Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics Podcast
As sexy as the digital revolution may be, it can't compare to the
Second Industrial Revolution (electricity! the gas engine! antibiotics!),
which created the biggest standard-of-living boost in U.S. history.
The only problem, argues the economist Robert Gordon, is that the
Second Industrial Revolution was a one-time event. So what happens next?
...
Robert Gordon
is an economist at Northwestern University and the author
of a book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Think about
that title for a moment. The rise -- and fall -- of American growth.
So Gordon's view may be as dark as all those presidential candidates'
views. But while politicians generally look for easy villains --
immigrants or China or Wall Street -- Gordon takes a less, shall we say,
hysterical view of things. It is a view based on how innovation and
inventions affect the economy, especially the inventions of the past
few decades.
GORDON: The Second Industrial Revolution included electricity, the internal combustion engine, chemicals, plastics, running water, the conquest of infectious diseases, the conquest of infant mortality, the development of processed food, the fact that women no longer had to make their clothes at home, but could buy them either in department stores or mail-order catalogs. So all of those things, every dimension of human life, was affected by the Second Industrial Revolution, with the inventions mainly taking place between 1870 and the early 1900s, and having their big impact on such economic measures as productivity during the middle part of the 20th century, especially from 1920 to 1970.
GORDON: The Third Industrial Revolution started off around 1960, with the first mainframe computer. And went further into the mini computer, the personal computer in 1980, and then followed by the marriage of communications with computers that we call the Internet, or the dot-com revolution that happened in the late 1990s. So all of these changes radically changed our ability to process information. Along the way we had a similar revolution in entertainment. So the Third Industrial Revolution includes entertainment, information through the computers, and communication as we moved from landline phones to what we can call dumb mobile phones in the 1990s, then into smart mobile phones in the last 10 to 15 years. Now, there's nothing wrong with the Third Industrial Revolution. Each of those fields was dramatically and completely changed, particularly the information processing by the computer and the invention of such things as e-commerce and search engines and email and web browsing. But those inventions, as monumental as they were, were taking place just in a narrow slice of human life in terms of the economy.
Judith Curry
There is genuine scientific consensus on the following points:Leveraged by the consensus on the three points above that are not disputed, the climate 'consensus' is being sold as applying to all of the above, even the issues for which there remains considerable debate.
"We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilizing effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data," says co-author Prof. Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, USA.
...
The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilization in promoting plant growth
has been used by contrarians ...
"The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold.
First, the many negative aspects of climate change, namely global warming,
rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice, more severe tropical
storms, etc. are not acknowledged. Second, studies have shown that plants
acclimatize, or adjust, to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilization
effect diminishes over time,"
I previously blogged about this several months ago on October 30, 2015.
An interesting point:
Outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics would soon occur within the first
1-2 years after we end vaccination. Based on information developed
by the CDC and others, the total worldwide economic burden if we
suddenly ended vaccines would exceed US$50 billion (and this ignores
flu pandemics that might suddenly ravish the pediatric population).
If we stick with the estimate that about 40% of the cost of
hospitalizations will fall to Big Pharma, then they would make about
$20 billion a year, worldwide, from not vaccinating. But remember,
most vaccines are given, at most, 2-3 times, so, long-term, the
revenues derived from vaccines is rather flat, unless new diseases
are prevented. But, the revenues from the diseases themselves repeat
every single year, and possibly multiple times per child.
And most of the products used to treat these diseases don't require
the research and capital investment that vaccines require. In other
words, the income derived from vaccine preventable diseases would
be more profitable than vaccines.
Algorithmically generated prior art
All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero -- which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.
A sister website All The Claims is attempting the same thing, but with the use of claims and a more verbose alternative.
Article about it in New Scientist: Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls
The Economist
Podcasts, series of digital audio files that users can download
or stream from MP3 players and computers, were first created
in 2001. This was also the year that Apple launched the iPod, the
device from which podcasting takes its name. Although it is now, in
tech terms, a doughty 15 years old, it has developed only fitfully.
...
They are also becoming more popular with advertisers. Podcasts are
largely listened to by commuters in cars-a captive audience, and a
demographic advertisers are keen to reach. To add to the attraction, the
hosts of many podcasts read out the advertising copy themselves, making ads
less obtrusive and more persuasive than those on many traditional stations
that are more clearly delineated by distinct voices and jingles.
Marti Leimbach
Nonetheless, this whole notion of "privilege" vexes me. We talk about it as though we can all recognise what it is. I am not always so sure. I can tell one narrative of my life and it seems to describe someone who grew up without privilege, and I can tell another narrative and it seems almost as though my life was one of ease and privilege from the time I was born.
Together, the body of data is beginning to reveal both that full-fat dairy has a place in a healthy diet, and also how focusing on one nutrient in the diet may backfire. When dietary guidelines began urging people to lower the amount of fat they ate, the idea was to reduce the amount of cholesterol and unhealthy fats in the body. But by focusing just on cutting out fat, experts didn't count on the fact that people would compensate for the missing fat and start loading up on carbohydrates, which the body converts into sugar-and then body fat.
As many have recognized, when inventions and innovations first appear they are often (always) labeled as "toys" or "incapable" of doing "real work" or providing "real entertainment". Of course, many new inventions don't work out the way inventors had hoped, though quite frequently it is just a matter of timing and the coming together of a variety of circumstances. It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing.