Category: Uncategorized
Hey Thomas Nagel: bats argue a lot about where the best restaurants are!
Let’s not give them Twitter:
They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds.
Here is further information, here is the original research, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Ocean Grove, New Jersey travel notes
Having not visited the New Jersey shore since I was a kid (and then a very regular visitor), I realized you cannot actually swim there with any great facility. Nor is there much to do, nor should one look forward to the food.
Nonetheless Ocean Grove is one of America’s finest collections of Victorian homes, and the town style is remarkably consistent and intact. Most of all, it is an “only in America” kind of place:
Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 as an outgrowth of the camp meeting movement in the United States, when a group of Methodist clergymen, led by William B. Osborn and Ellwood H. Stokes, formed the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to develop and operate a summer camp meeting site on the New Jersey seashore. By the early 20th century, the popular Christian meeting ground became known as the “Queen of Religious Resorts.” The community’s land is still owned by the camp meeting association and leased to individual homeowners and businesses. Ocean Grove remains the longest-active camp meeting site in the United States.
The pipe organ in the 19th century Auditorium is still one of the world’s twenty largest.
The Auditorium is closed at the moment, but they still sing gospel music on the boardwalk several times a night.
The police department building is merged together with a Methodist church, separate entrances but both under the same roof.
Ocean Grove remains a fully dry city, for the purpose of “keeping the riff-raff out,” as one waitress explained to me. To walk up the Ocean Grove boardwalk into nearby Asbury Park (Cuban and Puerto Rican and Haitian in addition to American black) remains a lesson in the economics of sudden segregation, deliberate and otherwise.
Based on my experience as a kid, I recall quite distinct “personae” for the adjacent beach towns of Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Seaside Heights, Lavalette, Belmar, Spring Lake, and Point Pleasant. This time around I did not see much cultural convergence. That said, Ocean Grove now seems less the province of the elderly and more of a quiet upscale haunt, including for gay couples. As an eight-year-old, it was my least favorite beach town on the strip. Fifty years later, it is now striking to me how much the United States is refusing to be all smoothed over and homogenized.
Monday assorted links
1. Fryer responds, in my opinion we are back to where we started after initial publication of his piece.
2. German wealth inequality is extreme.
3. Japanese building a dam almost entirely with robots.
4. Emmanuel Farhi has passed away, here is an earlier interview with him.
5. It was the later Harvard economist Robert Dorfman who came up with the pooled testing idea in 1943 to solve WWII problems. To test recruits for syphilis, of course.
Does Joining the S&P 500 Index Hurt Firms?
It seems to these days:
We investigate the impact on firms of joining the S&P 500 index from 1997 to 2017. We find that the positive announcement effect on the stock price of index inclusion has disappeared and the long-run impact of index inclusion has become negative. Inclusion worsens stock price informativeness and some aspects of governance. Compensation, investment, and financial policies change with index inclusion. For instance, payout policies of firms joining the index become more similar to the policies of their index peers. ROA falls following inclusion. There is no evidence of an impact of inclusion on competition.
That is from Benjamin Bennett, René M. Stulz, and Zexi Wang. Here is the NBER paper, here is an ungated copy.
Experienced Segregation
Here is a new and important paper from Susan Athey, Billy A. Ferguson, Matthew Gentzkow, and Tobias Schmidt:
We introduce a novel measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we measure experienced isolation by race. We find that the isolation individuals experience is substantially lower than standard residential isolation measures would suggest, but that experienced and residential isolation are highly correlated across cities. Experienced isolation is lower relative to residential isolation in denser, wealthier, more educated cities with high levels of public transit use, and is also negatively correlated with income mobility.
Here is the NBER link. Here is an earlier and ungated version.
What are fungi?
I don’t view this as a formal answer, but it is interesting nonetheless:
Mycelium is how fungi feed. Some organisms — such as plants that photosynthesize — make their own food. Some organisms — like most animals — find food in the world and put it inside their bodies, where it is digested and absorbed. Fungi have a different strategy. They digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies…
The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.
…to embed oneself is an irregular and unpredictable food supply as mycelium does, one must be able to shape-shift. Mycelium is an living, growing, opportunistic investigation — speculation in bodily form.
That is from the new and excellent book by Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures.
Sunday assorted links
1. Durlauf and Heckman revise Fryer.
2. Joel Miller thread on why he doesn’t believe herd immunity kicks in so quickly. Commenting on this new paper.
3. The Jewish and Christian origins of the rule of law. Important.
4. Device to predict avocado ripeness: there is no great stagnation.
5. Maureen Dowd interviews Elon Musk (NYT).
How do you shop for books in a bookstore?
Jason emails me:
I would be interested to read on your blog about how you would shop for books in Daunt (or any good bookstore, but Daunt since you mentioned it). Is there method to your browsing/do you ask for recommendations, etc. Is there a person there who you particularly rate? It sounds basic but I think readers would be interested in knowing your approach. I live in London and too often walk out of a bookstore with books I have already heard about rather than taking a chance on something new.
Daunt has about seven or eight main “pressure points” near the very front of the store, and they are easy to find, and that is where you should look for your books. My key advice for Daunt is simply to have a basket, and/or an arrangement with the front desk that you can rest your accumulating pile of books there while you continue to look for more.
The basement floor of Daunt is organized by country, rather than by genre of book, and each visit you should scour at least two country sections for new (or older) items of interest. Overall I find that “by country” is a better to organize the back titles than what any other bookstore does. So, for instance, Chinese fiction is put next to Chinese history, not next to other fiction.
What makes the Marylebone branch of Daunt the best bookstore is how they organize the store, and the quality of selections they put on the front tables, not the overall number of titles.
Making random purchases of featured fiction, if it looks vaguely intelligent, is not crazy in Daunt, yet it would be in literally any American bookstore, or even in Waterstone’s in London (another superb store, go to the Piccadilly branch, but use it for history and biography not fiction).
If you are in a Barnes and Noble, mostly focus on finding the “new non-fiction” section, which these days is increasingly difficult to come across and ever-smaller.
Saturday assorted links
1. Is the class divide in happiness growing?
2. Seton Hall is looking to make acquisitions: M&A in higher ed will grow.
3. Henry Farrell praises negativity.
4. Common cold exposure provides partial protection against Covid-19, and is very different across children and adults.
6. 100 most influential economists? Good to see EV winner Jennifer Doleac make the list.
7. The Economist is now on the “bat brigade,” recommended, good to see other people following up on these leads (you read it here first).
Global quieting of high-frequency seismic noise due to COVID-19 lockdowns
Human activity causes vibrations that propagate into the ground as high-frequency seismic waves. Measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread changes in human activity, leading to a months-long reduction in seismic noise of up to 50%. The 2020 seismic noise quiet period is the longest and most prominent global anthropogenic seismic noise reduction on record. While the reduction is strongest at surface seismometers in populated areas, this seismic quiescence extends for many kilometers radially and hundreds of meters in depth. This provides an opportunity to detect subtle signals from subsurface seismic sources that would have been concealed in noisier times and to benchmark sources of anthropogenic noise. A strong correlation between seismic noise and independent measurements of human mobility suggests that seismology provides an absolute, real-time estimate of population dynamics.
Here is the paper by Thomas Lecocq, et.al., Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
United Kingdom fact of the day
Britain recorded 65,000 more deaths than usual in the past three months as the coronavirus ravaged the country but numbers are now returning to normal, new data showed Tuesday.
In the week to June 19, so-called excess deaths in England and Wales fell below the five-year average for the first time since mid-March, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
There were 0.7 percent fewer deaths overall than would be expected for that period.
Here is the full story.
Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive
A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracy levels similar to the PCR test. This is another deadly FDA mistake.
NPR: Highly accurate at-home tests are probably many months away. But Mina argues they could be here sooner if the FDA would not demand that tests for the coronavirus meet really high accuracy standards of 80 percent or better.
A Massachusetts-based startup called E25Bio has developed this sort of rapid test. Founder and Chief Technology Officer Irene Bosch says her firm has field-tested it in hospitals. “What we learned is that the test is able to be very efficient for people who have a lot of virus,” she says.
The PCR tests can discover virus at significantly lower concentration levels than the cheap tests but that extra sensitivity doesn’t matter much in practice. Why not? First, at the lowest levels that the PCR test can detect, the person tested probably isn’t infectious. The cheap test is better at telling whether you are infectious than whether you are infected but the former is what we need to know to open schools and workplaces. Second, the virus grows so quickly that the time period in which the PCR tests outperforms the cheap test is as little as a day or two. Third, the PCR tests are taking days or even a week or more to report which means the results are significantly outdated and less actionable by the time they are reported.
The fundamental issue is this: if a test is cheap and fast we shouldn’t compare it head to head against the PCR test. Instead, we should compare test regimes. A strip test could cost $5 which means you can do one per day for the same price as a PCR test (say $35). Thus, the right comparison is seven cheap tests with one PCR test. So considered a stylized example. If a person gets infected on Sunday and is tested on Sunday then both tests will likely show negative. With the PCR test the infected person then goes to work, infecting other people throughout the week before being the person is tested again next Sunday. With the cheap test the person gets tested again on Monday and again comes up negative and they go to work but probably aren’t infectious. They are then tested again on Tuesday and this time there is enough virus in the person’s system to show positive so on Tuesday the infected person stops going to work and doesn’t infect anyone else. Score one for cheap tests. Now consider what happens if the person gets tested on another day, say Tuesday? In this case, both tests will show positive but the person doesn’t get the results of the PCR test until next Tuesday and so again goes to work and infects other people throughout the week. With the cheap test the infected person learns they are infected and again stops going to work and infecting other people. Score two for cheap tests.
Indeed, when you compare testing regimes it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which infrequent, slow, and expensive but very sensitive is better than frequent, fast, and cheap but less sensitive.
More details in this paper.
What should I ask Alex Ross?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. If you don’t know he writes for The New Yorker as a music (and literary) critic, writes a wonderful music blog, has first-rate books on music and has a new book coming out titled Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.
So what should I ask him?
Thursday assorted links
The case against the import of GPT-3
From an email from Agustin Lebron, noting that I will impose no further indentation:
“One thing that’s worth noting:
The degree of excitement about GPT-3 as a replacement for human workers, or as a path to AGI, is strongly inversely correlated with:
(a) How close the person is to the actual work. If you look at the tweets from Altman, Sutskever and Brockman, they’re pumping the brakes pretty hard on expectations.
(b) How much the person has actually built ML systems.
It’s a towering achievement to be able to train a system this big. But to me it’s clearly a dead-end on the way to AGI:
– The architecture itself is 3 years old: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762. It is not an exaggeration to say that GPT-3’s architecture can be described as “take that 2017 paper and make 3 numbers (width, # layers, # heads) much bigger”. The fact that there hasn’t been any improvement in architecture in 3 years is quite telling.
– In the paper itself, the authors clearly say they’re quite near fundamental limits in being able to train an architecture like this. GPT-3 isn’t a starting point, it’s an end-point.
– If you look at more sober assessments (http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html, https://minimaxir.com/2020/07/gpt3-expectations/), without the tweet selection bias, it starts to look less impressive.
– Within my fairly heterogeneous circle of ML-expert friends, there’s little disagreement about dead-end-ness.
The most interesting thing about GPT-3 is the attention and press that it’s gotten. I’m still not sure what to make of that, but it’s very notable.
Again, it’s incredibly impressive and also piles of fun, but I’m willing to longbet some decent money that we’re not replacing front-end devs with attention-layer-stacks anytime soon.”
I remain bullish, but it is always worth considering other opinions.