Michael Kevane

Emeka Okafor is an entrepreneur and venture catalyst who lives in New York City.He is the curator of Maker Faire Africa.He was the director for TED Global 2007 that took place in Arusha,Tanzania.In addition he is a member of the TED fellowship team.His interests include sustainable technologies in the developing world and paradigm breaking technologies in general. His blog, Timbuktu Chronicles seeks to spur dialogue in areas of entrepreneurship, technology and the scientific method as it impacts Africa.

via Timbuktu Chronicles.

I read about this company, SoleRebels, co-founded by Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu, from Ethiopia.  I famously don’t buy or need anything.  I mean it… I’m an original frugal recycler child of Depression-age-parents-type …. But I am tempted to buy some shoes from them. They look kind of cool.  Maybe I’ll get some from someone as an Xmas present! 😉

MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples.

via Mitt Romney’s Search for Simple Answers – NYTimes.com.

Dropbox has turned into a big scam where you strategize and pay for attic space to store junk… know what I mean?  It’s beneath us!

“By taxing estates heavily at death the State marks its condemnation of the selfish  millionaire’s unworthy life. It is desirable that nations should go much further in this direction.”

See the original article “Wealth” in The North American Review Volume 0148 Issue 391 (June 1889).

Chinese Leader Calls for Strong Moves to Offset Slowdown

Source: NY Times

Premier Wen Jiabao of China warned on Sunday of “huge downward pressure” on the Chinese economy, in the clearest expression yet of concern at the top of the country’s leadership about a sharp slowdown in recent months.

During a weekend inspection tour of east-central China, Mr. Wen called for the government to “preset and fine-tune its policies in a more aggressive manner,” using fiscal and monetary tools to offset the economic slowdown as much as possible. But he also tried to reassure the public, saying the economy was “running at a generally stable pace,” said Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

Mr. Wen largely attributed the slowdown to weak demand from overseas, particularly Europe with its faltering economies. But in separate remarks on Saturday, he reaffirmed a government policy of making real estate prices more affordable by banning real estate speculation.

That policy has played a central role in China’s economic slowdown, as housing construction has slowed to a crawl except for low-income housing. Developers across the country have laid off huge numbers of workers as construction sites from the steamy factory cities of Guangdong in the southeast to manufacturing and logistics hubs like Xi’an in the northwest have cut back this year from three shifts working around the clock, seven days a week, to one day shift on weekdays.

via Chinese Leader Calls for Strong Moves to Offset Slowdown – Democratic Underground.

Saw this while on a hike to Duck Lake, near Lake Alpine, up past Arnold, CA.  Very striking.

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The other day on “On the Media” with Brooke Gladstone, I hear while driving up to San Francisco, a story from Radiolab about positive publication bias and regression to the mean.  The story involves a study done some years ago that found that people who were asked to write down a detailed description of a bank robbery seen on video, right after watching the video, performed worse, not better ,at recall than a control group that was not prompted to remember details of the bank robber.  Attempts to replicate found the measured difference fading away.

Regression to the mean?  Positive publication bias?

No, the piece emphasized something else.  The finding of a difference between treatment and control gradually faded towards zero, rather than bouncing around.  The author speculated… perhaps the “ether of reality” was affected by scientific observation (by psychologists… and others too?).  Human interaction and minds keep changing when scientists observe stuff even if the minds are not aware of the observations.

Preposterous!  But then I realized.  Hmmm.  The interviewer never asked how many replication studies had been done.  Sounded like three or four.  The interviewer never asked whether any other replication studies had “smooth” regression to the mean rather than a bounce around.  The interviewer never asked any of a dozen other obvious questions.  And THEN I realized… it was all tongue in cheek… because they commented on how the original study was so compelling that it would be talked about at “dinner parties,” and now here was another finding so compelling that it also would be talked about at dinner parties.

So NPR kindly provided me with a non-study finding that I could talk about that evening.  For free.

I knew it.  But the social scientist in me says he doesn’t really offer details about this evidence.  How would it be obtained, one wonders? Randomized trials from birth to age 25? Track the Reading West Africa students for ten years after their “exposure” to Burkina!  But anyway, one more benefit of not being germ-obsessed… I’ve always been the opposite…

Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As nature’s blanket, the potentially pathogenic and benign microorganisms associated with the dirt that once covered every aspect of our preindustrial day guaranteed a time-honored co-evolutionary process that established “normal” background levels and kept our bodies from overreacting to foreign bodies.

via Let’s Add a Little Dirt to Our Diet – NYTimes.com.

Azaz Shami ‏@3ozaz

Salama Wardani to be deported out of Sudan #SudanRevolts

via (13) Twitter / Search – #SudanRevolts.

Source: Fletcher, Public Libraries in America, 2nd ed. (1894), 154.

For several years China has run current account surpluses that have been widely seen as the most serious source of global imbalances on the surplus side. Its exchange rate intervention limited appreciation of the currency and led to a buildup of external reserves to more than $3 trillion. Nonetheless, the surplus has fallen from 10 percent of GDP in 2007 to 2.8 percent in 2011, even though in September the International Monetary Fund projected the 2011 surplus at 5.2 percent of GDP and forecast a rebound to 7.2 percent of GDP by 2016. This policy brief examines whether the moderate 2011 surplus was a transitory aberration or a sign of a new trend. A statistical model explains the bulk of the reduction in the surplus as the consequence of the real exchange rate appreciation of about 20 percent that occurred from 2005–06 to 2009–10. Slow global growth, a rising oil deficit, and erosion in the capital income balance were additional causes. Projections based on this model and another used by the author indicate that if the exchange rate remains unchanged, the surplus is likely to be in a range of 2–4 percent of GDP in 2012–14 but rebound to 4 to 5 percent of GDP by 2017. If instead the government continues real appreciation at the 3 percent annual rate pursued since June 2010, by 2017 the current account would be approximately in balance.

via POLICY BRIEF 12-7: Projecting China’s Current Account Surplus.

The other key fuel for kleptocracy is a copious supply of domestic savings to loot. The reason Chinese savings levels are so high is the one-child policy.In most developing countries the way that people save is they have multiple children hopefully to generate a gaggle of grandchildren all of whom are trained to respect their elders. Given most people did not live to old age if you did you became a treasured and well cared for family member.This does not work in China. Longevity in China is increasing rapidly and the one-child policy results in a grandchild potentially having four grandparents to look after. The “four grandparent policy” means the elderly cannot expect to be looked after in old age. Four grandparents, one grand-kid makes abandoning the old-folk looks easy and near certain.Nor can the elderly rely on a welfare state to look after them. There is no welfare state.So the Chinese save. Unless they save they will starve in old age. This has driven savings levels sometimes north of fifty percent of GDP. Asian savings rates have been high through all the key industrializations Japan, Korea, Singapore etc. However Chinese savings rates are over double other Asian savings rates – this is the highest savings rate in history and the main cause is the one-child policy.

via Bronte Capital: The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy.

HT: Brian Go