Results for “age of em” 17233 found
Sentences to ponder
While the ethics behind holograms of deceased celebrities might be questionable (in the words of a parody Twitter account called Aaliyah’s Ghost, “The best duets imo are the ones where both artists are alive & agreed to work together”), copyright permissions and objections from various estates, in addition to the high costs, have so far prevented “resurrections” from becoming a more widespread trend. For its closing ceremony, the London Olympics scrimped on costs, reviving Freddie Mercury for a duet with Jessie J by broadcasting his image on a flat screen rather than a hologram body. It is hard to imagine the Tupac hologram moving forward without permission from his mother Afeni Shakur. The Marilyn Monroe estate, on the other hand, contested plans for a “Virtual Marilyn” concert organised by Musion partner Digicon Media.
Here is more, from the always interesting Joanne McNeil.
No Patents on Genes
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday in Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics that a gene, such as BRCA1 or BRCA2, does not qualify for a patent. The fact that Myriad isolated the DNA is not enough to distinguish it from its in situ counterpart as the information it contains is the same. However, cDNA, a version of the gene that has been stripped of non-coding sequences is subject to patent.
With this ruling the price of most of Myriad’s tests will fall as competition enters the market (the BRACAnalysis tests are actually a number of different tests, as I read the technical specifications, only some of these depend on cDNA. The markets appeared to have been initially confused about this.). Even more importantly, the Myriad patents were broad and they prevented researchers from freely studying the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, from improving the tests or from developing additional applications. The giants demanded payment (video) from those who would stand on their shoulders. I think the restrictions retarded progress–as have similar restrictions–to an extent that made the patents difficult to justify.
Although I am broadly in agreement with the ruling, it’s also clear that the limited flexibility of patent law–you get a 20-year patent or nothing–and the fact that patent law is not based on patent theory (pdf) greatly hampers the ability to tailor patent law optimally. The ruling, for example, says that a firm can’t patent a gene that it discovers but it can patent the cDNA that it develops. It’s the discovery, however, that’s expensive. The development of cDNA is today a trivial step. Thus, you can patent the trivial step but not the giant leap.
You might think that the law draws a bright line between discoveries which cannot be patented and inventions which can but that’s not correct. Discoveries can be patented and the ruling goes out of its way to push back against the view that they can’t. The ruling correctly notes that a “considerable danger” is that patents on basic ideas and tools would “inhibit future innovation”. Yet the law makes no mention of these considerations and the court provides no guidance on implementation.
Coherent or not, the recent patent cases do indicate that the SC is no longer acceding to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit–they are reestablishing control and pushing back in the right direction on the Tabarrok curve.
Assorted links
1. Indian ferris wheel (video, recommended; at least five different aspects of this material fascinate me).
2. A critical view of seasteading.
3. Japanese underground bicycle parking, more interesting than it sounds.
4. John Nye on James Buchanan.
5. 12 earth scars.
Breakthrough with Honduran charter cities
Written reports from Central America often require Straussian skills, but at least on the surface it would appear that Honduras will go forward with some version of the free city/charter city idea. A translation passing through Google, Tom Bell, and Lotta Moberg (not holding any one of them responsible for it, but to my eye it appears acceptably close) indicates:
“The Law complements the amendments to Articles 294, 303 and 329 of the Constitution which paved the way for the creation of these special areas. [Those amendments fixed the problems that caused the Honduran S.Ct. to strike down the earlier version of the statute, which aimed to establish REDE.] The ZEDE legislation authorizes the establishment of courts with exclusive jurisdiction, which may adopt legal systems and traditions of other parts of the world, provided that they ensure equal or better protection of constitutional human rights protected under Honduran law.”
The legislation was hardly crammed down the legislature’s throat. As I mentioned, the Honduran S.Ct. struck down an earlier version of the statute. The ZEDE legislation sparked “a fierce debate because several municipalities fear losing their autonomy and tax collection.” (The answer to those objections, in floor debate: You can arrange annexation by the ZEDE, winning the same legal status.)
Interested in moving there? “The ZEDE may establish coexistence agreements with people who wish to live or reside freely within their jurisdiction.”
There is a Honduran Spanish-language link here (it doesn’t work in every browser, but experiment). It starts with this, which seems clear enough:
La ley orgánica especial que regulará las Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico (ZEDE), la nueva versión de las “ciudades modelos”, fue aprobada ayer por el Congreso Nacional en su último debate, lo que deja las puertas abiertas para que empresarios extranjeros inviertan en regiones específicas con reglas diferentes al resto del país y con autonomía propia.
Developing…
And for the pointer I thank Lotta Moberg.
Assorted links
1. Nick Rowe on Japan and interest rates, and he asks whether Japan is already dead.
2. Parlor game, island, Japanese Chamber of Commerce, stir and mix.
3. Eichengreen essay on Robert Fogel (jstor).
4. The culture that is Vietnam: festival of killing inner insects, and TNR resurrects its “Plank Blog.”
5. Dan Drezner on Albert Hirschman.
6. Turkish Jugaad, and basketball in an arbitrage economy.
7. Disputes over the economic benefits of the human genome project, be careful not to measure inputs!
Robert Fogel has passed away
He was a Nobel Laureate and one of the greatest of economic historians. His Wikipedia page is here. He is here on scholar.google.com. Previous MR mentions and discussions are here. Here is one appreciation of Fogel. Here is a good NYT obituary.
From the comments
Rahul writes:
Just for the heck of it, I tried an alternative list:
1. Ramp up drastically the training output of new doctors and nurses: More med schools, larger intakes per school, elimination of 4 years of pre-med university etc. More med school student scholarships and subsidies?
2.Massively expand other lower tiers of the medical system: Physicians assistants, Nurse Practitioners etc.
3. Liberalize drug imports both commercial and personal. Allow direct import of any FDA-licensed drug sold in equivalent nations (western EU / Canada etc.). Mostly ignore Big Pharma’s opinions in this context.
4. Fully recognize all medical degrees from similarly developed nations (e.g. Canada / UK / Japan / Australia etc.) to the point that doctors from these nations can register and practice almost instantly in the US. Provide an almost limitless immigration quota for doctors from western nations. Even better, aggressively recruit doctors from abroad. Mostly ignore APA’s opinions in this context.
5. Allow and encourage Medicare / Insurance procedures to be carried out abroad where cheaper locales (Mexico? Canada? Argentina? ) exist. Incentivize recipients using these options. Premium rebates? Encourage private insurers to offer plans that economize on major procedures by treating abroad.
*How Asia Works*
The author is Joe Studwell and the subtitle is Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. That’s an excessively bland title and subtitle, but so far this is perhaps my favorite economics book of the year. Quite simply, it is the best single treatment on what in Asian industrial policy worked or did not work, full of both analysis and specific detail, and covering southeast Asia in addition to the Asian tiger “winners.”
Studwell explains that South Korean policy was based in a notion of “export discipline” and that policymakers were quite ready to see leading chaebol go bankrupt, which indeed they did often. Everything was directed toward export capacity and they didn’t worry about what rate of price inflation, often in double digits, the cheap credit policies might create. It was a gamble on a world-historical scale, noting that South Korea engaged in much more borrowing than did the other Asian tigers. His p.111 account of how Park and his cronies started arresting most of the nation’s leading businessmen, to teach them a lesson and to skew corruption in nation-building directions, is sobering and thought-provoking reading.
Here is one instructive bit of many:
Thailand holds the record for the most consistent import substitution industrialisation (ISI) policy in south-east Asia, running from the early 1950s into the 1980s. Industrial policy also was led by probably the most competent, professional bureaucracy in the region. But, as the Japanese scholar of development Suchiro Akira observed, there was almost no pressure for favoured manufacturers to export…Unlike in northeast Asian states, the Thai bureaucracy never brought export discipline to bear because the Thai generals and politicians who ran the country did not prioritise it.
In other words, industrial policy has to work with the market and rely on market discipline, not try to circumvent such constraints. That is hard to pull off, although clearly it happened in South Korea.
It is also an excellent book on the agrarian pre-histories of East Asian industrialization and why South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan pulled off successful land reforms and Indonesia and the Philippines did not.
I would wish for more coverage of education and labor markets, and the final section on China still awaits me. Think of it as a kind of “tweener” book: too specific and analytic to be truly popular, too broad, historical, and anecdotal to count as formal economic research. That is not a complaint.
Definitely recommended, you will learn lots from it, and it will upset people of virtually all ideologies.
Addendum: Here is a good FT review.
Assorted links
1. “Fill the Void” is an excellent social science movie and an excellent movie flat out.
2. Markets in everything: what do you think an LBJ tweet goes for?
3. Is grandpa better off not living with the kids?
4. Update on the German constitutional court and OMT.
5. Cuban funds flopping study.
Benjamin Britten at 100
I very much liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music. Also very good is Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century. They are both also useful for understanding English intellectual life during the 20th century, most of all Auden but even Keynes and also the broader history of homosexuality in England. Both are already out in the UK, where I picked them up earlier in the year, and both will make my best of the year list in late November.
Here is a good Anthony Tommasini survey of Britten at 100. I will offer these bits
The Britten pieces you are most likely to enjoy: Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, that disc has Les Illuminations and Nocturne too and is the single best Britten disc to buy, and also A Ceremony of Carols.
The ones I think are best: Cello Symphony, Winter Words (song cycle), and perhaps Billy Budd. War Requiem. Nocturne is a powerful spare late work. I like Curlew River for its connection to Balinese music, although I would not put it among his best compositions from a strictly musical point of view.
My most significant Britten heresy: I’ve never enjoyed listening to Peter Grimes and I find most of the experience oppressive. More generally, for much of my life I never felt close to Britten’s music, as it made me crave Stravinsky and Mahler instead. But I’ve listened to it quite a bit since January and have enjoyed it more than expected.
Two points: I think he understood the English language better than any other major composer, and how he sets and understands a text is without parallel, in English at least. Furthermore as a conductor or pianist he is superb, try his Brandenburg Concerti or his piano on Schubert’s Winterreise, Peter Pears singing, among other works. Those are two of my favorite recordings in all of classical music.
My model for how the Fed thinks about withdrawing QE
Bernanke believes QE works, but having been caught off-guard once before, in 2007-2008, he doesn’t fully trust his own judgment. He fears some risk of bubbles, or excess private disintermediation, in either case resulting from low interest rates. He lets Tarullo and Stein carry related messages to the markets to signal possible fears without having to endorse them.
Let’s say he assigns these risky scenarios a fairly small p = 0.05. Still, another financial collapse would be a disaster, all the more for political economy reasons. Bernanke has spent down his own political capital and these days Republicans are more likely to be obstructionists. Fear of that disaster leads him to withdraw QE sooner than his “most likely to be true” opinion thinks prudent. Economists respond by defending the “most likely to be true” opinion, and by arguing moralistically rather than probabilistically. That doesn’t convince Bernanke, because said economists can only convince him that they are likely right, not that he should obliterate his p = 0.05 fear of being wrong. The current policy course continues, early withdrawal from QE is contemplated, and economists complain all the more. Outside observers find it hard to understand the disconnect.
Here are some related probabilistic considerations from Brad DeLong.
How critical are the early years of life?
“Early intervention” to benefit children is one of those sacred cows which I consider unproven and which also is cited in far too malleable a fashion. Here is a new paper by Alan Rushton, Margaret Grant, Julia Feast, and John Simmonds, probably gated for many of you, but worth a read if you can.
The abstract is too wordy, but the study is a follow-up on one hundred Chinese girls who first lived in Chinese orphanages, were later adopted into the UK, and who now are 40 to 50 years old. The orphanage involved deprivation and even some malnutrition (55% of sample). There was basic medical care and supervision, although no general one-to-one caregiver relationship.
Of the initial hundred children, 98 were still alive and 72 of those responded to the survey, which also involved extensive follow-up interviews.
Most entered the orphanage very early, in the first year of life, with a mean of three months old. Age at exit varied between eight months and 83 months, with a mean of 23 months, and with a mean of 20 months spent in the care of the orphanage.
Compared to a general sample of adopted British women, and also UK non-adopted women, the adopted Chinese women did not appear to be at greater risk of mental illness, nor did they appear to have elevated health risks. There were no statistically significant differences when it came to “life control” or “life satisfaction.”
This single study is hardly dispositive, but it should raise some skeptical eyebrows. Recovering from a bad start, in this data set, appears eminently possible, provided of course that the environment improves.
Addendum: Here are some observations on Gerard Debreu’s early life (jstor).
For the pointer I thank a loyal MR reader.
Assorted links
1. Japanese Excel spreadsheet artist.
2. How quickly are plastic 3-D printed pistols spreading?
3. Outcomes of medical emergencies on commercial airline flights.
4. It seems that more people are renting tires, at net price 3x-4x retail. Think of it as “first world microcredit.”
Big Data, Big Government, Big Brother
In addition to monitoring who you call and when, your email, and your internet searches the government also has access to all of your credit card purchases. We usually don’t think about purchases as communication but what people buy says more about most people than does their email. Buying behavior can be used to predict all manner of information about your political views, affiliations, sexual activity, marriage quality and much more.
Where this all is leading
I.B.M.’s Watson, the supercomputing technology that defeated human Jeopardy! champions in 2011, is a prime example of the power of data-intensive artificial intelligence.
Watson-style computing, analysts said, is precisely the technology that would make the ambitious data-collection program of the N.S.A. seem practical. Computers could instantly sift through the mass of Internet communications data, see patterns of suspicious online behavior and thus narrow the hunt for terrorists.
Both the N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency have been testing Watson in the last two years, said a consultant who has advised the government and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.
There is more here, pointer is from Claudia Sahm.