Michael Kevane

Les sofas de la République et le coup d’Etat du 22 mars : Le tout nouveau son « Aw ya to anga lafia! »

Cette chanson est l’œuvre des rappeurs, du groupe Tata Pound, Master Soumi,  Ramsès et bien d’autres. Le single qui ne sera pas vendu est à la disposition de tous les Maliens, ils l’ont fait comme contribution dans la crise que connaît notre pays, surtout après l’agression du président de la transition, Dioncounda Traoré. C’est un texte très engagé avec des verbes forts et des mots clairs à l’endroit des politiciens et toutes autres personnes, qui selon les rappeurs veulent oublier le Mali,  la crise dans le nord en s’adonnant à des querelles politiques et d’intérêt à Bamako.

competition <- read.table(“C:\\Data\\Econ 135 Gender\\competitivereadingcamp.csv”, header=TRUE, sep=”,”)
names(competition )

# first make tables
with(competition , tapply(score1 , list(female , treatment ), mean))
with(competition , tapply(score2 , list(female , treatment ), mean))

# now run regression
fit <- lm(score2 ~ female + competitive + africanbooks+pretest
+compafrica + female+ femalecomp+ femaleafrica +femalecompafrica
+vildum1 +vildum2 +vildum3 +vildum4 +vildum5+ t
, data=competition )
summary(fit) # show results

HT: Elisee

What seems clear is that China’s economy did not bottom out as expected in the first quarter. It is flirting with real trouble. Yao Wei from Societe Generale says a blizzard of awful data “screams out for easing”.

China’s electricity output – watched religiously by bears – slumped in April. It is up just 0.7pc over the last year. State investment in railways has fallen 44pc, with an accelerating downward lurch over recent months. Highway construction has dropped 2.7pc. “The data shows extreme weakness in the Chinese economy,” said Alistair Thornton from IHS Global Insight in Beijing.

The Yangtze shipyards tell the tale. Caixin magazine said eight of the 10 largest builders in the country have not received a single new order this year. “A wave of closures in the shipbuilding industry has yet to begin. A hurricane is approaching,” said one official.

via World edges closer to deflationary slump as money contracts in China – Telegraph.

I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review section today, on the question many Chinese economists and industrialists are asking themselves but that relatively few outsiders recognize. Essentially it is whether the Chinese system of “guided” capitalism, which has achieved such economic, technological, and social-welfare miracles in the past 30 years, will be an advantage or a handicap over the next few years — as Chinese companies try to become more like the Apples, Samsungs, Daimlers, GEs, etc for which they now mainly do assembly work. Sample:

After another several-month stay in China last year, I came up with one proxy for China’s ability to take this next step: how slow its Internet service is, compared with South Korea’s or Japan’s.

In much of America, the Internet is slow by those standards, but mainly for infrastructure reasons. In China it’s slow because of political control: censorship and the “Great Firewall” bog down everything and make much of the online universe impossible to reach. “What country ever rode to pre-eminence by fighting the reigning technology of the time?” a friend asked while I was in China last year. “Did the Brits ban steam?”

Before you ask: Yes, this argument is not coincidentally related to the one I deal with in China Airborne.

Read more and follow bunch of nice links to visuals at James Fallows – The Atlantic.

There have been many spikes in the euro zone’s crisis fever in the past, of course, with a bailout here or a stopgap measure there seeming to calm things for a while. But this time, Europe may have reached a moment when the currency union’s survival depends on a powerful, convincing response.

Greece, progenitor of the debt debacle, is in political turmoil once again, and this time it is in danger of dropping out of the euro zone altogether. Spain, with one of the region’s largest economies, is in the grip of a banking crisis, and there is a growing sense that the danger to Spanish banks is of an entirely different order of magnitude from that in suffering but small Greece.

The clearest danger signal may be the euro currency itself. It is at a two-year low against the dollar, as investors who can do so are pulling money out of the euro region.

via Central Banker Says Euro Zone Structure Is ‘Unsustainable’ – NYTimes.com.

China’s currency dropped further in May against the dollar than in any other month since the Chinese government began allowing the renminbi to appreciate gradually in the summer of 2005, in a currency market shift that could help Chinese exports but worsen trade friction with Europe and particularly the United States.

….

China may have another motive in allowing the renminbi to decline against the dollar in the past month: the dollar’s strength. The euro has been sliding against the dollar this spring, and because the renminbi is effectively linked to the dollar, the euro has also been very weak this spring against the renminbi.

This has hurt the competitiveness of Chinese exports to Europe — and China exports slightly more to Europe than to the United States. Even with the renminbi’s decline against the dollar in May, the renminbi still rose 5.5 percent against the euro during the month.

via China Lets Currency Weaken, Risking New Trade Tensions – NYTimes.com.

There is a huge developing story in China’s currency, the renminbi. After years of structural under-valuation, things are changing. China faces what we have described before as a “dollar shortage” problem, a situation it last faced on a major level in 2008.  This might seem counterintutive given China’s large stock of US Treasuries, but we promise, this is a real and growing problem. As it stands, China sits on a huge pile of Treasuries it can’t openly liquidate for fear of sending the wrong signal to the Treasury market, as well as fear of moving the underlying.

But at the same time it is finding it ever harder to absorb dollars from the system, because fewer surplus greenbacks are making their way into China via trade. Ordinarily, China offers traders the chance to exchange dollars — received through their business practices — for renminbi at the standing PBoC renminbi rate. This bid is always attractive for traders because on a structural level it is undervalued versus the dollar. (Traders get more renminbi than they probably should.)

Since this creates an excess renminbi liquidity issue, the government simultaneously offers yuan-denominated bills to the market so as to absorb the huge amounts of yuan-denominated cash that it creates. But, whilst this creates big yuan-denominated liabilities for the government, the process also creates large dollar-denominated assets, which are usually reinvested into dollar-denominated “safe” securities like Treasuries (or GSE paper before 2008).

via FT Alphaville » Why China’s RMB exodus IS the story.

House Prices Plunge in Chinese Ghost Town – YouTube.

via No Guarantee « Patrick Chovanec.

In early April, Caixin magazine ran an article titled “Fool’s Gold Behind Beijing Loan Guarantees”, which documented the silent implosion of Zhongdan Investment Credit Guarantee Co. Ltd., based in China’s capital. “What’s a credit guarantee company?” you might ask — and ask you should, because these companies and the risks they potentially pose are one of the least understood aspects of China’s “shadow banking” system. If the risky trust products and wealth funds that Caixin documented last July are China’s equivalent to CDOs, then credit guarantee companies are China’s version of AIG.As I understand it, credit guarantee companies were originally created to help Small and Medium Enterprises SMEs get access to bank loans. State-run banks are often reluctant to lend to private companies that do not have the hard assets such as land or implicit government backing that State-Owned Enterprises SOEs enjoy. Local governments encouraged the formation of a new kind of financial entity, which would charge prospective borrowers a fee and, in exchange, serve as a guarantor to the bank, pledging to pay for any losses in the event of a default. Having transferred the risk onto someone else’s shoulders, the bank could rest easy and issue the loan which it otherwise would have been reluctant to make. In effect, the “credit guarantee” company had sold insurance — otherwise known as a credit default swap CDS — to the bank for a risky loan, with the borrower forking over the premium.

A number of readers, both at this blog and other places, have been asking for an explanation of what IS-LM is all about. Fair enough – this blogosphere conversation has been an exchange among insiders, and probably a bit baffling to normal human beings (which is why I have been labeling my posts “wonkish”).

[Update: IS-LM stands for investment-savings, liquidity-money — which will make a lot of sense if you keep reading]

So, the first thing you need to know is that there are multiple correct ways of explaining IS-LM. That’s because it’s a model of several interacting markets, and you can enter from multiple directions, any one of which is a valid starting point.

via IS-LMentary – NYTimes.com.

After weeks of speculation and debate, Egyptians went to the polls on Wednesday to cast ballots in the Arab world’s first competitive presidential election.

via The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.

Inside Job clip ‘Mishkin Looks Bad’ – At UK Cinemas February 18th – YouTube.

The Mexican Peso Crisis of the Mid-1990s – YouTube.

Mishkin on Lessons from the Crisis.

In our MBA curriculum reform we tried to convince part of the faculty to go this route, and they were completely opposed, with no interest in listening or experimenting. How about a randomized experiment for what works to get faculty to adopt new teaching technologies for their schools?

Without diminishing learning outcomes, automated teaching software can reduce the amount of time professors spend with students and could substantially reduce the cost of instruction, according to new research.In experiments at six public universities, students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on “machine-guided learning” software — with reduced face time with instructors — did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses. This largely held true regardless of the race, gender, age, enrollment status and family background of the students.

via Report: Robots stack up to human professors in teaching Intro Stats | Inside Higher Ed.

HT: Marginal Revolution

The online version of this article here in Perspectives on Psychological Science 2012 7: 221.

Abstract
By 2025, when most of today’s psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today’s iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right “psych apps,” smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women’s sexuality), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. Smartphone research will require new skills in app development and data analysis and will raise tough new ethical issues, but smartphones could transform psychology even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did.

Excerpt:

Lieberman, Pillsworth, and Haselton (2011) reasoned that women near peak fertility in their cycle should reduce contact with male kin to minimize the risks of incest and genetic inbreeding. Analyzing itemized cell-phone bills from female college students who retrospectively reported the sex, age, relationship, and emotional closeness of each caller, they found that women at peak fertility talked less (in call number
and duration) with their fathers but more with their mothers, consistent with incest avoidance.

HT: Marginal Revolution

From Kun Guo and co-authors, confirmation of an earlier finding that dogs, like humans, exhibit left gaze bias to better and more quickly read emotions (more likely expressed on right side of face) in humans.

Sensitivity to the emotions of others provides clear biological advantages. However, in the case of heterospecific relationships, such as that existing between dogs and humans, there are additional challenges since some elements of the expression of emotions are species-specific. Given that faces provide important visual cues for communicating emotional state in both humans and dogs, and that processing of emotions is subject to brain lateralisation, we investigated lateral gaze bias in adult dogs when presented with pictures of expressive human and dog faces. Our analysis revealed clear differences in laterality of eye movements in dogs towards conspecific faces according to the emotional valence of the expressions. Differences were also found towards human faces, but to a lesser extent. For comparative purpose, a similar experiment was also run with 4-year-old children and it was observed that they showed differential processing of facial expressions compared to dogs, suggesting a species-dependent engagement of the right or left hemisphere in processing emotions.

via PLoS ONE: Reading Faces: Differential Lateral Gaze Bias in Processing Canine and Human Facial Expressions in Dogs and 4-Year-Old Children.