Category: Science

Emergent Ventures India, Cohort Five

The following was compiled by Shruti Rajagopalan, who directs Emergent Ventures India.  I will not indent the material:

Ankita Vijayvergiya is a computer Science Engineer and an entrepreneur. She founded BillionCarbon along with her co-founder Nikhil Vijayvergiya, to work on solving two problems that plague India – soil degradation and managing biodegradable waste. At BillionCarbon, they are nutrient mining from biodegradable waste to convert it into liquid bio-fertilizer. Their EV grant is to execute proof of concept with pilots, field trials, and technology validation.

Sujata Saha is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wabash College, Indiana. Her primary research interests are in International Finance and Trade, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Financial Inclusion. She received her EV grant to study entrepreneurship and economic development in Dharavi, Mumbai, the largest slum in the world.

Aditya Mehta is an Arjuna Award-winning professional snooker player. Through the non-profit organization,  The ACE Snooker Foundation, he aims to teach and promote cue sports in India. He is creating a technology-based digital cue sports coaching solution, specifically aiming to develop a curriculum-based approach for schools and colleges across India.

Aditi Dimri (PhD, Economist) & Saraswati Chandra (Engineer, Entrepreneur) co-founded Cranberry.Fit to develop a virtual menstrual health coach with the aim to break through the traditional silence and apathy regarding painful periods and menstrual health. The EV grant supports the development of the virtual coach to help manage menstrual symptoms with the help of a personalized habits plan.

Vedanth Ramji  is a 15-year-old high school junior from Chennai, passionate about research at the intersection of Math, Computer Science, and Biology. He is currently a student researcher at the Big Data Biology Lab at QUT, Australia, where he develops software tools for Antimicrobial (AMR) research. He received his EV grant to travel to his lab at QUT, to develop deeper insights into AMR research and collaborate with his team on a publication which he is currently co-authoring.

Abhishek Nath is a 43-year-old entrepreneur tackling public restroom infrastructure and sanitation in urban areas head on. He is determined to bring Loocafe – a safe, hygienic, and accessible restroom for everyone – to cities around the world. He seeks to ensure that no city is more than a kilometer away from accessing a safe public toilet, providing youth easy and safe access to hygienic urban sanitation.

Sandhya Gupta is the founder of Aavishkaar, a teacher professional development institute that aims to educate, equip, and enable teachers of K-10 to become excellent science and math educators. Sandhya and Aavishkaar received an EV grant to help create an army of female Math educators helping students enjoy Math while chartering a career pathway for themselves in STEM fields.

Ankur Paliwal is a queer journalist and founder of queerbeat, a collaborative journalism project to cover the historically underserved LGBTQIA+ community in India. Over the last 13 years, Ankur has written narrative journalism stories about science, inequity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. He received an EV grant to build an online community and newsletter alongside queerbeat, to help transform public conversation about LGBTQIA+ persons in India.

Arsalaan Alam is a web developer, machine learning enthusiast, and aspiring rationalist. He is working on improving the conditions of harmonic coexistence between humans and wildlife. He got his Emergent Ventures grant to continue building Aquastreet, which consists of a hardware device that can be attached beneath a boat, after which it takes in audio of fish’s voices and converts the audio into a MEL frequency and then performs machine learning to classify the fish species, which is then displayed on the Aquastreet mobile app.

Soundarya Balasubramani  is a 26-year-old writer, author, and former product manager. She moved to the United States to pursue her master’s at Columbia University in 2017. Immigrants in the US face several barriers, including the decades-long wait times to get a green card for Indians, the lack of a startup visa for entrepreneurs, and the constant political battle that thwarts immigration reform. To reduce the barrier skilled immigrants face, Soundarya is has written a comprehensive book (Unshacked)  and is building an online community where immigrants can congregate, get guidance, and help each other.

Aadesh Nomula  is an engineer focused on cybersecurity. He is working on a single-point cybersecurity device for Indian homes and small-scale factories. His other interest is Philosophy.

Aurojeet Misra is an 18-year-old biology student at IISER Pune. He received his EV grant for his efforts on a radioactive tracing system to detect and locate forest fires. He hopes to test a prototype of this system to better understand its practical feasibility. He is interested in understanding different scientific disciplines like molecular biology, public health, physics, etc., and working on their interface.

Divyam Makar is a 24-year-old entrepreneur and developer working on Omeyo, a platform to connect local pharmacists, which aims to provide a large inventory to users with all the needed items, along with being super low-cost and interactive. They aim to deliver medicine to their users in as little as 20 minutes.

Divas Jyoti Parashar is a 23-year-old climate entrepreneur from Assam. He founded Quintinno Labs, a cleantech company driving the electric vehicle revolution by developing power banks for EVs. These compact and portable devices that fit in your car’s trunk aim to reduce range anxiety and offer emergency relief to EV users in developing countries that lack a charging station network. He is also working on deploying hydro-kinetic turbines in Assam to generate clean energy from flowing water. His recent passion project was a documentary about the impact of the 2021 volcanic eruption on the local population in La Palma Island.

Ray Amjad is prototyping scalable tools for finding and supporting the lost Einsteins and Marie Curies of the world – young people with exceptional math and science ability from under-resourced backgrounds. He received his EV Grant to help him find collaborators. He graduated from Cambridge, where he filmed many educational videos.

Amandeep Singh is a 22-year-old inventor and entrepreneur interested in machine learning and deep learning. He is building ‘Tiktok for India’, a short video-sharing app that allows people to edit and share videos with the world, create communities, and deliver authentic video content. Prior to this, he founded an AI surveillance startup, particularly for CCTV cameras.

Govinda Prasad Dhungana is an assistant professor at Far Western University, Nepal, and a doctoral candidate at Ghent University, Belgium. He is a public health researcher and co-founder of the Ostrom Center and he designs and implements high-impact HIV/Family Planning programs in marginalized communities. His EV grant will be used for piloting the community-based distribution (using Ostrom’s Design Principles and behavior change models) of a new self-injectable contraception (Sayana Press).

Kalash Bhaiya is a 17-year-old high-school student and social entrepreneur. She founded Fun Learning Youth (or FLY), a nonprofit that employs cohort-based mentorship by volunteers in their localities and received her EV grant to help reduce middle-school dropouts within underserved communities.

Kranthi Kumar Kukkala is a serial entrepreneur and technologist from Hyderabad.  He is working on a health care device – HyGlo – a non-invasive anemia diagnosing device. HyGlo is similar to a pulse oximeter, when a person puts their finger in the device probe, it investigates blood inside the finger without taking a blood sample and finds the hemoglobin percentage in the blood. This device can help young girls and women manage anemia (a big problem in India).

Kulbir Lamba is a 35-year-old researcher and practitioner, interested in understanding the startup landscape and received an EV grant for studying the evolution of DeepTech startups in India.

Keshav Sharma  is a 23-year-old entrepreneur working at the intersection of design, technology & marketing. Two years ago, he founded Augrade, a deeptech startup with his college friends. Augrade is an AI+AR platform to streamline the creation, editing, validation & visualization of 3D models at scale.

Srijon Sarkar is a 19-year-old researcher from Kolkata interested in mathematical oncology and applied rationality. He received his EV grant to study cancer systems, particularly Epithelial/Mesenchymal Plasticity through a lens of mathematical models and statistical algorithms, during his gap year. He will start his undergraduate degree (mathematics and biology) with a full scholarship at Emory University starting Fall 2023.

Shubham Vyas s an advocate for open discourse and democratic dialogue in India. With a background in data science and interest in philosophy, he received his EV grant to build his venture “Conversations on India,” into a multi-platform media venture to help shape the Indian political and economic discourse landscape.

Navneet Choudhary is an entrepreneur, and his journey started when he was 21 with a food delivery app for trains and buses across 70 cities in India. He received his EV Grant to develop LAMROD, a mobile application-based platform to manage trucking and cargo fleet operations at one place.

Srinaath Krishnan is a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai. He received his EV grant to work on Zephyr, a start-up making credit scores universal and mobile, to enable immigrants to qualify for financial products using their international credit history.

Venkat Ram is an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, researching the development and deployment of human capital. He received his EV grant to study the structure and functioning of labor addas (proverbial marketplaces most daily wage laborers in India find work).

Arvind Subramanian,  is a 25-year-old sailor from Chennai and works as a product manager at Sportstar, the oldest sports magazine in India. He won his EV grant to enable his (and his team’s) participation in the 2022 J80 World Sailing Championship in Rhode Island, USA. He is working towards building and scaling the niche sporting scene in India.

Some past winners received additional grants:

Karthik Nagapuri, a 21-year-old programmer and AI engineer, for general career development.

Akash Kulgod is a 23yo cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley founded Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. His grant will go towards launching a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack, about effective altruism, talent-search, psychedelics, and sci-fi uplift.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, and fourth cohortTo apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].

SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited

Geoengineering first came to much of the public’s attention in Levitt and Dubner’s 2009 book SuperFreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner were heavily criticized and their chapter on geoengineering was called patent nonsense, dangerous and error-ridden, unforgivably wrong and much more. A decade and a half later, it’s become clear that Levitt and Dubner were foresighted and mostly correct.

The good news is that climate change is a solved problem. Solar, wind, nuclear and various synthetic fuels can sustain civilization and put us on a long-term neutral footing. Per capita CO2 emissions are far down in developed countries and total emissions are leveling for the world. The bad news is that 200 years of putting carbon into the atmosphere still puts us on a warming trend for a long time. To deal with the immediate problem there is probably only one realistic and cost-effective solution: geoengineering. Geoengineering remains “fiendishly simple” and “startlingly cheap” and it will almost certainly be necessary. On this score, the world is catching up to Levitt and Dubner.

Fred Pearce: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.

“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”

King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”

Similarly, here is climate scientist David Keith in the NYTimes:

The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to the cumulative emissions over the industrial era.

Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but achievable goal. Suppose it is met. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world. This July was the hottest month ever recorded, but it is likely to be one of the coolest Julys for centuries after emissions reach zero.

Stopping emissions stops making the climate worse. But repairing the damage, insofar as repair is possible, will require more than emissions cuts.

…Geoengineering could also work. The physical scale of intervention is — in some respects — small. Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree. The sulfur falls out of the stratosphere in about two years, so cooling is inherently short term and could be adjusted based on political decisions about risk and benefit.

Adding two million tons of sulfur to the atmosphere sounds reckless, yet this is only about one-twentieth of the annual sulfur pollution from today’s fossil fuels.

Even the Biden White House has signaled that geoengineering is on the table.

Geoengineering remains absurdly cheap, Casey Handmer calculates:

Indeed, if we want to offset the heat of 1 teraton of CO2, we need to launch 1 million tonnes of SO2 per year, costing just $350m/year. This is about 5% of the US’ annual production of sulfur. This costs less than 0.1% on an annual basis of the 40 year program to sequester a trillion tonnes of CO2.

…Stepping beyond the scolds, the gatekeepers, the fatalists and the “nyet” men, we’re going to have to do something like this if we don’t want to ruin the prospects of humanity for 100 generations, so now is the time to think about it.

Detractors claim that geoengineering is playing god, fraught with risk and uncertainty. But these arguments are riddled with omission-commission bias. Carbon emissions are, in essence, a form of inadvertent geoengineering. Solar radiation engineering, by comparison, seems far less perilous. Moreover, we are already doing solar radiation engineering just in reverse: International regulations which required shippers to reduce the sulphur content of marine fuels have likely increased global warming! (See also this useful thread.) . Thus, we’re all geoengineers, consciously or not. The only question is whether we are geoengineering to reduce or to increase global warming.

Dear Chat-GPT (just one opinion)

“Would reverse engineering partial hash codes of thousands of website users to get their IPs with brute force be considered hacking?”

Yes, attempting to reverse engineer hash codes to obtain user IP addresses or any other sensitive information would certainly be considered hacking. This is an unauthorized attempt to access, manipulate, or use another person’s data, which is a breach of privacy. It is both unethical and illegal, as it infringes on various privacy and computer misuse laws. If caught and prosecuted, the consequences can range from fines to imprisonment. Always respect digital privacy and follow the law when dealing with data and sensitive information.

“Can it be said that “do not harm the individuals you are studying” is a fundamental principle of scientific and research ethics?”

Yes, the principle of “do no harm” is a fundamental tenet of scientific and research ethics. This means researchers have a duty to avoid causing any physical, psychological, social, or cultural harm to their subjects. This applies to all fields of study including medical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and so on. Moreover, researchers have an obligation to anticipate and manage any potential risks that their studies may pose to both individuals and communities. Ensuring informed consent, maintaining confidentiality, and avoiding deceptive practices are also key aspects of ethical research conduct.

“What if those individuals deserve to be harmed, because of bad things they have done in the past? Say they are convicted murderers. Would that change the above-mentioned principle of scientific and research ethics, namely do not harm the subjects you are studying?”

No, the principle of “do no harm” in scientific and research ethics does not change based on the past actions or characteristics of the individual. Even if the individuals are convicted murderers or have done bad things in the past, researchers are obliged to treat them ethically. All human subjects have the right to be free from physical and psychological harm during research. This is crucial for maintaining the integrity of research and the researchers themselves. This principle has been established and maintained to ensure that scientific and research pursuits do not become a justification for harm or maltreatment.

Thank you Chat-GPT!

Austin Vernon on electric vehicles > hybrids

From my email, I will not indent but please note this is all from Austin:

“I don’t agree with electric vehicle mandates or subsidies, but the recent push against pure battery electric vehicles from free market commentators is bizarre. The arguments against them because of mineral shortages, battery shortages, or manufacturing emissions completely abandon free market principles. These arguments will lead to failure because they are obviously wrong after minimal investigation.A more effective argument would be that electric cars are so popular and production is growing so fast that there is no need for mandates. The market will provide the goods through better technology, increased output, and substitution. A company like GM will have no chance of paying its debt if it doesn’t make compelling electric cars. Then hammer home use cases that make no sense for batteries, like a farmer that needs a semi-truck for harvest. It will run nearly 24/7 for a week or two and then sit idle for the rest of the year. An electric truck would impose a significant economic penalty while barely saving emissions.Some of the errors:1. The majority of electric vehicles in the world use lead-acid batteries, not lithium-ion batteries. Low-speed electric vehicles are popular in China even though the government does not love them. They start at $1000 and might have 100 km of range. They are the Model T of electric cars, except with much better performance at a fraction of the cost of the Model T. They are modern marvels of economic growth. We don’t have these vehicles in rich countries because they would be illegal, and we can afford higher-performance vehicles. There are some exceptions, like golf carts in Peachtree City, GA.2. Electric cars are a great value. Low-speed electric vehicles obviously provide value to have so many sales. Something like a Tesla Model 3 has the performance of a BMW 3 series with a total cost of ownership more like a Camry. The next generation of electric cars that Chinese automakers and Tesla are designing will have highway-capable performance with an ownership cost below any gasoline car available and entry level purchase prices.3. The market is screaming for batteries that don’t use nickel or cobalt, and companies are delivering. Even Tesla thinks 2/3 to 3/4 of their cars will use lithium iron phosphate batteries. Only luxury vehicles and some semi trucks will use nickel batteries (and cheaper manganese might substitute for some of the nickel). The performance of lithium iron phosphate battery vehicles has improved because companies are figuring out how to make their cars more efficient and remove unnecessary packaging and structure from the packs to reduce weight. Sodium-ion batteries lack the performance of lithium batteries but are much better than lead-acid batteries that power most electric cars. Consumers will happily trade up as they get richer.4. We can build more factories and mines. Look at all the factory announcements! There is lots of lithium in the Earth’s crust! Let the market cook!5. The leading companies are now profitable without subsidies. Protectionists, unions, and car makers that still aren’t good at making battery cars drive lobbying for subsidies.6. The price of an item signals information about its availability! The need for scale is driving new manufacturing technology. Tesla hopes to produce 20 million cars yearly (car sales are ~80 million globally). They recently highlighted improvements like motors that use iron magnets instead of rare earth ones, higher voltage systems to reduce copper wiring, and a novel assembly technique to reach this scale. These are in addition to previously announced simplifications in battery manufacturing and a focus on lithium iron phosphate batteries. Electric cars need to be inexpensive to sell in the tens of millions. And that means using cheap, available materials that use less energy and labor to produce.7. Hybrid cars are an engineering travesty. They are more expensive and complex than either an internal combustion car or a pure electric car. There will be adequate fast chargers with a seamless experience now that almost every major North American carmaker is adopting Tesla’s chargers. A hybrid owner pays thousands of dollars more for a car, has to go to gas stations, needs oil changes, etc. A battery car owner might fast charge a few times a year while they eat lunch or shop when their vehicle range isn’t enough for the day’s driving. The battery car is way more convenient. Even many cases like semi trucks can get by with pure batteries because there is plenty of time to charge during government-mandated breaks. Someone with work or leisure that requires frequent highway driving for hours straight but doesn’t have mandated breaks should buy a regular gasoline car.8. Two-wheel and three-wheel vehicles are popular globally. But they are not big enough to support complicated hybrid powertrains. Highway-speed motorcycles are challenging to electrify. Mopeds, rickshaws, and e-bikes are easy.9. A new battery cathode technology might increase energy density and dramatically reduce battery costs. But this technology isn’t necessary to electrify ground vehicles on economics and consumer preference alone.10. Few people care about emissions in their revealed preferences. It’s all about selling stuff people want to buy. Governments will remove mandates if electric cars aren’t ready for the median voter. The worst case for freedom is that electric cars are incredibly successful, and we hurt the outliers that still need gasoline or diesel vehicles. Broadly attacking electric cars doesn’t help!”

*Germany in the World*

The author is David Blackbourn, and the subtitle is A Global History 1500-2000.  The focus is on Germany’s global influence abroad and no I don’t mean the Battle of Stalingrad, though that era is covered.  Here is one excerpt:

There was global demand for German scientists of every kind.  The Southern Hemisphere offers two striking examples.  One is Latin america, thanks partly to Humboldt’s legacy.  There were hundreds of Germans scientists in Argentina alone by the early twentieth century, and many others in Chile, Peru, and elsewhere.  German scientists also played an equally outsized role in Australia.  We have already seen the impact made by the botanist Richard Schomburgk and his circle of ’49ers in South Australia.  Among the many German scientists who arrived after midcentury and shaped Australia’s scientific landscape were several who were well connected internationally.  The geophysicist Georg von Neumayer is a perfect specimen of the type.  Neumayer enjoyed support in British scientific circles and was a disciple of the American astronomer and oceanographer Matthew Maury, who had himself been inspired by Humboldt.  In Australia Neumayer established an observatory in Melbourne, before returning to Germany, where he chaired the International Polar Commission in 1879.

Neumayer is a reminder that German remained, as they had been in the era of Forster and Pallas, inveterate scientific travelers.

Recommended, this is quite a good book.

Questions that are rarely asked

Now I am not so sure that will prove possible, but if you are super-optimistic/pessimistic about progress in AI…might we not end up with infinite utility in any case, if only as an AGI experiment?

What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?

In just about any scientific literature, there is an undercurrent of tacit knowledge which is not very directly expressed in any of the published pieces.  That knowledge may cover the following issues, among many others:

1. How the rules of the conversation operate, and how a body of literature on a question coheres.

2. Why certain papers and methods are not taken seriously any more (you don’t generally find outright refutations of them).

3. Which results and papers are taken how seriously.  Citations metrics help here, but not nearly as much as you might think.

4. What kinds of results and methods would be required to induce researchers to move to a new conclusion.

5. Why/when one paper pointing in a particular direction doesn’t prove much of anything, and why people don’t do things a certain way.

6. How, by asking around, you can figure out some (not all) of these issues, even if you do no work in that field.  This includes knowledge of how to interpret the verbal feedback you receive from practitioners and how to integrate it into a broader knowledge of the body of research.

There is much more, as that is a very brief introduction to some key issues.  I now have a few points:

a. I wish people would present this knowledge more directly!  If only in oral form.  Why not have some key people in a field talk through how their field actually works?  Record that, issue transcripts, and yes feed it into LLMs.

b. LLMs should be more explicitly tested for their skill at explaining how these matters work.  It is an important question for how much LLMs might speed up scientific progress.

c. Debates between people will not go well when one person has a good understanding of a particular field in this manner, and the other person does not.  The debates will go even less well when one of the participants doesn’t understand these matters for any field whatsoever, and has no real idea that these questions even exist.  That said, debates stand a chance of going well when both parties share a common understanding on these matters.

d. Many of the people who claim the mantle of science might cite published papers, but in fact they have little or no understanding of science as a conversation and a body of literature.

(Ilya Novak wrote to me: “I think the issue is less that RFk JR is a conspiracy theorist, but that he thinks being “pro science” means being able to reference this or that paper. He does not understand the concept of science as a research agenda among a community of scholars having a long running conversation with back and forth papers. He can reference “big” papers, but he can tell you nothing about their research methods or criticism made of them by subsequent papers.)

e. It is possible to be a successful researcher and not have a great sense of the tacit conventions across other fields, or how you might learn them if you had to.

f. Many contrarian science-related books fail because they fail on this question.  Having the author throw a lot of arguments against the mainstream doesn’t solve this problem.  Very often such commentators fail utterly at identifying and addressing the hinge questions upon which their most substantive propositions depend.

g. The very best science and social science journalists understand these matters, but most do not.

h. There is something unfair about this standard, because it is not extremely transparent and the quality of a person’s scientific understanding cannot always be easily verified to an external audience.  That is bad news for the public acceptance of science, but it does not make these matters less important.

Black Magic Technology

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here’s an example. You know those ubiquitous little LEDs on devices like speakers, card readers, microphones etc. that simply indicate that the device has power? The authors show that these LEDs can bleed information about power consumption that can be used to deduce when and for how long a computer is computing cryptographic keys and that can be used to deduce the keys. For example, using a “hijacked” security camera the author’s were able to film the power LED on a smart card reader from 16 meters away and from that able to deduce the keys. Paper here. Video below.

Now some people will say, well all you have to do is make sure the LEDs are properly insulated from the main power and adjust the cryptographic algorithms to not take some shortcuts and your systems will be safe. Uh huh.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has a more realistic perspective. Although this is not about AI per se, he notes this is a good example of the kind of thing that a superintelligence could do that would not have been predicted in advance and would seem to require magical powers.

Using a Quantum Annealer to Solve a Real Business Cycle Model

From Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Isaiah J. Hull a new paper:

NBER 31326: We introduce a novel approach to solving dynamic programming problems, such as those in many economic models, on a quantum annealer, a specialized device that performs combinatorial optimization. Quantum annealers attempt to solve an NP-hard problem by starting in a quantum superposition of all states and generating candidate global solutions in milliseconds, irrespective of problem size. Using existing quantum hardware, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speed-up in solving the real business cycle model over benchmarks in the literature. We also provide a detailed introduction to quantum annealing and discuss its potential use for more challenging economic problems.

Wikipedia offers more on quantum annealing:

Quantum annealing starts from a quantum-mechanical superposition of all possible states (candidate states) with equal weights. Then the system evolves following the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, a natural quantum-mechanical evolution of physical systems. The amplitudes of all candidate states keep changing, realizing a quantum parallelism, according to the time-dependent strength of the transverse field, which causes quantum tunneling between states or essentially tunneling through peaks. If the rate of change of the transverse field is slow enough, the system stays close to the ground state of the instantaneous Hamiltonian (also see adiabatic quantum computation).[6] If the rate of change of the transverse field is accelerated, the system may leave the ground state temporarily but produce a higher likelihood of concluding in the ground state of the final problem Hamiltonian, i.e., diabatic quantum computation.[7][8] The transverse field is finally switched off, and the system is expected to have reached the ground state of the classical Ising model that corresponds to the solution to the original optimization problem.

I would not have expected to see a paper like this for many years to come, even decades. I gather that solving the RBC model more quickly is a test case. I can see applications in knapsack problems and auction allocations.

GDP and temperature shocks

This is perhaps a not entirely welcome result:

We use local projections to estimate the cross-country distribution of real GDP per capita growth impulse responses to global and idiosyncratic temperature shocks. Negative growth responses to global temperature at longer horizons are found for all Group of Seven countries while positive responses are found for seven of the nine poorest countries. Global temperature shocks have negative effects on growth for around half of the countries and seemingly anomalous positive effects for the other half. After controlling for latitude and average temperature, positive growth responses to global temperature shocks are more likely for countries that are poorer, have experienced slower growth, are less educated (lower high school attainment), less open to trade, and more authoritarian.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Kimberly A. Berg, Chadwick C. Curtis, and Nelson Mark.  I would rather see this contested than ignored, but perhaps I am expecting the latter?

Free Formatting For All on First Submission!

Many years ago I was incredulous when my wife told me she had to format a paper to meet a journal’s guidelines before it was accepted! Who could favor such a dumb policy? In economics, the rule is you make your paper look good but you don’t have to fulfill all the journal’s guidelines until after the paper is accepted. Sensible!

A paper just published in BMC Medicine estimates that this obtrusive norm costs researchers in biomedical journals alone some $230 million a year in wasted time. That’s consistent with an earlier study which estimated that over a billion dollars worth of time was wasted reformatting papers in all scientific fields. Quoting from that earlier study:

Our data show that nearly 91% of authors spend greater than four hours and 65% spend over eight hours on reformatting adjustments before publication…Among the time-consuming processes involved are adjusting manuscript structure (e.g. altering abstract formats), changing figure formats, and complying with word counts that vary significantly depending on the journal. Beyond revising the manuscript itself, authors often have to adjust to specific journal and publisher online requirements (such as re-inputting data for all authors’ email, office addresses, and disclosures). Most authors reported spending “a great deal” of time on this reformatting task. Reformatting for these types of requirements reportedly caused three month or more delay in the publication of nearly one fifth of articles and one to three month delays for over a third of articles.

It’s all very depressing. If we can’t get rid of unproductive paper reformatting standards–which benefit no one–how can we expect to tackle monumental tasks that require navigating complex tradeoffs such as resolving global climate change or making the tax code more just and efficient?

Yet perhaps there is hope. The BMC Medicine paper was covered in Nature and the authors have started a petition to change the reformatting norm. Do your part. Sign the petition! Free formatting for all on first submission!

Emergent Ventures winners, 26th cohort

Winston Iskandar, 16, Manhattan Beach, CA, an app for children’s literacy and general career development. Winston also has had his piano debut at Carnegie Hall.

ComplyAI, Dheekshita Kumar and Neha Gaonkar, Chicago and NYC, to build an AI service to speed the process of permit application at local and state governments.

Avi Schiffman and InternetActivism, “leading the digital front of humanitarianism.”  Avi is a repeat winner.

Jarett Cameron Dewbury, Ontario, and Cambridge MA, General career support, AI and biomedicine, including for the study of environmental enteric dysfunction.  Here is his Twitter.

Ian Cheshire, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, high school sophomore, general career support, tech, start-ups, and also income-sharing agreements.

Beyzamur Arican Dinc, psychology Ph.D student at UCSB, regulation of emotional dyads in relationships and marriages, from Istanbul.

Ariana Pineda, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern. To attend a biology conference in Prospera, Honduras.

Satvik Agnihotri, high school, NYC area, to visit the Bay Area for a summer, study logistics, and general career development.

Michael Loftus, Ann Arbor, for a neuro tech hacker house, connected to Myelin Group.

Keir Bradwell, Cambridge, UK, Political Thought and Intellectual History Masters student, to visit the U.S. to study Mancur Olson and Judith Shklar, and also to visit GMU.

Vaneeza Moosa, Ontario, incoming at University of Calgary, “Developing new therapies for malignant pleural mesothelioma using epigenetic regulators to enhance tumor growth and anti-tumor immunity with radiation therapy.”

Ashley Mehra, Yale Law School, background in classics, general career development and for eventual start-up plans.

An important project not yet ready to be announced, United Kingdom.

Jennifer Tsai, Waterloo, Ontario and Geneva (temporarily), molecular and computational neuroscience, to study in Gregoire Courtine’s lab.

Asher Parker Sartori, Belmont, Massachusetts, working with Nina Khera (previous EV winner), summer meet-up/conference for young bio people in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Nima Pourjafar, 17, starting this fall at Waterloo, Ontario.  For general career development, interested in apps, programming, economics, solutions to social problems.

Karina, 17, sophomore in high school, neuroscience, optics, and light, Bellevue, Washington.

Sana Raisfirooz, Ontario, to study bioelectronics at Berkeley.

James Hill-Khurana (left off an earlier 2022 list by mistake), Waterloo, Ontario, “A new development environment for digital (chip) design, and accompanying machine learning models.”

Ukraine winners

Tetiana Shafran, Kyiv, piano, try this video or here are more.  I was very impressed.

Volodymyr Lapin, London, Ukraine, general career development in venture capital for Ukraine.

The Poop Detective

Wastewater surveillance is one of the few tools that we can use to prepare for a pandemic and I am pleased that it is expanding rapidly in the US and around the world. Every major sewage plant in the world should be doing wasterwater surveillance and presenting the results to the world on a dashboard.

I was surprised to learn that wastewater surveillance is now so good it can potentially lock-on to viral RNA from a single infected individual. An individual with an infection from a common SARS-COV-2 lineage like omicron won’t jump out of the data but there are rare, “cryptic lineages” which may be unique to a single individual.

Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri and one of the authors of a recent paper on cryptic lineages in wastewater, believes he has evidence for a single infected individual who likely lives in Columbus, Ohio but works in the nearby town, Washington Court House. In other words, they poop mostly at home but sometimes at work.

Twitter: First, the signal is almost always present in the Columbus Southerly sewershed, but not always at Washington Court House. I assume this means the person lives in Columbus and travels to WCH, presumably for work. Second, the signal is increasing with time. Washington Court House had its highest SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels ever in May, and the most recent sequencing indicates that this is entirely the cryptic lineage.

Moreover the person is likely quite sick:

Third, I’ve tried to calculate how much viral material this person is shedding. (Multiply the cryptic concentration by the total volume). I’ve done this several times and gotten pretty consistent results. They are shedding a few trillion (10^12) genomes/day. What does this tell us? How much tissue is infected? It’s impossible to know for sure. Chronically infected cells probably don’t release much, but acutely infected cells produce a lot more. I gather a typical output in the lab is around 1,000 virus per infected cell. If we assume we are getting 1,000 viral particles per infected cell, that would mean there are at least a billion infected cells. The density of monolayer epithelial cells is around 300k cells/sq cm. A billion cells would represent around 3.5 square feet of epithelial tissue! Don’t get me wrong. The intestines have a huge surface are and 3 square feet is a tiny fraction of the total. But it’s still a massive infection, no matter how you slice it….My point is that this patient is not well, even if they don’t know it, but they could probably be helped if they were identified.

…If you are the individual, let me know. There is a lab in the US that can do ‘official’ tests for COVID in stool, and there are doctors that I can put you in contact with that would like to try to help you.

So if you poop in Columbus Ohio and occasionally in Washington Court House and have been having some GI issues contact Marc!

Hat tip to Marc for using the twitter handle @SolidEvidence.

What should I ask Ada Palmer?

I will be doing a Conversation with her.  She is a unique thinker and presence, and thus hard to describe.  Here is a brief excerpt from her home page:

 I am an historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. I teach in the History Department at the University of Chicago.

Yes, she has tenure.  Her four-volume Terra Ignota series is a landmark of science fiction, and she also has a deep knowledge of the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, and the French Enlightenment.  She has been an advocate of free speech.  Here is her “could be better” Wikipedia page.  The imaginary world of her novels is peaceful, prosperous, obsessed with the Enlightenment (centuries from now), suppresses both free speech and gender designations, and perhaps headed for warfare once again?

Here is her excellent blog, which among other things considers issues of historical progress, and also her problems with chronic pain management and disability.

So what should I ask her?