Results for “water” 1034 found
Safari surprises
I learned just how accustomed I am to North American wildlife patterns. In much of North America, you see wildlife only sporadically, as for instance in Yellowstone Park you can easily drive for an hour and not see a bear.
In this part of Masai Mara, it is unusual to drive for more than thirty seconds without seeing something interesting. And very commonly you can see a tableau of multiple animals, such as buffalo, Thomson’s gazelle, warthogs, and zebras, all together at once.
On those 4-5 hour drives around the plains, usuually I am thinking about “solving for the equilibrium.” When you see a group of dik-diks, the immediate thought is “how do they escape the cheetahs?” You wonder what is the optimal number of a buffalo grouping to repel a lion attack, without crowding or overgrazing on a particular patch of land.
How close can your open vehicle come to the lions without arousing excessive interest? (Closer than you might think.)
When should a pride of lions split into two groups, balancing strength of collective attack against food scarcity?
Why do cheetahs go about it solo? And how is that fact related to their propensity to win chases on the basis of extreme bursts of speed?
Can you model why the zebras and wildebeest seem to get along so well together?
What is the deadweight loss from the fact that wildebeest use property allocation — over which the males fight — to attract females?
I have noticed that the guides are implicitly Lamarckian in their theorizing.
As dusk arrives, many of the larger cats become more active. And so the potential prey wake up and move to more open territory, where they can see predators arriving. They group and spread themselves out (optimally?), to maximize their own collective field of vision and aural acuity, in case a predator should approach. Those patterns are gone by the late morning.
There is definitely a set of land value gradients here, noting that waterholes are both a) super-valuable, and b) the place where you are most vulnerable to predators. Few potential prey wish to settle there, though they will visit and make haste to leave.
I enjoy watching the prey trigger equilibrium of “My durability in running speed exceeds yours, so I can hang around and expect you won’t charge me, at least not if I keep a safe enough distance. Furthermore, if I don’t run away I can keep you in plain view, which is preferable in any case.”
So my biggest surprise is how visible the notion of equilibrium is here.
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.
Thursday assorted links
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.
Sunday assorted links
1. From Kyjnghyun Cho, total sanity on AGI risk.
2. The Bible is now banned in some Utah middle and elementary schools, due to violence and vulgarity.
3. “In a new analysis based on the latest telescope data, University of Florida astronomers have discovered that a third of the planets around the most common stars in the galaxy could be in a goldilocks orbit close enough, and gentle enough, to hold onto liquid water – and possibly harbor life.” Link here.
4. “Viable offspring derived from single unfertilized mammalian oocytes.” Not endorsing, but interesting to see.
5. Louise Perry reviews Bryan Caplan on feminism.
7. Good Ross column on where U.S. politics is procedurally at right now (NYT).
Would higher male earnings drive a marriage boom?
The results of that research cast doubt on the notion that an improvement in men’s economic position will necessarily increase marriage rates. The fracking boom of the first decade of the 2000s, which gave rise to economic booms in US towns and cities where they wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, provided a rare opportunity to investigate whether an improvement in the economic prospects of men without a four-year college degree would lead to a reduction in the nonmarital birth share. In a 2018 study that I wrote with my coauthor Riley Wilson, we used a fracking boom to test a “reverse marriageable men” hypothesis…
Our first finding was that these local fracking booms led to overall increases in total births, an increase of roughly 3 births per 1,000 women…
To our surprise, the increase in births associated with fracking booms occurred as much with unmarried partners as with married ones. The “reverse marriageable men” hypothesis, which predicted that improvements in the economic circumstances of men would lead to an increase in marriage and a reduction in the share of births outside marriage, was not what the data showed.
That is from Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Here is the original research. Note also that pp.96-100 of this book provide strong evidence against the claim that the welfare state has been driving the rise in single-parent families.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Who benefits most from name visibility bias during the journal editorial process?
2. Prendergast watercolor for 500-700k, truly a splendid piece, St. Marks in Venice. The collection as a whole, while not my taste (“too American” in a very particular direction), shows exquisite taste. You can learn a lot by studying their choices. From the Wolf family. Here is more from their collection.
3. AI Policy Guide, by Matthew Mittelsteadt at Mercatus. And a clear explanation of the new “autonomous” AIs.
4. Current U.S. defense spending is, in historical terms, at a relative low point.
5. Miami Native, new (non-leftist) magazine on the way, presenting and explicating and enhancing the status of the culture of Miami. They are looking for contributors. Mainly a physical copy magazine, planning only a limited presence on-line.
6. Genetic timeline of humans? (speculative) And I believe in hiring talented 14- to 15-year olds.
My favorite things Alaska
I haven’t done many of these in a while, mostly because I haven’t been in many new states or countries recently. But Alaska I had never visited before (my remaining state, in fact), so here goes:
Classical music: John Luther Adams. “The other John Adams,” his reputation continues to rise, now I would like to see one performed live. I am fan of the sound textures and the broad expanses of his works, even if the programmatic aspects do not always delight me. Become Ocean is his best known piece.
Popular music: There is Jewel, I guess she is OK, and I can’t think of anyone else.
This is tough! Nor did Andre Marrou acquit himself especially well over the years. How about “theatre builder-upper”? Then I can cite Edward Albee.
Affiliated writer: Jack London, obviously. Still worth reading, not archaic, has held up remarkably well.
Movies, set in: Plenty of competition here. There is Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and Never Cry Wolf (oddly forgotten but moving, plus the protagonist is named Tyler, which was rare in the early 1980s), and of course Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Into the Wild I haven’t seen. Maybe I watched Abbott and Costello Lost in Alaska as a kid? What am I missing?
Artist: Taking the entire cake has to be Alaskan indigenous art, but who should be the favorite? I can’t bring myself to elevate Florence Nupok Malewotkuk to the number one position, so perhaps Nathan Jackson, who did Tlingit art?
Watercolor, affiliated with: Try this John La Farge, currently up at auction.
Throat singer: A strong area, but which ones exactly are from Alaska rather than Canada? Janet Aglukkaq? Don’t ask me!
Here is a good essay on Alaskan totem poles, from Eyak, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures.
I can’t name a mask-maker, but the masks are arguably the highlight of the Alaskan indigenous tradition.
Any NBA players? Am I supposed to like Carlos Boozer?
The bottom line: There is more than you might think at first.
Anarchy in South Africa
Public services such as police, fire, and traffic control in South Africa are breaking down. Private firms are stepping in to take some of the burden. Twenty two percent of Johannesburg’s fire engines are owned and operated by private firms.
Fire Ops employs more than 60 firefighters across seven fire stations in Johannesburg and owns two fire engines—including one now sporting the same shade of blue Discovery uses for its logo and much of its branding—as well as six smaller high-pressure-pump response vehicles.
Discovery says the blue firetruck responded to 172 building fires between Fire Force’s launch through the end of January.
Mr. Ossip said the Discovery-branded truck promotes the insurer’s brand and lowers damages, including to multimillion-dollar homes in some of Johannesburg’s toniest areas. “You need to just save one or two of those a year and it is substantial savings,” he said.
The service helps alleviate a shortage of operational fire engines in Johannesburg, a spread-out city of more than 5.5 million residents, in situations where minutes can make the difference between a blaze limited to a couple of rooms and one that destroys an entire house or spreads to neighboring homes.
Robert Mulaudzi, a spokesman for the City of Johannesburg Emergency Management Services, said the city currently has about seven operational fire engines across 30 fire stations.
…Fire Ops, which invoices buildings’ owners for fire services, says that while it responds to all calls, it will give priority to clients, including Discovery policyholders, when simultaneous fires break out. Other insurers usually pick up the bill when the company puts out a fire in a home not insured by Discovery, said De Wet Engelbrecht, Fire Ops’s chief executive.
In 19th century Great Britain prosecution assocations and insurance firms were responsible for much of the policing (see Stephen Davies in The Voluntary City.) In Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City (working paper) Shruti Rajagopolan and I discuss private police and fire services in modern day Gurgaon. In general, the private firms provide excellent service relative to their public counterparts but, as in Gurgaon, there are limits to how much the private firms can do without large economies of scale:
…Fire Ops also has to navigate public infrastructure that doesn’t always work, including traffic lights, fire hydrants and municipal water supplies….In September, both Fire Ops and the city’s fire department responded to a blaze at Little Forest Centre, a private special-needs school in Johannesburg, but a water shortage in the area meant all fire hydrants were empty, said Kate More, the school’s owner and principal, who isn’t a Discovery policyholder.
Despite Fire Ops sourcing water from a neighbor’s pool, the school burned down.
Addendum: In unrelated news, just one year after its grand opening Whole Foods is closing its downtown San Francisco store because they can’t ensure the safety of their employees.
Science is proceeding
In a few days, a £1.4bn probe will be blasted into space on an eight-year mission to find signs of life on other worlds in our solar system. The spacecraft will not head to local destinations such as the planet Mars, however. Instead, it will fly into deep space and survey the icy moons of distant Jupiter. In doing so, it will open up a new chapter in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer – or Juice – will exploit an unexpected feature of our solar system. The greatest reserves of water turn out to exist on worlds very far from Earth, in deep space, and in orbit around the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. Juice is the first mission to be launched specifically to explore these remote worlds.
Here is the full story, via mdschultz.
*On Every Tide*
The subtitle is The Making and Remaking of the Irish World, and the author is Sean Connolly. Excerpt:
Seven out of every ten emigrants entering the United States between 1900 and 1909 were men. The female minority, moreover, came mainly as members of family groups. Emigration from Ireland initially followed much the same pattern. After 1850, however, Ireland became the only European country to send almost as many women as men across the Atlantic, the great majority as single women rather than as wives or daughters. This pattern of independent female migration was of central importance, giving Irish diasporic communities a stability they would not otherwise have had. In particular it helps to explain why Irish rates of return migration were so low: there was no need to return home to find a bride form one’s own ethnic background.
And from a bit later in the text:
There were good economic reasons why Irish women were more ready than others to take to the migrant ship. the replacement of the cottage spinning wheel by the giant water-and-steam-driven machinery of Belfast and the surrounding area, and the failure of factory-based manufacturing to thrive in other parts of the country, sharply reduced the opportunity for women to find employment, and with it their prospect of marriage.
Quite a good book.
My Conversation with Jonathan GPT Swift
Here is the transcript and audio, I have heard that video (no joke) is on the way. Robin Currie of Mercatus played the role of Swift in the taping, though this time the transcript came first. Here is part of the summary:
GPT Swift discusses his support for the Church of Ireland, his shift from the Whigs to the Tories, and his opposition to William Wood’s copper coinage in Ireland. He also talks about his works, including Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, and his skepticism of moral and intellectual progress. Swift addresses rumors about his relationship with Esther Johnson and his fascination with scatological themes in his works. He also discusses his early life in England, his intellectual mentor Sir William Temple, and his jovial attitude towards death.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Queen Anne: overrated or underrated? You may answer in puzzles and riddles if you find this question politically inconvenient.
SWIFT: As Jonathan Swift, I shall offer my perspective on Queen Anne in a veiled manner, employing a metaphor to express my thoughts:
Imagine a vessel navigating through troubled waters, with strong currents representing the shifting political landscape. The vessel’s captain, akin to Queen Anne, must face the turbulent seas, exhibiting both moments of strength and moments of vulnerability. Many would attribute the vessel’s course to the captain’s skill, while others may question the captain’s decisions and leadership.
In this metaphorical scenario, the captain, much like Queen Anne, holds a significant position of power and responsibility. However, the captain’s competence may be a subject of debate. Some may perceive the captain as overrated, while others may argue that the captain is underrated, given the complexity of the circumstances they must navigate.
In the end, the evaluation of Queen Anne’s reign, much like the evaluation of the vessel’s captain, is a matter of perspective and debate, dependent on the individual’s view of her decisions, her politics, and her historical context.
How about this for humor:
COWEN: Can you tell us a joke from your time, Jonathan Swift, a short but funny one?
SWIFT: I shall share a short jest that was popular during my time:
Why do we never tell secrets on a farm?
Because the potatoes have eyes and the corn has ears.
COWEN: So, what is a joke from your time that *you* would find funny?
SWIFT: My humor often leaned towards satire and irony. A jest from my time that I might find more appealing would be a humorous couplet from my own work, On Poetry: A Rhapsody:
“So geese in compass, figures may express, And teach dull censors to be more or less.”
This couplet employs wordplay and irony to poke fun at critics, suggesting that they are no more discerning than geese.
Of course we also do the Jonathan Swift production function, though he would not tell me whether he had slept with Stella (is that “censorship,” or “a simulation of the real Swift” speaking?). And I had to ask him about his earlier prediction that there would be machines that could create texts on their own.
As for method, here is TC:
Now what you’re going to hear and what you’re going to read on the transcript is very close to the actual exchange but there were a few small differences and edits we’ve made. Very often the GPT would begin the answer with, “As Jonathan Swift.” We simply took that out. Some of the longer answers, there were resummaries at the end. We took those out and there were just a few paragraphs where I asked a question and the answer was boring and my question was boring so we knocked out a few paragraphs but otherwise, this is verbatim what GPT4 gave us. I did not keep on repeating prompts trying to get the answer I wanted. This is really awfully close to the dialogue.
Do read the whole thing. It is too “textbook-y” in parts, but overall I was extremely impressed.
The permanent pause?
Here is an Elon Musk-signed petition, with many other luminaries, calling for a pause in “Giant” AI experiments. Here is one excerpt:
In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.
Few people are against such developments, or at least most of them. Yet this passage, to my eye, shows how few realistic, practical alternatives the pausers have. Does regulation of any area, even simpler ones than AI, ever work so well? Exactly how long is all this supposed to take? How well do those same signers expect our Congress to handle, say, basic foreign policy decisions? The next debt ceiling crisis? Permitting reform?
Is there any mention of public choice/political economy questions in the petition, or even a peripheral awareness of them? Any dealing with national security issues and America’s responsibility to stay ahead of potentially hostile foreign powers? And what about the old DC saying, running something like “in politics there is nothing so permanent as the temporary”?
Might we end up with a regulatory institution as good as the CDC?
By the way, what does it mean to stop the “progress,” but not stop and not cease to improve the safety testing? Are those two goals really so separable?
Overall this petition is striking for its absence of concrete, practicable recommendations, made in the light of the semi-science of political economy. You can think of it as one kind of evidence that these individuals are not so very good at predicting the future.
Time Passages
Here’s an interesting idea it wouldn’t have occured to me to ask. What is the length of time described in the average 250 words of narration and how has this changed over time? Most famously James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is a long novel about single day with many pages describing brief experiences in minute detail. In contrast, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men covers 2 billion years in fewer words than Joyce uses to cover a single day.
Using human readers grading 1000 passages, Underwood et al. (2018) finds that the average length of time described in a typical passage has declined substantially since the 1700s, from a day to about an hour so a decline by a factor of 24. Writers have become much more focused on describing individual experiences than events.
In a blog post, Underwood revisits his earlier work but this time comparing human readers with various statistical techniques and also GPT. To use GPT he prompts
Read the following passage of fiction. Then do five things. 1: Briefly summarize the passage. 2: Reason step by step to decide how much time is described in the passage. If the passage doesn’t include any explicit reference to time, you can guess how much time the events described would have taken. Even description can imply the passage of time by describing the earlier history of people or buildings. But characters’ references to the past or future in spoken dialogue should not count as time that passed in the scene. Report the time using units of years, weeks, days, hours, or minutes. Do not say zero or N/A. 3: If you described a range of possible times in step 2 take the midpoint of the range. Then multiply to convert the units into minutes. 4: Report only the number of minutes elapsed, which should match the number in step 3. Do not reply N/A. 5: Given the amount of speculation required in step 2, describe your certainty about the estimate–either high, moderate, or low. The passage follows: <omitting this to save space>
Here’s an example of the analysis:
ABRIDGED PASSAGE FROM Jane Eyre: And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child … Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.
ASSISTANT REPLIES.
1: The narrator recalls a saying about dreaming of children being a sign of trouble and remembers an incident from her childhood. She then describes her recent dreams of infants over the past week.
2: The passage mentions the narrator’s childhood memory, which happened when she was six years old, and the past week of dreams. The time elapsed in the passage is the week of dreams.
3: 1 week has elapsed. At seven days a week that’s 7 days. 24 hours in a day, so 168 hours. 60 minutes in an hour, so 10080 minutes.
4: 10080 minutes.
5: Moderate confidence, as the childhood memory is not counted as time passing in the scene.
Overall, Underwood finds that GPT-4 is more accurate than previous statistical techniques in that its judgments correlate with those of human readers nearly as much as human readers correlate with themselves.
Addendum: See also my paper with Tyler on how to use GPT models.
Chat Law Goes Global
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the global business services firm, has signed a deal with OpenAI for access to “Harvey”, OpenAI’s Chatbot for legal services.
Reuters: PricewaterhouseCoopers said Wednesday that it will give 4,000 of its legal professionals access to an artificial intelligence platform, becoming the latest firm to introduce generative AI technology for legal work.
PwC said it partnered with AI startup Harvey for an initial 12-month contract, which the accounting and consulting firm said will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services.
PwC said it will also determine ways for tax professionals to use the technology.
IBM’s Watson was a failure so we will see but, yeah I will say it, this time feels different. For one, lawyers deal with text where GPTs excel. Second, GPTs have already revolutionized software coding and unlike Watson I am using GPTs every day for writing and researching and it works. The entire world of white collar work is going to be transformed over the next year. See also my paper with Tyler, How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT.