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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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I fear that Gebru et al. have failed to see an important corollary of their results, or perhaps they have deliberately refrained from mentioning it. If personal attributes can reliably be deduced from small scale analyses of neighbourhoods and if these data are increasingly being used in decision making, it will become ever more important just where you live. Unavoidably house and rent prices will diverge even more than they have already begun to do and the quality of public services will diverge with them. Already parents of young children are moving into high rent areas to ensure good schools for their children. This tendency can only get worse.
See also Rodman et al. and Scheffer et al..
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The advantages of an infinitely variable valve timing have been well known for decades. So what Li et al. are demonstrating for a not very good test engine as baseline is neither new nor worth knowing. What would be good to know, but they totally fail to tell us, is the current development stage of hydraulic valve actuation. What are its capabilities, is reliability and is energy consumption? Unless they can demonstrate serious advances in those respects they don’t tell us anything not already well known in the seventies.
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Palmer et al. fail to list real cost and subsidies in an intelligible way creating a false impression of market readiness. Another fact their article brings to light is that with the inordinate amount of useless ballast “modern” cars carry, making them twice as heavy as they ought to be, battery weight has become less of an obstacle than it used to be.
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The middle teen ages from about 12 to 17 are the most formative ones, that determine our values and outlook for the rest of our lives. They are also the years when humans are at their most vulnerable. Are we allowing the few super rich heads of a few world-wide monopolies to raise our children to become the most malleable and pliable generation in human history? Rodman et al. do not tell us much about the who and why, but they do explain a lot about the means employed. As Charles Murray has shown in Coming Apart (2012), the rich elite are already bringing up their own children far away from modern cultural influences.
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Jambon makes a laudable effort to elucidate a vexing question. Unfortunately his results fail to deliver what he claims. The data points of his figures 3 and 5 (not shown side by side on purpose?) fully overlap in just that critical range left in doubt by the older methods. His figure 6 too lets the smelted data points march right through the area spanned by the meteoritic Umm el Marra pendant. So where the question was left open before, he is unable to supply a definitive answer as well. But full points for trying and extra points for publishing a negative result, deducted again for trying to fudge it.
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Scheffer et al. draw a bleak picture of the future. Interestingly one of the few possible counter measures are savings. As my father used to say, “only poor people have savings, the rich have tangible assets and (monetary) debt”. Inflation – intentionally state generated inflation – is a tax on the poor and an extra subsidy to the rich. So it is in fact the states and their policies, that actively work to make things worse here. How and why do middle class career politicians invariably end up wealthy?
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