouble, because not only is it going to get worse, it is being completely misdiagnosed. When an illness is misdiagnosed, it can be treated in ineffective or even completely counterproductive ways. If underemployment caused by technological progress is the root of our current problems, the solutions have to lie in providing people with the skills they need to work with the new technology, helping people to build an ownership stake in the technology, lowering barriers to startups and innovators, and providing a safety net for those still left behind through no fault of their own. Instead, we are talking about subsidizing outdated technologies and industries, blaming mythical internal and external enemies for our problems, and removing the limited safety net we have fought so hard to build up until now.

inflation

The Economist says inflation could be on the verge of a comeback.

Some economists reckon a sustained rise in inflation is overdue. Most of the rich world is out of recession, emerging markets seem to have put the worst of their commodity bust behind them, and in a few places, like America, low unemployment has at last given way to accelerating wage growth. It is possible, some suppose, that the weak growth and sustained disinflation of the past half-decade has blinded markets and policy-makers to the potential for a sharp swing in the other direction, toward uncomfortably high inflation.

The rest of the article goes on to poo-poo the idea that inflation may be on the verge of a comeback. But we’ll see.

Washington State carbon tax voted down

I wrote recently about a carbon tax referendum in Washington State. Sadly (in my view), it was voted down.

The carbon tax initiative (I-732) garnered only 42 percent of the vote in Washington State. The tax was supposed to be revenue neutral by lowering the state sales tax by 1 cent and provide tax rebates of up to $1,500 per year to 460,000 low-income households. The initial $25 per ton would have boosted the price of gallon of gas by about 25 cents, and added 2.5 cents to each kilowatt-hour of coal-fired electricity, and 1.25 cents to electricity generated by natural gas. Interestingly, the proposal which aimed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide that are contributing to man-made global warming was opposed by many leading environmentalist groups. Why? Largely because of the tax’s revenue neutrality. The climate activists wanted to use the revenues to “invest” in various projects such as subsidizing solar and wind power schemes, mass transit and job training for folks put out of work by climate policies.

It’s unfortunate. Let’s review: Taxes on externalities (which occur when the activity of Group A results in a profit while unfairly imposing a cost on Group B) are a good thing for at least three reasons. First, they give Group A to engage in less of the offending activity because they now have to pay the cost rather than imposing the cost on someone else. Second, if Group A decides the activity is still worthwhile, revenue is raised for the government which it can spend on some worthy cause, like helping Group B. Third, the revenue raised by taxing bad things can be used to reduce taxes on good things, like work and savings and investment and making a profit without hurting other people. All this is good for people and the economy as a whole. The only party hurt is Group A, which had no right to profit at everyone else’s expense in the first place. The reason we don’t do this more is that Group A is able to use some of its profits to buy off politicians and mount propaganda campaigns to convince the public to vote against their own interests.

learn about carbon trading and R

This is pretty cool – an interactive website that lets you explore a real-world carbon trading research problem while learning new tricks in R.

Many economists would agree that the most efficient way to fight global warming would be a world-wide tax or an emmission trading system for greenhouse gases. Yet, if only a part of the world implements such a scheme, a reasonable concern is that firms may decide to relocate to other parts of the world, causing job losses and less effective emmission reduction…

In their article ‘Industry Compensation under Relocation Risk: A Firm-Level Analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme’ (American Economic Review, 2014), Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls, Laure B. de Preux and Ulrich J. Wagner study the most efficient way to allocate a fixed amount of free permits among facilities in order to minimize the risk of job losses or carbon leakage. Given their available data, they establish simple alternative allocation rules that can be expected to substantially outperform the current allocation rules used by the EU.

As part of his Master’s Thesis at Ulm University, Benjamin Lux has generated a very nice RTutor problem set that allows you to replicate the insights of the paper in an interactive fashion. You learn about the data and institutional background, run explorative regressions and dig into the very well explained optimization procedures to find efficient allocation rules. At the same time you learn some R tricks, like effective usage of some dplyr functions.

It’s an interesting question at a time when some U.S. states and Canadian provinces have started introducing carbon trading and taxation schemes that differ from their neighbors (sometimes because their neighbors have nothing at all). Perhaps there is a win-win where a policy can gradually phase out less productive, dirtier industries while replacing them with cleaner and higher-value-added industries, then sharing enough of the wealth so everyone benefits.

passive haptic learning

Researchers at Georgia Tech have taken a small step toward the dream of learning without effort.

Tactile taps teach rhythmic text entry: passive haptic learning of morse code

Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) is the acquisition of sensorimotor skills with little or no active attention to learning. This technique is facilitated by wearable computing, and applications are diverse. However, it is not known whether rhythm-based information can be conveyed passively. In a 12 participant study, we investigate whether Morse code, a rhythmbased text entry system, can be learned through PHL using the bone conduction transducer on Google Glass. After four hours of exposure to passive stimuli while focusing their attention on a distraction task, PHL participants achieved a 94% accuracy rate keying a pangram (a phrase with all the letters of the alphabet) using Morse code on Glass’s trackpad versus 53% for the control group. Most PHL participants achieved 100% accuracy before the end of the study. In written tests, PHL participants could write the codes for each letter of the alphabet with 98% accuracy versus 59% for control. When perceiving Morse code, PHL participants also performed significantly better than control: 83% versus 46% accuracy.

reduced work week as a carbon emissions strategy

Reducing the work week to four days would reduce carbon emissions.

Worktime Reduction as a Solution to Climate Change: Five Scenarios Compared for the UK

Reducing working hours in an economy has been discussed as a policy which may have benefits in achieving particular economic, social and environmental goals. This study proposes five different scenarios to reduce the working hours of full-time employees by 20% with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions: a three-day weekend, a free Wednesday, reduced daily hours, increased holiday entitlement and a scenario in which the time reduction is efficiently managed by companies to minimise their office space. We conceptually analyse the effects of each scenario on time use patterns through both business and worker activities, and how these might affect energy consumption in the economy. To assess which of the scenarios may be most effective in reducing carbon emissions, this analytical framework is applied as a case study for the United Kingdom. The results suggest that three of the five scenarios offer similar benefits, and are preferable to the other two, with a difference between the best and worst scenarios of 13.03 MTCO2e. The study concludes that there is a clear preference for switching to a four-day working week over other possible work-reduction policies.

reservoirs, resilience and system dynamics

This article in Water Resources Research uses a system dynamics simulation to examine the resilience of a reservoir. Some of these concepts may be adaptable to other types of water resources systems or systems in general.

Comparison of static and dynamic resilience for a multipurpose reservoir operation

Reliability, resilience and vulnerability are the traditional risk measures used to assess the performance of a reservoir system. Among these measures, resilience is used to assess the ability of a reservoir system to recover from a failure event. However, the time independent static resilience does not consider the system characteristics, interaction of various individual components and does not provide much insight into reservoir performance from the beginning of the failure event until the full performance recovery. Knowledge of dynamic reservoir behavior under the disturbance offers opportunities for proactive and/or reactive adaptive response that can be selected to maximize reservoir resilience. A novel measure is required to provide insight into the dynamics of reservoir performance based on the reservoir system characteristics and its adaptive capacity. The reservoir system characteristics include, among others, reservoir storage curve, reservoir inflow, reservoir outflow capacity and reservoir operating rules. The reservoir adaptive capacity can be expressed using various impacts of reservoir performance under the disturbance (like reservoir release for meeting a particular demand, socio-economic consequences of reservoir performance, or resulting environmental state of the river upstream and downstream from the reservoir). Another way of expressing reservoir adaptive capacity to a disturbing event may include aggregated measures like reservoir robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity. A novel measure that combines reservoir performance and its adaptive capacity is proposed in this paper and named ‘dynamic resilience’. The paper also proposes a generic simulation methodology for quantifying reservoir resilience as a function of time. The proposed resilience measure is applied to a single multi-purpose reservoir operation and tested for a set of failure scenarios. The dynamic behavior of reservoir resilience is captured using the system dynamics simulation approach, a feedback-based object-oriented method, very effective for modelling complex systems. The results of dynamic resilience are compared with the traditional performance measures in order to identify advantages of the proposed measure. The results confirm that the dynamic resilience is a powerful tool for selecting proactive and reactive adaptive response of a multipurpose reservoir to a disturbing event that cannot be achieved using traditional measures. The generic quantification approach proposed in the paper allows for easy use of dynamic resilience for planning and operations of various civil infrastructure systems.

breakthroughs in antibiotic resistance

There are potential breakthroughs against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which I think is good as I’ve been coughing up some kind of alien green goo for about a week now.

An anti-infective synthetic peptide with dual antimicrobial and immunomodulatory activities

Antibiotic-resistant infections are predicted to kill 10 million people per year by 2050, costing the global economy $100 trillion. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop alternative technologies. We have engineered a synthetic peptide called clavanin-MO, derived from a marine tunicate antimicrobial peptide, which exhibits potent antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties both in vitro and in vivo. The peptide effectively killed a panel of representative bacterial strains, including multidrug-resistant hospital isolates. Antimicrobial activity of the peptide was demonstrated in animal models, reducing bacterial counts by six orders of magnitude, and contributing to infection clearance. In addition, clavanin-MO was capable of modulating innate immunity by stimulating leukocyte recruitment to the site of infection, and production of immune mediators GM-CSF, IFN-γ and MCP-1, while suppressing an excessive and potentially harmful inflammatory response by increasing synthesis of anti-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-10 and repressing the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-12 and TNF-α. Finally, treatment with the peptide protected mice against otherwise lethal infections caused by both Gram-negative and -positive drug-resistant strains. The peptide presented here directly kills bacteria and further helps resolve infections through its immune modulatory properties. Peptide anti-infective therapeutics with combined antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties represent a new approach to treat antibiotic-resistant infections.