The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.Some obvious caveats:
CONCLUSIONS:
These findings suggest that the 10-minute nap was overall the most effective afternoon nap duration of the nap lengths examined in this study. The implications from these results also suggest a need to consider a process occurring in the first 10 minutes of sleep that may account for the benefits associated with brief naps. [more]
[My emphasis]
Production:
• Beef: 2011 annual production was changed from 36,195 million pounds to 26,195 million pounds.
• Pork: 2011 annual production was changed from 22,752 million pounds to 22,758 million pounds.
• Pork: Third quarter 2012 production was changed from 5,260 million pounds to 5,620 million pounds.
• Total red meat and poultry: Annual 2012 production was changed from 92,132 million pounds to 92,140 million pounds.
• Total red meat and poultry: Annual 2013 production was changed from 92,742 million pounds to 92,052 million pounds.
Why the surge in digital demand? Privacy is one explanation. Erotic titles with racy covers are believed to sell better as e-books because the technology removes the embarrassment of toting them around in public – and the same may be true of spiritual titles, experts say. Book jackets covered in angels and rainbows may be equally uncomfortable for some people to read in public, says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a publisher of self-published e-books. “These books can be sampled, purchased and read without the judgmental eyes of a clerk at the cash register, or colleagues who might glance at the cover.” Plus, digital bibles and sex trilogies are only as heavy as your Kindle Fire, he says. [More]What if this leads to a lot more reading of a lot more dubious literature? Good new? Bad news?
It’s beginning to look like Keynes was wrong about liquidity traps, at least when he argued that there’s a certain minimum nominal yield that government bond investors demand, and that long term rates can be reduced no further. Wherever people draw a line, bond yields just seem to plunge right through, to one record low after another. And we know from Japan that they can go even lower. But what does this mean?I have been trying to grasp the nature of this savings glut for the last few years. Nothing else really explains why interest rates refuse to climb or inflation is almost trivial, even with commodity volatility.
It probably means multiple things. For instance it suggests that the Keynesian/market monetarist AD pessimists and the Great Stagnation AS pessimists are both right. We are looking at BOTH low inflation and low real GDP growth for many years to come. Why don’t I think AD explanations are enough? Partly because even the 20 year T-bond now has a negative real yield. Indeed it suggests the Bernanke “global savings glut” hypothesis is also correct, a point I’ve argued previously. Japan is the future of the world. [More]
So what is going on? The main answer is that this is what happens when you have a “deleveraging shock,” in which everyone is trying to pay down debt at the same time. Household borrowing has plunged; businesses are sitting on cash because there’s no reason to expand capacity when the sales aren’t there; and the result is that investors are all dressed up with nowhere to go, or rather no place to put their money. So they’re buying government debt, even at very low returns, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, by making money available so cheaply, they are in effect begging governments to issue more debt. [More]It truly counterintuitive to grasp that assets and debts are really just two sides of the same transaction. Our seemingly horrifying debt is also the retirement fund for Mom and Dad (bonds). So the more we stress to save, not spend, the more we need investments to put those savings in.
In short, Japan's economy works better for those middle-aged and older than it does for the young. But it is not yet in crisis, and economists say there is plenty it could do to raise its potential growth rate, as well as to lower its debt burden.While eyes strain to make the first sighting of inflation or rising interest rates, the fact we are so afraid of seeing them almost insures their delayed arrival. In the face of real numbers on CD rates we cling to cash and cash equivalents like...a bunch of old people.
Last weekend Yoshihiko Noda, the prime minister, took a brave shot at promoting reform when he said Japan planned to start consultations towards joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This is an American-backed free-trade zone that could lead to a lowering of tariffs on a huge swath of goods and services. Predictably it is elderly farmers, doctors and small businessmen who are most against it.
Reforms to other areas, such as the tax and benefit system, might be easier if the government could tell the Japanese a different story: not that their economy is mired in stagnation, but that its performance reflects the ups and downs of an ageing society, and that the old as well as the young need to make sacrifices.
The trouble is that the downbeat narrative is deeply ingrained. The current crop of leading Japanese politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen are themselves well past middle age. Many think they have sacrificed enough since the glory days of the 1980s, when Japan's economy seemed unstoppable. Mr Weinstein says they suffer from “diminished-giant syndrome”, nervously watching the economic rise of China. If they compared themselves instead with America and Europe, they might feel heartened enough to make some of the tough choices needed. [More]
One lesson to be learned here is that environmental issues can no longer speak for themselves. Unlike the images of urban haze from the 1960s, stories of anxious polar bears or dried up waterbeds fail to generate public mobilization on climate change issues. In fact, a study by Sol Hart and Erik Nisbet suggests that increasing public knowledge about climate change does not lead to greater support of climate policies. Merely transmitting information about environmental repercussions—no matter the degree of impact on the human or natural environment—is not enough to persuade the population of the public who is already disengaged or dismissive about climate change.It could be that we'll be unlucky and see increased incidence of climatic extremes like this drought, and availability bias will swing public opinion toward acceptance of scientific opinion, even as that opinion continues to be buttressed by converted skeptics.
Instead, Hart and Nisbet’s study points to the important role of social cues in interpreting climate news. Participants in the study were more receptive to and persuaded by a story about climate change effects when the community involved was socially similar to their own (in this case, farmers in up-state New York verses farmers in France). The public, on both sides of the political fence, are more likely to rally behind an environmental cause when they can personally relate to the people or places in question, suggesting that localizing climate change in terms of impacts and policy action is an important path forward.
There is significant opportunity for the climate change movement to adopt new media strategies in order to reach larger populations of the public. Integrating social cues and increasing the relevancy of climate stories is one encouraging method. Others include introducing climate change issues under existing frameworks, such as public health or the moral responsibility to protect innocents, as was the case in campaigns against smoking and Big Tobacco. These strategies can help untangle the super-wicked problems of climate change so that the movement can generate alliances with people across political ideology and social identity. [More]
The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.The tipping point for him was a report by Leanardo Maugueri of Harvard (funded by BP, ahem).
Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.
Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)
Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time. [More worth reading]
To his credit, Maugeri acknowledges that his analysis “is subject to a significant margin of error, depending on several circumstances that extend beyond the risks in each project or country,” and he details numerous important caveats. And to the extent that he reveals the assumptions underpinning his forecast, his transparency is laudable. In the final analysis, however, it is insufficient. He fails to provide adequate justification that his assumptions, being widely divergent from most other industry estimates, are remotely realistic.Finally, The Oil Drum, the blog for oil geeks, picks up the thread and adds the best comments to boot.
We must conclude that the key assumptions about reserve growth and its effect on decline rates in Maugeri’s report are muddled, speculative and unverifiable. And sprinkling those assertions with repeated declamations about how peak oil is a non-issue, insisting repeatedly that the only real constraints on his scenario have to do with political decisions and geopolitical risks, suggests that his report is more about grinding a political axe on behalf of the oil industry than offering a serious or transparent analysis. Finally we must note that Maugeri is well known for his hostility to peak oil, as is BP, which funded his report. After taking real-world risks, costs, and restrictions into account, the case for peak oil—which is about production rates, not production capacity or reserves—seems far more realistic. [More]
Summary Maugeri's analysis and conclusions are critically dependent upon the decline rates applied to existing and future fields, and yet he does not explicitly say what these decline rates will be. However, Maugeri’s assumptions can be derived from his Table 2, which projects gross and net capacity additions over the period to 2020. Doing so suggests he uses an average annual decline rate for all fields of 1.6% over this period, which is less than half of the IEA and CERA estimates for 2008 (4.1%/year and 4.5%/year respectively). The discrepancy is even greater since the IEA and other analysts project an increase in average decline rates over the 2011-20 period. If we replace Maugeri’s 1.6% decline rate assumption with the IEA estimate of 4.1%, the projected loss of production capacity over the period to 2020 increases from 11 mb/d to 26.5 mb/d. In turn, the projected global production capacity in 2020 reduces from 110.6 mb/d to 95.1mb/d (a reduction of 14%). Since average decline rates would be expected to increase over this period, this projection must be considered optimistic. [More]While I think I'm trying to be impartial, I probably am carrying my own biases into this fray, but Sorrell's point about decline rates vs. depletion rates is abstruse but convincing for me. I have never been fascinated with Peak Oil because I wasn't sure what it really meant in everyday terms. Clearly the US production boom has made it seem like there is no real problem in the immediate future (for us anyway).
Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.While skeptics don't think the 2℃ is all that scary, more of us are growing uncomfortable with the 0.8℃ we've already managed to produce. Not to be a doomsayer, but I just don't see much happening until way too late. And given the current state of domestic and global policy debate, the first few decades will be spent assigning blame to win elections even if we do decide we're in trouble.
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain. [More]
Brown got into fake meat after working in the clean-energy business. He says he loves the taste of meat, but his childhood on a family farm convinced him to refrain from killing animals*, and he’s been vegan for many years. In 2009, he met Fu-Hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, food scientists at the University of Missouri who’d been working to create a meat substitute for more than a decade. The three formed a company, and they’ve been working to build the perfect fake meat ever since.
The process has moved along in fits and starts. “It’s a combination lock,” Brown says. “There are three different parameters we’re working with—heat, cooling, and pressure.” To make the meat, the firm starts with a powdered protein—for the chicken strips, they’re using soy; for the beef, they’ll use a protein from a kind of pea—that they form into a liquid paste. The paste is heated, then it’s extruded through a machine that resembles a pasta press, and then cooled. “It was a process of trial and error to get all of those to align exactly right in the right sequence,” Brown says. “But if you do—if you get the heating and cooling sequence right, and you apply exactly the right pressure through the extrusion—you get the proteins to align in a way that makes them almost indistinguishable from animal proteins.”
Brown says that other hurdles remain, and Beyond Meat is constantly working to refine its methods. Making the perfect fake beef is harder than making chicken, because people expect real beef to look a bit red, from blood. Beyond Meat can add a red hue using beet juice or other natural colorants, but Brown doesn’t know yet if people will consider it strange to have bloody-looking fake meat. This sounds like a trivial factor, but one study has shown that a meat substitute’s appearance is the most important factor to consumers—even before you taste it, you decide whether fake meat is acceptable based on how it looks.
More reviews here, here, here.Over time, Brown believes, the firm will get all these little details just right. He’s also confident that society will accept his innovations just as it has adapted to tech revolutions of the past. “Once, we had the horse-drawn carriage, and then we had the horse-less carriage, and then we had the automobile,” he says. “I’m firmly convinced we’re going to go from beef and chicken products that are animal in origin to those that are made with plants—and at some point in the future you’ll walk down the aisle of the supermarket and ask for beef and chicken, and like the automobile has no relationship to the horse, what you get will have nothing to do with animals.” [More]
But now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy. (Disclosure: Slate participates in Amazon Associates, an "affiliate" advertising plan that rewards websites for sending customers to the online store. This means that if you click on an Amazon link from Slate—including a link in this story—and you end up buying something, Amazon will send Slate a percentage of your final purchase price.)
It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed. [More]The crucial aspect of this is the impact is in the service sector - not manufacturing. The former is supposedly the sector of the Future for jobs.
But à la carte would blow up television, which has been the most dependable and lucrative business model in modern entertainment history. The Internet gutted the music industry. Print journalism has been forced to innovate or die -- or, sometimes, both simultaneously -- in response to the Web. The American movie industry has survived fundamentally because it learned to diversify away from the terms "American" and "movie industry" -- most of their revenue now comes from overseas and "merchandise-able" franchises. But the cable bundle is still basically the cable bundle, and it is still growing by hundreds of thousands of subscribers a year. Innovation is an answer to a problem. As long as cable providers don't have a revenue problem, they have less need to innovate.
The debate between DirecTV (a provider) and Viacom (a "content" creator) is about finding the right price that providers should pay for content that most people don't watch. That's where bundles are useful. They disguise the price of things we don't use. But with pay TV growth slowing, we're at the edge of a revolution. "DirecTV thinks video streaming is eating away at the ratings of channels like MTV and Comedy Central," Jeff Bercovici writes at Forbes, and the company has "demanded that Viacom give consumers the right to select channels a la carte."
The Aereo story is different. It's not about cable. But it is about distributing broadcast networks online. Once sports fans can get the Olympics and NBA and other shows without a cable package, whenever they want it, it could serve alongside Netflix, Hulu and other services to replace the cable bundle.
The Internet is ruthlessly efficient at stripping cross-subsidies and allowing content to shine on its own. (As Jim Fallows has pointed out, newspapers once paid for international coverage with classifieds and cars. Now, if you want classifieds and cars, you go to a classifieds site or a cars site. Bye-bye, cross-subsidy.) Devices like Aereo combined with cases like Viacom's could be leading to an a la carte model for television. The question isn't really if the Internet's unbundling revolution will visit the television industry but when. [More]
It is clearly reasonable in our subsector (cash grain). We're replacing people at an increasing rate matched by our acquisition of technology. When we can have one guy monitoring 2-3 field machines, it will be obvious, but our current self-deluding pseudo-stats about "jobs that depend on ag" help us to imagine this isn't happening.When I look at this graph I see evidence of the computer age everywhere. After the recession of 2001 ended profits came roaring back and equipment investment eventually started ramping up sharply, but the employment ratio increased only between September of ’03 and December of ’06, the most frenzied time for both the construction and financial industries.And since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 GDP, equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are all now at their all-time highs (non-financial profits are near their historic high). The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers.So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring — from needing more human workers.As computers race ahead, acquiring more and more skills in pattern matching, communication, perception, and so on I expect that this decoupling will continue, and maybe even accelerate. This doesn’t mean that companies are about to stop hiring altogether; there are still plenty of things that humans alone can do. But it means they’ll need to hire at an ever-lower rate, compared to how quickly they’re growing, making money, or buying equipment. Because America’s working age population will continue to grow for at least the next few decades, I predict that the employment ratio will not start to trend upward in the coming years. If anything, I think it’ll decrease. [More]
That would have made reporting the news a little tricky. But maybe it wouldn't have upset the religious right as much.SIEGEL: I want to ask you about this particle's nickname, the "God particle." What did Higgs, who I've read is an atheist, think about the nickname the "God particle"?MARTIN: I'm sure - I actually haven't ever asked him this directly, but I'm sure he doesn't like it. Almost all particle physicists detest that name. It was actually Leon Lederman, who's a Nobel laureate, that came up with it. But he was trying to call it "that goddamn particle," and that wasn't allowed by the publishers so it became the "God particle."So the name stuck and I think it's fine because then people know what we're talking about. But secretly, all of us hate the name, the "God particle." [More]
The number of firework injuries, meanwhile, has not increased proportionately. Data from the National Firework Safety Council finds there were 7,300 firework-related injuries in 2008, just slightly up from the 7,000 in 1996.
Elsewhere, the Sunlight Foundation gets into the Fourth of July spirit by digging into the history of firework industry lobbying. Firework makers appear to be a bipartisan bunch, donating “$1,149,280 to Republican candidates and $1,082,834 to Democratic candidates since 1990.” Nearly all of their donations went to local level politicians, rather than those running for Congress or presidents. [More]
Okay, explained like you're a five year-old (well, okay, maybe a bit older), without too much oversimplification, and (hopefully) without sounding too biased:Posting about the ACA is toxic, like climate change only meaner, and right now (drought) I really don't need that. Nor do rational arguments seem to gain much traction. Haidt's book made it clear to me why.
What people call "Obamacare" is actually the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. However, people were calling it "Obamacare" before everyone even hammered out what it would be. It's a term mostly used by people who don't like the PPACA, and it's become popularized in part because PPACA is a really long and awkward name, even when you turn it into an acronym like that.
Anyway, the PPACA made a bunch of new rules regarding health care, with the purpose of making health care more affordable for everyone. Opponents of the PPACA, on the other hand, feel that the rules it makes take away too many freedoms and force people (both individuals and businesses) to do things they shouldn't have to.
So what does it do? Well, here is everything, in the order of when it goes into effect (because some of it happens later than other parts of it): [Please read the succinct summary here]
