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Quotes:
Random Search Wired Into Animals May Help Them Hunt
Articles:
No need to worry about a deficit when the government can print money, say some economists
Warren Buffett Hates It. AOC Is for It. A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Monetary Theory
How Facebook, Twitter and other data troves are revolutionizing social science
Drug researcher develops 'fat burning' molecule that has implications for treatment of obesity
Molecules that reduce 'bad' gut bacteria reverse narrowing of arteries in animal study
How a fungus turns ants into zombies
Diluting blood plasma rejuvenates tissue, reverses aging in mice
Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability
Scientists detect unexpected widespread structures near Earth's core
Neoliberalism rests on the myth that “good” families can provide for their own without public support. COVID-19 may finally change all that.
the conditions for the squeeze that families are currently experiencing were set long before the pandemic hit U.S. shores. The seeming impossibility of the current situation for American families is not an unfortunate byproduct of an unforeseen global health crisis. It is the inevitable result of an economic worldview that has methodically shifted more and more costs onto families’ shoulders under a façade of “family values.”
In recent years critics have placed the blame for our current economic arrangement on four decades of privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts. What has received less attention are the accompanying cultural norms for families: the heightened expectations that families will provide for their own with little public support, and the assumption, sometimes implicit, that the two-parent nuclear family is the optimal family structure to do so. The two sets of norms—one economic, one cultural—are superficially distinct but deeply intertwined. In order to emerge from this crisis stronger, we must dismantle the family norms that lie at the heart of our current failed economic approach. Only then will we see the political will to invest in the kinds of public goods—from child care to affordable higher education—that today’s American families need to survive and thrive.
...one of the reasons that neoliberalism has endured politically is that it has convinced many Americans that the failure to prosper in a free and unfettered market is a personal failing—a lack of virtue stemming from poor family decision-making.
This could be the moment in which such a consensus unravels, when families’ economic and time struggles become so acute and widespread that they can no longer be chalked up to poor individual choices. It is conceivable that the crisis will enable us to imagine an alternative economic future, one grounded in the recognition that families of all forms have dignity and value. Such outcomes are far from certain, but for the first time in the better part of the last half-century, they are possible. The crisis is prompting a re-examination of economic tenets that have held sway for decades. Now we must do the same for the family assumptions that played an equally powerful role in neoliberalism’s rise and resilience. And we must build the political institutions and power needed to make such a future a reality.
It is possible that COVID-19 crisis could cause greater numbers of Americans to reject the family norms that have allowed neoliberalism to endure as a “zombie ideology,” one whose intellectual claims have overwhelmingly failed to produce.
it is difficult to overstate the degree to which neoliberals have succeeded in convincing the public—particularly political, policy, and media elites—that their particular form of family values are just a matter of common sense.
The End of Family Values
When food is distributed in sparse patches that can regenerate quickly and an animal has no sensory guidance to where the food is, Lévy walks are the mathematically optimal search strategy for blindly discovering a meal.
The pattern of these vertical movements was a classic truncated Lévy walk. (Truncated, that is, in a purely mathematical sense: In a perfect Lévy walk, there would be a nonzero probability of the shark occasionally taking a step equivalent to swimming to Mars.) Sims was so impressed, he looked at tracking data he had on blue sharks and ocean sunfish too, then wrote to colleagues and got comparable data describing leatherback turtles, penguins and tuna. All of them showed Lévy walks to greater or lesser extents.
Sims and his colleagues hypothesize that many animals evolved to use this search pattern when they could neither sense nor remember where food was. “Lévy movements arise when the animal really has no clue,” said Nick Humphries, a computational biologist and a postdoctoral researcher in Sims’ lab.
In a summary of their findings in Nature in 2008, Sims, Humphries and their colleagues showed that the movements of sharks and other marine predators varied depending on whether they were searching for food (when they did Lévy walks) or in the midst of a food patch (when Brownian randomness prevailed). Their work supported Sims’ original hunch that defining the type of movement might reveal whether a fish was consuming food or exploring for it.
Lévy walks are now seen as a movement pattern that a nervous system can produce in the absence of useful sensory or mnemonic information, when it is an animal’s most advantageous search strategy.
Random Search Wired Into Animals May Help Them Hunt
The entire world is bifurcating into Android or iOS. Android users are the masses who trade privacy for value. iOS are the wealthy who enjoy the luxury of privacy and status signalling by shelling over one month’s household income in Hungary in exchange for $443 in sensors and chipsets (what it costs to make an iPhone). Even social platforms are distilling to red-state (Android) and blue-state (iOS).
Four Weddings & A Funeral
Another strong signal of the change in economic paradigm emerging as we face global challenges. I think someone noted in writings and presentations - that is is all ‘accounting’. :)
Japan, which has been boosting its money supply for 20 years, and has seen no inflation. Similarly, central banks in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere have been printing money at an accelerated pace since the financial crisis of 2008, and inflation has consistently remained below two per cent.
No need to worry about a deficit when the government can print money, say some economists
‘Modern Monetary Theory gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy’
This ability to print money means that Canada will always be able to pay its bills, it can never go broke, or default on its debt, no matter how deep into the red it goes.
And for Canadians who are fretting about the size of our debt, Stephanie Kelton has a simple solution: we should just stop selling billions of dollars of interest-bearing bonds and Treasury bills to investors.
"The Canadian government never needs to borrow its own currency, ever," she explained in a recent interview. Instead, the Bank of Canada could purchase our debt, interest-free, "move it onto their balance sheet, hold it to maturity, stop issuing bonds and you'll be done with the whole thing."
It might sound far-fetched, but Japan has been doing this for years. The bulk of its roughly $11 trillion US debt is owned by the Bank of Japan. Many economists disapprove, but Japan remains the world's third largest economy.
This is a decent account of Modern Monetary Theory - for anyone interested in how governments with their own currency can meet the challenges of COVID-19, the challenges of Climate Change and the challenges of a society who’s technology platforms are undergoing accelerating change. The graphics are informative.
Warren Buffett Hates It. AOC Is for It. A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Monetary Theory
There’s a lot of debate swirling around Modern Monetary Theory—some strident. Its critics call it a hot mess. “MMT has constructed such a bizarre, illogical, convoluted way of thinking about macro that it’s almost impervious to attack,” Bentley University economist Scott Sumner claimed recently on his blog. MMT’s proponents say it’s the critics who are impervious to reason—“part of a degenerative paradigm that has lost credibility,” says Australian MMTer William Mitchell.
Fortunately, the first academic textbook based on the theory was published in February. The 573-page tome, titled simply Macroeconomics, is by Mitchell, an economist at the University of Newcastle in Australia; Randall Wray of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; and Martin Watts, an emeritus professor at Newcastle. This article is based on the textbook as well as academic papers and blogs by MMTers and their critics.
A good place to start is with a simple description that you can carry in your pocket: MMT proposes that a country with its own currency, such as the U.S., doesn’t have to worry about accumulating too much debt because it can always print more money to pay interest. So the only constraint on spending is inflation, which can break out if the public and private sectors spend too much at the same time. As long as there are enough workers and equipment to meet growing demand without igniting inflation, the government can spend what it needs to maintain employment and achieve goals such as halting climate change.
If you’ve absorbed that much, you’re already ahead of a lot of the critics. Because MMT is associated with the Left, some people assume it favors soaking the rich to pay for social programs. In fact, MMT breaks with liberal orthodoxy by saying that while taxes on the wealthy are good for lessening inequality, they aren’t essential to pay for government spending. Another misconception is that MMT says deficits never matter. On March 13 the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published a survey of prominent economists that misrepresented MMT that way, leaving out its understanding that too-big deficits can cause excessive inflation.
This is a strong signal indicating a profound paradigm change in how social science is conducted. Not only is the survey dead (although it is an active zombie) but it is the rise of data of real behavior and real-time behavior.
Over the past decade, researchers have used such techniques to pick apart topics that social scientists have chased for more than a century: from the psychological underpinnings of human morality, to the influence of misinformation, to the factors that make some artists more successful than others. One study uncovered widespread racism in algorithms that inform health-care decisions; another used mobile-phone data to map impoverished regions in Rwanda
How Facebook, Twitter and other data troves are revolutionizing social science
A new breed of researcher is turning to computation to understand society — and then change it.
Elizaveta Sivak spent nearly a decade training as a sociologist. Then, in the middle of a research project, she realized that she needed to head back to school.
Sivak studies families and childhood at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. In 2015, she studied the movements of adolescents by asking them in a series of interviews to recount ten places that they had visited in the past five days. A year later, she had analysed the data and was feeling frustrated by the narrowness of relying on individual interviews, when a colleague pointed her to a paper analysing data from the Copenhagen Networks Study, a ground-breaking project that tracked the social-media contacts, demographics and location of about 1,000 students, with five-minute resolution, over five months1. She knew then that her field was about to change. “I realized that these new kinds of data will revolutionize social science forever,” she says. “And I thought that it’s really cool.”
With that, Sivak decided to learn how to program, and join the revolution. Now, she and other computational social scientists are exploring massive and unruly data sets, extracting meaning from society’s digital imprint. They are tracking people’s online activities; exploring digitized books and historical documents; interpreting data from wearable sensors that record a person’s every step and contact; conducting online surveys and experiments that collect millions of data points; and probing databases that are so large that they will yield secrets about society only with the help of sophisticated data analysis.
An interesting signal - that may be nudged off trajectory (for a while at least) by Covid-19. The graphic is worth the view.
Where 100 is the New 80
Research by Pew estimates that by 2050 there will be 3.7 million centenarians across the globe and Japan is the country which is home to the largest share of them. According to the U.N. Population Division, 79,000 people at or over the age of 100 lived in the country in 2020, making Japan the home of most centenarians in absolute numbers as well as in relation to the size of the general population.
The longevity of its population has been a source of pride for the Japanese, but an aging population and plunging birthrates are also creating a series of economic problems. Other countries have similarly been wrestling with how to plan for their elderly in the future, even if they do not have the highest concentration of centenarians.
A signal of a potential way to deal with the epidemic of obesity.
Drug researcher develops 'fat burning' molecule that has implications for treatment of obesity
"Obesity is the biggest health problem in the United States. But, it is hard for people to lose weight and keep it off; being on a diet can be so difficult. So, a pharmacological approach, or a drug, could help out and would be beneficial for all of society," said Webster Santos, professor of chemistry and the Cliff and Agnes Lilly Faculty Fellow of Drug Discovery in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.
Santos and his colleagues have recently identified a small mitochondrial uncoupler, named BAM15, that decreases the body fat mass of mice without affecting food intake and muscle mass or increasing body temperature. Additionally, the molecule decreases insulin resistance and has beneficial effects on oxidative stress and inflammation.
The findings, published in Nature Communications on May 14, 2020, hold promise for future treatment and prevention of obesity, diabetes, and especially nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a type of fatty liver disease that is characterized by inflammation and fat accumulation in the liver. In the next few years, the condition is expected to become the leading cause of liver transplants in the United States.
Another fascinating signal in the progress being made in both understanding the implications for our wellbeing of our microbiome - but also how to cultivate a better microbiome.
"It was surprising to us that simply remodeling the gut microbiome can have such an extensive effect," says study co-senior author Reza Ghadiri, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research.
Molecules that reduce 'bad' gut bacteria reverse narrowing of arteries in animal study
Scientists at Scripps Research have developed molecules that can remodel the bacterial population of intestines to a healthier state and they have shown—through experiments in mice—that this reduces cholesterol levels and strongly inhibits the thickened-artery condition known as atherosclerosis.
The scientists, who report their findings in Nature Biotechnology, created a set of molecules called peptides that can slow the growth of less-desirable species of gut bacteria. In mice that develop high cholesterol and atherosclerosis from a high-fat diet, the peptides beneficially shifted the balance of species in the gut microbiome, which refers to the trillions of bacteria that live inside the digestive system. This shift reduced cholesterol levels and dramatically slowed the buildup of fatty deposits in arteries—symptoms that are the hallmarks of atherosclerosis.
Atherosclerosis is the condition that leads to heart attacks and strokes, the two leading causes of death among humans.
It looks like the Zombie Apocalypse has been happening for a long time - beneath our feet - somewhere.
How a fungus turns ants into zombies
Researchers have elucidated the molecular mechanism of the fungus that turns ants into living zombies. The fungus specifically affects the ants' neurobiology, odor perception and biological clock. The Utrecht microbiologist Robin Ohm publishes this, together with American and German colleagues, in G3.
The fungus Ophiocordyceps camponoti-floridani can infect ants and manipulate their behavior in a way that is beneficial for fungus growth and transmission. These infected ants are called "zombie ants." Influenced by the fungus, the ants climb to a high point and bite into a branch, attaching themselves until death. The fungus then digests the ant and forms a fruitbody with which the fungus spreads its spores. The molecular mechanisms behind this behavioral modification are still largely unknown, as in similar parasitic interactions in which the behavior of a host is manipulated.
A great signal of - So much to know - so little time to learn it.
Diluting blood plasma rejuvenates tissue, reverses aging in mice
In 2005, University of California, Berkeley, researchers made the surprising discovery that making conjoined twins out of young and old mice—such that they share blood and organs—can rejuvenate tissues and reverse the signs of aging in the old mice. The finding sparked a flurry of research into whether a youngster's blood might contain special proteins or molecules that could serve as a "fountain of youth" for mice and humans alike.
But a new study by the same team shows that similar age-reversing effects can be achieved by simply diluting the blood plasma of old mice—no young blood needed.
In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin—where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed—has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. Performing the same procedure on young mice had no detrimental effects on their health.
This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood.
It may seem like there can be no secure place-space where secrets are safe and things have unbreakable locks - our safety and security can only be ensured with conditions of vigilance and response-ability. Maybe like a UBI we also need our infrastructures and governances to be open-source.
Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability
Remember Spectre and Meltdown? Back in early 2018, I wrote:
Spectre and Meltdown are pretty catastrophic vulnerabilities, but they only affect the confidentiality of data. Now that they -- and the research into the Intel ME vulnerability -- have shown researchers where to look, more is coming -- and what they'll find will be worse than either Spectre or Meltdown. There will be vulnerabilities that will allow attackers to manipulate or delete data across processes, potentially fatal in the computers controlling our cars or implanted medical devices. These will be similarly impossible to fix, and the only strategy will be to throw our devices away and buy new ones.
That has turned out to be true. Here's a new vulnerability:
On Tuesday, two separate academic teams disclosed two new and distinctive exploits that pierce Intel's Software Guard eXtension, by far the most sensitive region of the company's processors.
Humans are everywhere - perhaps we were evolved to be immigrants in body and mind. This is a great signal of the mysteries beneath our feet in the heart of spaceship earth - and the emerging capacities of ‘way-big-data’ and AI. There are very interesting gifs as well.
"By looking at thousands of core-mantle boundary echoes at once, instead of focusing on a few at a time, as is usually done, we have gotten a totally new perspective. This is showing us that the core-mantle boundary region has lots of structures that can produce these echoes, and that was something we didn't realize before because we only had a narrow view."
Scientists detect unexpected widespread structures near Earth's core
University of Maryland geophysicists analyzed thousands of recordings of seismic waves, sound waves traveling through the Earth, to identify echoes from the boundary between Earth's molten core and the solid mantle layer above it. The echoes revealed more widespread, heterogenous structures—areas of unusually dense, hot rock—at the core-mantle boundary than previously known.
Scientists are unsure of the composition of these structures, and previous studies have provided only a limited view of them. Better understanding their shape and extent can help reveal the geologic processes happening deep inside Earth. This knowledge may provide clues to the workings of plate tectonics and the evolution of our planet.
The new research provides the first comprehensive view of the core-mantle boundary over a wide area with such detailed resolution. The study was published in the June 12, 2020, issue of the journal Science.
The researchers focused on echoes of seismic waves traveling beneath the Pacific Ocean basin. Their analysis revealed a previously unknown structure beneath the volcanic Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific and showed that the structure beneath the Hawaiian Islands is much larger than previously known.
