Results for “stagnation” 721 found
There is no great stagnation (remote-controlled cockroach edition)
Built-in power supply? Check. Ability to survive anything? Check. Easy to control? Okay, anyone who’s had a cockroach as an uninvited houseguest knows that’s not the case. So, rather than re-inventing the biological wheel with a robotic version, North Carolina State university researchers have figured out a way to remotely control a real Madagascar hissing cockroach. They used an off-the-shelf microcontroller to tap in to the roach’s antennae and abdomen, then sent commands that fooled the insect into thinking danger was near, or that an object was blocking it. That let the scientists wirelessly prod the insect into action, then guide it precisely along a curved path, as shown in the video below the break. The addition of a sensor could allow the insects to one day perform tasks, liking searching for trapped disaster victims — something to think about the next time you put a shoe to one.
What’s it like trying to climb the IQ gradient with this device? There are videos at the link, and for the pointer I thank magilson.
Singapore R&D there is no great stagnation
Here is one description (with photo and a very good video):
Unveiled at a design conference in the UK recently, Kissenger is basically an egg-like orb outfitted with two soft plastic lips packed with sensors and actuators. When a human on one end of the kiss transaction plants a kiss on the robot lips, the sensors record the shape changes the kisser creates on the lips and translates those pressure patterns into a mirror image that can be beamed over the Web to another Kissenger. That Kissenger then reproduces the sender’s unique kiss for a human on the other end.
Here is another:
Kissing Bot. Singaporean robotics studio Lovotics has a new robot in the news. Kissenger is an advanced and intimate form of telepresence robot specially designed to transmit the senstions of a kiss. Two units are able to record and remotely reproduce the unique pressure sensations from a kiss … although the design looks pretty chaste and seems to lack an option to go French. Research like this while seeming silly is crucial for innovating next-gen avatar robot tech.
Here is more. Hat tip goes to @GrishinRobotics.
Self-recommending!
The Great Olympic stagnation?
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on the way to the London Olympics: Athletes stopped breaking world records. Remember the run-up to Beijing in 2008, when the sports world was abuzz over how many marks Michael Phelps would smash? He set seven world records there but hasn’t bested a global time since 2009. The Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 provided plenty of drama but few record-shattering wins — Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo’s highest-ever score in pairs figure skating wasn’t exactly a Bob Beamon moment. World records are now decades old in classic men’s Olympic sports such as the long jump (1991), shot put (1990) and discus throw (1986).
Many scientists have concluded from recent events that athletic performance is hitting a wall. Geoffroy Berthelot of INSEP, a sports research institute in Paris, looked at competitions from 1896 to 2007 and found that peak scores stopped improving in 64 percent of track and field events after 1993. Giuseppe Lippi of the University of Verona examined nine Olympic sports from 1900 to 2007 and found similar results. “Improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities,” he wrote. Berthelot has predicted that the “human species’ physiological frontiers will be reached” in most sports around 2027.
Yet his conclusion is more measured:
But what these researchers are detecting isn’t some final biological frontier but rather a lull in technological enhancement. Athletes have always relied on science to push the bounds of achievement. Olympic athletes’ great stagnation, then, is really a temporary halt in innovation.
That is from Peter Keating, here is more. For the pointer I thank Allison Kasic.
Will it be drones that end the great stagnation?
Will we deregulate drones? Should we? When might that become possible?:
There are very few drones over our cities. Commercial interests are not allowed to fly overhead. Nor most local governments. Hobbyists can, if they keep their drones under 400 feet. And the skies will eventually open up to everyone. “Ironically, my nine-year-old can fly drones, but the police department can’t.” Anderson says.
The problem is that our airspace is governed by a policy called sense-and-avoid. Flying vehicle control systems — be they people or computers — are ultimately responsible for avoiding other vehicles. And today’s drones, as a rule, have no facility to make them aware of other aircraft.
Anderson says there is still a long way to go when it comes to autonomous vehicles. The videos we’ve seen of quadcopters flying through tiny slits or playing instruments are taken in highly-controlled environments, he says.
Out in the real world, GPS and wind leads to much less precise positioning.
Here is more. I enjoy following @GrishinRobotics on Twitter.
We are all stagnationists now
Here is Jim Hamilton, on peak oil, scary tag at the end:
…we should not dismiss the possibility that there may also have been a nontrivial contribution of simply having been quite lucky to have found an incredibly valuable raw material that for a century and a half or so was relatively easy to obtain. Optimists may expect the next century and a half to look like the last. Benes and coauthors are suggesting that instead we should perhaps expect the next decade to look like the last.
On this issue I am more optimistic than Hamilton.
Alternatively, here is Cardiff Garcia from the FT, with a survey of recent pessimistic thought on productivity, citing (but not necessarily endorsing) Nomura:
…we think it more likely that the economy will grow at a trend pace near 2.5%, which, coupled with normalization in productivity, implies the sustainable underlying pace of monthly gains in private payrolls is in the low-100k range or lower.
Karl Smith has a very useful blog post. Addressing me, he writes:
My position perhaps more clearly stated is that if all markets were clearing then phenomena such as: lack of educational improvement, globalization, de-industrialization, skew of technological improvement towards information technology, energy shortages, etc would show up in wages.
My view is this. When real factors are slow, it takes much longer for the private sector to manufacture its own ngdp and also of course rgdp. (You can pursue a separate argument about how quickly the Fed can fix things, but given that they haven’t, for whatever reason, the previous claim still holds. We can make multiple margins of comparison, even if a perfect Fed would clear everything up. We don’t have a perfect Fed.) Much of North Dakota has full employment, but most of the nation does not. With a stronger real economy along the right dimensions, we would have more jobs, but we don’t. The long term where everything shows up in wages can take a while to arrive. Nothing in this view requires one to tell stories — be they true or not — about companies which cannot find quality computer programmers. A final point is that labor force participation may be the job market number that really matters.
Here is an excellent post by Will Wilkinson on Obama, Romney, meanness, and Ben Friedman.
Social Security, Savings and Stagnation
Here is Evans, Kotlikoff, and Phillips making the case that transfers to the elderly, such as Social Security and Medicare, have dramatically lowered the US savings rate, the investment rate and real wage growth:
In the lifecycle model, the young, because they have longer remaining lifespans than the old, have much lower propensities to consume out of their remaining lifetime resources. This prediction is strongly confirmed for the US by Gokhale et al (1996).
Hence, in taking from young savers and giving to old spenders, which Uncle Sam has spent six decades doing on a massive scale, the lifecycle model predicts a major decline in US net national saving associated with a major rise in the absolute and relative consumption of the elderly. This is precisely what the data show.
In 1965, the US net national saving was 15.6% of net national income. Last year, it was just 0.9%. And, according to Gokhale et al (1996) and Lee and Mason (2012), the secular demise in US saving has coincided with a spectacular rise in the consumption of older Americans relative to that of younger Americans.
As Feldstein and Horioka (1980) document, US net domestic saving tracks US net national saving. Hence, postwar intergenerational redistribution has not only lowered net national saving; it has also reduced net domestic investment, from 14.0% of national income in 1965 to just 3.6% in 2011. This decline in the rate of net domestic investment is, no doubt, playing a major role in the slow growth in US wages. Indeed, the level of private-sector average real earnings per hour, exclusive of fringe benefits, is lower today than it was 40 years ago.
We call this America’s “fiscal child abuse”. If it continues, it will no doubt shortly drive the national saving rate, which was negative 1.2% in 2009, into permanent negative territory and further reduce net domestic investment and prospects for real wage growth.
Sentences to ponder (there is a great stagnation)
Over the span of our data, health IT inputs increased by more than 210% and contributed about 6% to the increase in value-added. Virtually all the increase in value-added is attributable to the increased use of inputs…
Here is much more. Can anyone find an ungated copy?
Markets in everything there is no great stagnation
You can now get rolls of toilet paper especially printed with the Twitter feed of your choice.
That is from Tim Worstall.
Markets in everything there is no great stagnation
The sOccket harnesses the kinetic (motion) energy of the soccer ball during normal game play and stores it for later power needs. After play, small electrical appliances, like an LED lamp, can be plugged into the sOccket. Learn more about our first mass-produced sOccket on our blog.
The web page, with lots of pictures, is here. It’s not just free energy, one goal is to prevent so many people from dying from kerosene lamps.
For the pointer I thank Brent Depperschmidt.
Counting benefits does not much change the income stagnation story
Lane Kenworthy reports:
A third worry is that the income measure used to calculate median family income is too thin. If a growing portion of GDP has gone to employer benefits, that would help middle-class households, but it wouldn’t show up in these income data.
To address these second and third concerns, we can turn to a more encompassing measure of household income. The data are from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The measure includes all sources of cash income. It adds in-kind income (employer-paid health insurance premiums, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid benefits), employee contributions to 401(k) retirement plans, and employer-paid payroll taxes. Tax payments are subtracted.
We can use average household income in these data as a substitute for GDP per capita. The CBO data set doesn’t tell us the median income, but it provides something quite similar: the average income of households in the middle quintile of the distribution (from the 40th percentile to the 60th). The following chart adds these two series. The story is virtually identical.
He considers some other adjustments too, and this is the final story:
Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.
There is no great stagnation
The drone of speakers who won’t stop is an inevitable experience at conferences, meetings, cinemas, and public libraries.
Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech-jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission.
The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second.
Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built a handheld device consisting of a microphone and a speaker that does just that: it records a person’s voice and replays it to them with a delay of about 0.2 seconds. The microphone and speaker are directional so the device can be aimed at a speaker from a distance, like a gun.
In tests, Kurihara and Tsukada say their speech jamming gun works well: “The system can disturb remote people’s speech without any physical discomfort.”
Their tests also identify some curious phenomena. They say the gun is more effective when the delay varies in time and more effective against speech that involves reading aloud than against spontaneous monologue. Sadly, they report that it has no effect on meaningless sound sequences such as “aaaaarghhh”.
Kurihara and Tsukada make no claims about the commercial potential of their device but list various aplications. They say it could be used to maintain silence in public libraries and to “facilitate discussion” in group meetings. “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking,” they say.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson, here is her recent dialogue.
The balance sheet recession and The Great Stagnation
Many people point out that we are in a balance sheet recession. I agree with this view but wish to push it one step deeper. The negative wealth and income effects on debtors are positive wealth and income effects for the creditors. If the creditors were keener to invest that money in useful, productive activities the economy would be much stronger. Balance sheet recessions are most problematic when the investment channel is for some reason broken or especially weak.
You might think “Ah, the weak investment channel is due to weak AD.” And in part it is. But, if I may quote the Austrians, production takes time and recoveries do not take forever. Investors are often keen to invest into the swoosh of a future, not too far away, post-recession boom. But this desire has been much weaker than in many times past. A lot of the weakness of AD comes from the investment side, and in fact it predated the recession.
The Great Start-Up Stagnation
You see a long-term slowdown in start-ups:
The numbers are sobering. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, 450,000-550,000 new businesses with at least one employee were created in the US each year. In 2009, the latest year for which records are available, there were just 400,000. More recent numbers suggest that the climate has not improved: the number of incorporated self-employed people, a measure of the health of small businesses, was 5.06m in November, down from 5.37m in November 2009, official figures say.
A slowdown would be expected in a downturn, but the start of the decline predates the start of the recession at the end of 2007; the peak year for business starts was 2006.
The dwindling birth rate for new businesses matters because young companies are disproportionately responsible for job creation. Indeed, companies less than five years old have generated all of the net jobs in the US economy since the 1970s, according to research published by the Kauffman Foundation.
Weak job creation remains at the heart of America’s unemployment problem. Accepting this hypothesis does not require the rejection of Keynesian economics; for instance you can think of weak job and start-up creation as one reason why AD is not recovering so well on its own, with causation running both ways of course. Remember — monetary velocity is endogenous to perceived gains from trade.
By the way, here is a profile of me and TGS from The Washington Diplomat. It is very good, and the journalist understands TGS quite well.
There is no Great Stagnation, Thanksgiving edition
It’s called a Cherpumple, and it is A Cherry Pie, an Apple Pie and a Pumpkin Pie, Each Cooked Inside a Separate Cake, and Then All Cooked Together inside Another Cake. Photo at the link.
For the pointer I thank Nick Thompson.
Paths out of The Great Stagnation
Thankfully, Thingiverse user Tom Lombardi invented a solution for this age old problem. Enter the Lucky Charms Sifter.
According to Lombardi, the humble-looking 3D printed cup removes over 90 percent of all the cereal, leaving only the marshmallowy goodness. All the user has to do is pour Lucky Charms into the cup and give it a good shake. The precision-printed holes are just large enough for the whole-grain hamster food to fall through, while still retaining the slightly larger marshmallows.
Here is more, hat tip goes to ModeledBehavior. And via Rob Nelson, here is 3-D printing for pet hermit crab shells.
That all said, 3-D printing is unlikely to end up being a transformative technology; transportation costs for what it can produce are already fairly low. The printers may in some longer run be cheaper than UPS, truck, and commercial rail, but that’s a moderate savings only, albeit a nice one.
The most likely paths out of TGS — by far — are artificial intelligence and natural gas supply (with some chance of E-Cat). Smart machines will be most successful in their least romantic, furthest from hard AI, most mundane forms, starting with Siri and Watson. Natural gas and other energy source developments will likely make North America the cheap energy power for much of the next fifty years; this may improve the quality of our foreign policy as a collateral benefit.