Emergent Ventures India, sixth cohort, post and selection done by Shruti Rajagopalan
Akash Kulgod is a 23-year-old cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley and chief canine comrade at Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. He received his EV grant for a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack.
A travel grant to the four-member team representing India in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bansko, Bulgaria below:
Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui is a 17-year-old high-school senior from Mumbai. He received his EV Grant to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bansko, Bulgaria, where he won a silver medal. He now aims to popularize linguistics in India. He also enjoys studying and teaching Astronomy and Physics. His team (Anshul, Animikha and Diya) also received a travel grant to participate in the Olympiad.
Anshul Krishnadas Bhagwat is an 18-year-old polyglot, and language and linguistics enthusiast. He speaks over 9 languages fluently (English, Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, Kannada, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French) and is learning many more. He (and his team) received an EV grant to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria, where he won an honorable mention.
Animikha Dutta Dhar is a 16-year-old from Kolkata, passionate about mathematics, linguistics and problem solving. She received her EV grant to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.
Diya Agrawal is an 18-year-old from Bangalore and is interested in biology, law and linguistics. She received an EV grant for applying to colleges in the US and to participate in the 20th International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.
Yakara Ganesh is a 24-year-old social entrepreneur and the founder of Samskar Electronics. He received his EV grant to develop the “Samskar Toy” an interactive device to educate young children about sexual abuse (a very big, and underreported problem in India).
Arpit Shukla is a 25-year-old social entrepreneur and researcher from Varanasi. He received his EV grant to develop and test his low-cost AI based bone conduction hearing aid for those with hearing loss and disability. The device is programmed to prevent the loss of voice data and has active noise cancellation.
Parth Verma is a 26-year-old mechanical engineer and the founder of Bakz4ever. He is working on Carbon Bank Technology, a 2-in-1 climate solution for low-cost Direct Air Carbon Capture with Long Duration Energy storage, to support and stabilize a 100% renewable grid.
Shivaganesh Gaddam is the founder of Zeni5, an innovative neobanking solution designed specifically for students, offering a convenient platform to manage their payments and benefits, introduce them to financial literacy, and reward them through digital gold cashbacks on every purchase.
Shweta Dalmia is a 26-year-old entrepreneur from Delhi, the Founder & CEO of Climapreneur. She received her EV grant to scale her podcast; through which she is bringing forward insights on the climate startup and nonprofit ecosystem and presenting opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Atul Singhal and his co-founder Sudhanshu Singh received their EV grant for scaling their startup Cuvette, which helps connect students from small towns in India looking for internships and jobs in the field of software development to employers. Currently, Cuvette is already being used by 400K+ users and they have around 6,000+ partner companies.
Anagha Rajesh is a 21-year-old chemistry major at BITS Goa and believes the future of computing will be driven by biomolecules. She received an EV grant to build a bacteria-driven DNA nanochip to enable next generation computing and storage. Prior to this, Anagha spent four years building and scaling Yours Mindfully, a mental health non-profit that impacted over 10,000 people.
Gautham Pasupuleti is the CEO and Managing Director of Biodesign Innovation Labs in Bangalore. He received his EV grant to further develop and scale RespirAID, a patented medical technology offering a safe, affordable, and reliable alternative to manual ventilation.
Shashank Aswathanarayana is a 34-year-old music technologist, percussionist and a postdoctoral research scholar at American University. He received an EV grant to travel across Southern India to build a complete acoustic image of Hindu temples.
Shankar Sri is a 22-year-old founder of Sputnik Brain (rebranded in the US as Neural Inception). He’s building a nonsurgical neural interface to democratize access to happiness through the brain’s serotonergic circuits to initially solve the issue of treatment-resistant depression, and eventually hopes to create a suffering-free human civilization.
Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. He built Ideas of India, a new database that indexes every English-language periodical published in India from 1800-1950. Over 150 researchers have tracked down and indexed these lost publications, resulting in 300,000 entries from over 400 periodicals sourced from 175 libraries worldwide. Rahul’s EV grant will support a hunt “off the grid,” sending out teams to manually search in libraries that only have paper records of their holdings, in the hope of uncovering endangered archives.
Hardeep Gambhir is a 20-year-old from New Delhi/Toronto, interested in improving education and the future of humanity. He received his EV grant for general career development and to take a gap year from university to build his education/community initiative called The Residency, a home for the ambitious.
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, fourth cohort, and fifth cohort. To 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].
Russia facts of the day
A further bump in real wages of up to 3.5 per cent is expected this year, alongside an expected 3 per cent jump in real disposable income, according to Russia’s Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting. The unemployment rate, forecast to hit between 7 and 8 per cent in 2022, is at 2.6 per cent — a record post-Soviet low.
Here is much more from Courtney Weaver and Anastasia Stognei in the FT. Now model that!
Friday assorted links
1. Two Patrick Collison citations on mentorship.
3. Nick Whitaker puts forward AI policy.
4. “The US economy has been expanding for 15 years, only interrupted by 2 months of contraction in early 2020″…and…”The US economy has now been in an expansion for 51 months with annualized real GDP growth of 4.5% over that time.” Links here.
5. “Children’s outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children’s outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction.” That is from some new Chetty mobility results. WSJ coverage here.
Markets in Everything: Fentanyl Precursors
Reuters: To learn how this global industry works, reporters made multiple buys of precursors over the past year. Though a few of the sales proved to be scams, the journalists succeeded in buying 12 chemicals that could be used to make fentanyl, according to independent chemists consulted by Reuters. Most of the goods arrived as seamlessly as any other mail-order package. The team also procured secondary ingredients used to process the essential precursors, as well as basic equipment – giving it everything needed to produce fentanyl.
The core precursors Reuters bought would have yielded enough fentanyl powder to make at least 3 million tablets, with a potential street value of $3 million – a conservative estimate based on prices cited by U.S. law enforcement agencies in published reports over the past six months.
The total cost of the chemicals and equipment Reuters purchased, paid mainly in Bitcoin: $3,607.18.
I don’t doubt that Reuters did what they say they did. I have trouble believing, however, that the implied profit margins are so high. A gram of cocaine costs about $160 on the street and $13 to $70 trafficked into the US and ready to sell. Thus, the street price to production cost is at most 12:1 and perhaps as low as 2.3:1. Note that this profit margin includes the costs of jail etc. I think Reuters overestimates fentanyl street prices by a factor of 2 which would still give a ratio of 415:1 which is way too high. Let’s say fentanyl sells for $1.5 million on the street then to get the ratio to a very generous 20:1 we need costs of $75,000 so my guess is that Reuters has underestimated costs by a significant amount in some manner.
Happy to receive clarification or verification from those with more expertise in the business.
I do accept Reuters point that fentanyl is cheap and easy to produce.
The whole story is excellent.
Which are the most effective subsidies for green energy?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
A recent study finds that, of all domestic subsidies, the most effective involve replacing the dirty production of electricity with the cleaner production of electricity. In practice, that means subsidies or tax credits for solar and wind power. Those are more than twice as effective as appliance rebates, the weatherization of homes, or subsidies for buying electric or hybrid vehicles.
Current local and national policies offer subsidies for both electric vehicles and for solar and wind power, though the specifics vary. It would be better if the US switched more of those funds into subsidies for solar and wind power.
Green energy advocates, however, tend to support public subsidies for any policy that reduces emissions. “Less money for electric vehicles” is not the kind of message they necessarily want to send. Nonetheless, in a world of scarcity and limited support for green energy projects, hard thinking about trade-offs is necessary.
When it comes to green energy policies, many countries are having trouble meeting their commitments. Australia, for instance, repealed its carbon tax a decade ago, and many nations are talking about a zero-emissions future in vaguer terms and with looser deadlines. The UK has a net zero pledge for 2050, but is not on track to meet intermediate targets. It’s folly to blindly support an all-of-the-above strategy.
So we need to choose, and this paper offers guidelines.
The original research is from Robert W. Hahn, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert D. Metcalfe, and Ben Sprung-Keyser.
My excellent Conversation with Alan Taylor, on American history
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Taylor take a walking tour of early history through North America covering the decisions, and ripples of those decisions, that shaped revolution and independence, including why Canada didn’t join the American revolution, why America in turn never conquered Canada, American’s early obsession with the collapse of the Republic, how democratic the Jacksonians were, Texas/Mexico tensions over escaped African American slaves, America’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence, how many American Tories went north post-revolution, Napoleon III’s war with Mexico, why the US Government considered attacking Canada after the Civil War, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, here’s a quotation from your writings, page 37: “One of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States.” Could you explain that, please?
TAYLOR: Sure. The war was very expensive. All the states and the United States also incurred immense debts. How are you going to pay for that? This is the time when there’s no income tax, and the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on import duties and then on selling land. There was a lot of land, provided you could take it away from native peoples. All of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land, but also they’re reliant within the states on these land taxes. All of these go up, then, to try to finance the war debt.
Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They’re paying the full freight of it, which means that local taxes were much lower there. It also meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers. They had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans, they will want to leave that new American republic, move back into the British Empire, strengthen Canada, and provide a militia to defend it.
Substantive and interesting throughout. And can you guess what in his answers surprised me most?
From Google DeepMind (it’s happening)
We’re presenting the first AI to solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems at a silver medalist level. It combines AlphaProof, a new breakthrough model for formal reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2, an improved version of our previous system.
Here is further information.
From the NYT three days ago “A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles With Math.” From the NYT today: “Move Over, Mathematicians, Here Comes AlphaProof.” And here is one opinion: “This type of A.I. learns by itself and can scale indefinitely, said Dr. Silver, who is Google DeepMind’s vice-president of reinforcement learning.” Okie-dokie!
Thursday assorted links
1. Malaysia to build a large AI and data centre next to Singapore (FT).
2. The Indicator from Planet Money NPR on whether AI might possibly be underrated, I am one of the guests. And beta website for The Rational Optimist Society.
3. Shruti on why observers of American politics now need to learn about caste.
4. Hoshimov podcast with Steven Durlauf.
5. RCT for surgical masks and Covid.
6. The economics of which countries do well in the Olympics, my old Grantland piece with Angus.
7. Predictors of not having sex, the subjects are British and Australian.
Overturn Euclid v. Ambler
An excellent post from Maxwell Tabarrok at Maximum Progress:
On 75 percent or more of the residential land in most major American cities it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home. 95.8 percent of total residential land area in California is zoned as single-family-only, which is 30 percent of all land in the state. Restrictive zoning regulations such as these probably lower GDP per capita in the US by 8–36%. That’s potentially tens of thousands of dollars per person.
The legal authority behind all of these zoning rules derives from a 1926 Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. Ambler realty held 68 acres of land in the town of Euclid, Ohio. The town, wanting to avoid influence, immigration, and industry from nearby Cleveland, passed a restrictive zoning ordinance which prevented Ambler realty from building anything but single family homes on much of their land, though they weren’t attempting to build anything at the time of the case.
Ambler realty and their lawyer (a prominent Georgist!) argued that since this zoning ordinance severely restricted the possible uses for their property and its value, forcing the ordinance upon them without compensation was unconstitutional.
The constitutionality claims in this case are about the 14th and 5th amendment. The 5th amendment to the United States Constitution states, among other things, that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The part of the 14th amendment relevant to this case just applies the 5th to state and local governments.
The local judge in the case, who ruled in favor of Ambler (overturned by the Supreme Court), understood exactly what was going on:
The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped area of 16 square miles in a strait-jacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit it. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life … Aside from contributing to these results and furthering such class tendencies, the ordinance has also an esthetic purpose; that is to say, to make this village develop into a city along lines now conceived by the village council to be attractive and beautiful.
Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.
Read the whole thing and subscribe to Maximum Progress.
My podcast with Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek
Lots of fresh material and debate, they question me, lots of philosophy, here are the links. And this is a new podcast from Peter and Kasia, Lives Well Lived, further interesting episodes are on the way.
Who uses ChatGPT?
By Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard:
We study the adoption of ChatGPT, the icon of Generative AI, using a large-scale survey experiment linked to comprehensive register data in Denmark. Surveying 100,000 workers from 11 exposed occupations, we document that ChatGPT is widespread, but substantial inequalities have emerged. Women are 20 percentage points less likely to have used the tool. Furthermore, despite its potential to lift workers with less expertise, users of ChatGPT earned more already before its arrival. Workers see a substantial productivity potential in ChatGPT but are often hindered by employer restrictions and the need for training. Informing workers about expert assessments of ChatGPT shifts workers’ beliefs but has limited impacts on actual adoption.
Here is the link to the full paper.
Be there or be square!
Here is the link.
Mark Zuckerberg on open source AI
Wednesday assorted links
Cuba Libre! Part 2
In April I posted, following an excellent piece by Martin Gurri, that 4% of Cuba’s population had recently escaped. The Miami Herald now reports, based on official Cuban data, that 4% was a large underestimate.
A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.
…It was a somber moment that capped a week of National Assembly sessions in which government officials shared data revealing the extent of the economic crisis and the failure of current government policies meant to increase production, address widespread shortages, deal with crumbling infrastructure and tame inflation.
Most seriously food production has collapsed:
Alexis Rodríguez Pérez, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the country produced 15,200 tons of beef in the first six months of this year. As a comparison, Cuba produced 172,300 tons of beef in 2022, already down 40% from 289,100 in 1989.
Pork production fared even worse. The country produced barely 3,800 tons in the first six months of this year, compared to 149,000 tons in all of 2018. Almost every other sector reported losses and failed production goals.
And yet
…Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced several new restrictions on the island’s private sector (!!!)
Raul Castro is 93. I am betting that his death or something similar will signal a new revolution. Is the US prepared for an open Cuba?