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Monday, January 20, 2020

Links - 20th January 2020 (1)

Egyptian Vats 5,600 Years Old Were For Beer Brewing - Scientific American - "this ancient beer would have tasted very different from what our modern palates are used to. The Egyptian beer makers did use malted wheat and barley in the brewing process. But no one had mastered carbonation yet. So the resulting brew was a flat, unfiltered malt beverage with a low alcohol content... The researchers found a high concentration of the amino acid proline, which is abundant in dates and some other fruits.“This result suggests that dates could have been used or incorporated in the beer, for flavor.”And maybe to add some sweet notes.Hops—which act as both a flavoring and a preservative—weren’t added to beer until medieval times. “The use of hops was unknown to the ancient Egyptians, and we think that they used phosphoric acid to preserve their beer.”The residues were indeed high in phosphoric acid, a product of barley grains added during the fermentation process. Phosphoric acid is often used today to prolong the shelf life of alcoholic beverages."

Lean Times, Plump Partners : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Women don't really care about men… On the other end, they do care about all kinds of things like wealth and status. But barring that they don't care so much about how much a man weighs. The opposite is clearly not true the other direction. Men care a great deal about how much a woman weighs. And there the overwhelming relationship is that in poor places, men prefer women that are slightly heavier and in rich places men prefer women that are slightly thinner.’...‘In poor countries, they appreciate somebody who's heavy, because they actually have enough money to get food and in rich countries they prefer people who’re skinny because they have time to go to the gym?’
‘It’s something, the argument’s actually pretty close to that of all things... in like evolutionary terms, we seek what's best. And if you say oh my gosh, there's scarce resources, what matters most is starvation, then you look for the person who clearly is at lowest risk for malnutrition, that is the heavier person...
[On implications for evolutionary psychology] It is one of my favorite observations in that it is detected by anthropologists with no stake in the outcome, some more than 50 years ago, and only much more recently sort of the evolutionists stepped in to try to offer an explanation...
In the US, he shows that as the GDP fluctuates, so do Playmates’ centerfold body dimensions, basically, when times are lean in the US, playmates get a little bit more plump. When times are good, they get a little more thin’
‘Do they get as plump as people in regular society?’
‘No, they don't even come [close]’...
[On undergraduates] ‘Men who feel poor prefer a woman that weighs more than do men who feel rich.’
‘So it's not just a cultural variation, and not just a temporal variation, but actually you say at the moment you can get people to to feel more poor and therefore want more plumpy women and the opposite as well’"
This helps explain "socially constructed" beauty preferences

What's in a (Stock's) Name? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If you look at how difficult a stock’s name is to pronounce that predicts how well the stock will do initially after going public’...
'Long term, the stocks with easy to pronounce names do tend to do better. But it is not as strong an effect as other information such as profitability comes out, people start to pay more attention to that and less to more superficial factors like the name but the effect of the trends do hold long term... Politicians with easier to pronounce names do better in elections'"

The Case for Higher Gas Taxes : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘In the countries where they for a long time have this, like in Italy, it is relatively acceptable to raise the, more. You would think it would be easier to raise gasoline taxes where they are low, but it's easier when they are high.’
‘So once people get used to the idea that that taxes on gasoline are an acceptable way to control that, they're willing to accept it and they're willing to even take higher tax increases on that.’
‘Yes, you get lobbies always built around status quo... I even managed to interview one of the directors of Fiat once and I asked what Fiat thinks about gasoline taxes and to my great joy there was a an auto manufacturer who says we are very much in favor of a higher gasoline tax, otherwise they would buy BMW’"

Surprising Effects of Brain Drain : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If they really leave and you don't hear back... as if they disappeared, still the source country could gain and this happens before migration. If people know that through past experience... people have to choose whether to go into study. Okay. So, in economics, we tend to think that you will take your decision to go into study if this is beneficial for you, basically, in monetary terms’
‘Okay. So you're saying when when people are planning what to do, if they think that what they're doing has returns, they will do it and if they think that it's immigration is a good thing. they will plan for immigration’
‘They look at this as a probabilistic thing. So they say, for example, I have 80 or 90% chance of staying in the country and maybe 10 or 20% chance of immigrating. But if you have just 10 or 20% chance to, to multiply your income by, by 10, okay, that would double your expected income, you know, this is enough to, to to drive certain amount of people to go into study. People that would not go to study without the option or the prospect of migration’
‘So what that would mean is people will try to get skills that are good for the country that they want to immigrate to... sometimes the skills they're trying to get are also good for the country that they're living’...
'Of course, if too many of them leave [that is] detrimental'"

Ovulatory Cycle Affects Earnings : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; Brent Jordan, Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘When they're at their most fertile, right before they ovulate, they feel the best. They also appear more attractive to human males, so therefore they would make more money. What's important about that is up into this point of time, it was considered that human females didn't display their ovulation, that it was concealed, that only non human primates displayed their ovulation. This study showed that human females do display in a way.’
‘Wait, so you want to tell me that on different days of the month, they make actually more money?’
‘Exactly.’
‘When do they make the most money?’
‘Between days 10 and 12 of their ovulatory cycle... Right now currently, they don't know it at all. They're completely oblivious. So they make more money, but they're unaware they're making more money.’...
‘So you’re opening like consulting business for lap dancers to suggest to them when to work more and when to work less? Basically saying work twice as hard on these days and you can rest for three days on the other time?’...
‘They can basically double their earnings when they're ovulating when a male senses that’
‘Wow. And do we know if they they dance differently or they do different things or whether it's just a perception of the male?’
‘Well, it's the perception of the male but also they’re advertising. They're displaying. They're not aware of it. But when they're actually ovulating, they retain less water. So their muscles and things show a little bit better, they have a little bit more athletic ability, because they feel better. They kind of feel a little bit more upbeat. So it's a display, and they're probably a little bit more confident mentally. They're not aware of why that is. They just feel that way. They just feel better.’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On F1 being carbon neutral] ‘Although the optics around Formula One always tend to focus on the racing cars themselves, the reality is that when you look at the environmental issues to do with Formula One, it's much more to do with things like air travel and freight and the 300,000 spectators coming to a race and what they do while they're at a race there. So there are a lot of things that can be done, that are very measurable and very clear, and frankly, not unique to Formula One. But something that Formula One can do that really will be able to make a change’
‘Isn't there an issue about credibility? Formula One's whole purpose, one of the things it does is it burns fossil fuels very quickly, and lots of them. The idea of being carbon neutral to me just sounds like window dressing, doing something that's not really at the heart of the enterprise at all.’
‘Well as I said, the kind of optics of Formula One tend to be problematic. The reality is that the 20 Formula One cars use less fuel in an entire season than a single Boeing 747 flight from London to Tokyo. So the reality is the quantity of fuel burnt is very low. And the Formula One engines today are hybrid petrol electric engines, and they're the most efficient fossil fuel burning internal combustion engines in the world. So the detail of Formula One is actually already impressive. And this initiative announced by Formula One is really a major step to taking the entire sport and making it carbon neutral by 2030’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "‘There was a poll last year which suggested that economists are trusted less than the much maligned weather forecaster. Perhaps that's why economics is regarded by many as a bit of a joke. But can economics itself be funny? An unlikely festival of economics and comedy is now in its 10th year. Killconomics is underway in the Irish town of Kilkenny and is determined to show the dismal science can be a laugh’."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘A new proposal on equal pay. It says that if women are working with men who they think are being paid more, they should have a right by law to find out what those men are being paid. Good idea?’
‘So if I were going to implement something like this, and I'm not a politician, I’d probably use a system like Sweden's, which is anyone can look at anyone else's tax return. But the catch is is that person will know that you looked. And that system has worked fairly well in Sweden in terms of having a lower pay gap. It also works in terms of catching people who might be trying to evade tax. But I think just giving women the right isn't the answer. If we're going to give to someone you know, why not people who are minorities, why not old people, young people?’
‘So everybody's pace should be disclosable?’
‘I think all or nothing, will be my view.’...
‘Google has said that they would not use anybody's data, just like they said yesterday, of course, that they won't take anybody's health data with this new relationship they have with Ascension. The problem is that Google and many of the tech companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, have a really strong track record of saying they won't take data. And then later on, we find out that they did, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. We saw this with Google and DeepMind, when they acquired DeepMind. They said they weren't going to take any of that data. And of course they did.’
‘And of course, we had the Facebook situation, Google will have access to data from your financial records, potentially your health records, all the stuff in their smart speakers, all the stuff from your search history, they would know more about you than you know about yourself, I suspect.’
‘Yeah, we're getting to this point where I think the way the companies will frame it is they're trying to create an ecosystem in which their customers would live. A regulator is going to quickly start to ask the question of when does an ecosystem become a cartel?’
‘We have to ask ourselves, are we moving into a world where it's going to be, you know, Google life, or Apple life or Amazon life?’
‘So you’ve got a situation where you have two or three Silicon Valley companies basically competing to run your life, and you choose which ecosystem you join’
‘Yeah. And you might even have some, some non US examples. You might have the Chinese companies that went as well, it's probably going to be about five to 10 global companies that all of us around the world would choose from’
‘It hasn't happened so much in Europe has it? We don't have Silicon Valley. We don't have the Googles and the Amazons, but we do have tougher regulators, I think, or at least regulators were much less comfortable with this kind of idea.’
‘And a population that's a little bit less comfortable with all of this data gathering, and collecting. So that's another question is will we see consumers and citizens push back? Will we see governments listen to that and empower regulators and finance them so that they can actually go after these firms? Issue enforcement guidelines, issue fines if need be, but also will we actually see firms really be challenged on the data that they're gathering? All they need is one big screw up to set all of this back.’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘What we've seen on cookies, so called cookies on on the web where people are being asked to understand the policies on any website as to how cookies are used, in what way they're used and how data is used… When was the last time for example you refused to go on a website?’
‘When I turned down a cookie? No, I don’t think that’s something I've ever turned down.’
‘Right, exactly. And what happens is that on most of these sites, you get these long agreements, 16 page agreements or whatever, that if you sent to a lawyer would take about 30 days to go through. So it's completely impractical. What we have to do is to clearly articulate to consumers on an opt in basis. In other words, you choose to participate, what you are letting yourself in for, what your data will be used for. And then looking at the opposite, we're now starting to see the development of platforms where people can sell their data on a personal basis. For example, there was an article on the front page of the FT about somebody sitting on top of a bus, and by the time they got to the end of the bus journey, they paid for their bus trip by selling their data to one or two apps.’"

Andrew Yang, Asian stereotypes and the discomforts of reality | Spectator USA - "Andrew Yang has garnered criticism over the course of his presidential campaign for making self-deprecating jokes that reinforce Asian stereotypes. He has alluded to Asians’ hard work-ethic and love for math, even selling merchandise inscribed with the word ‘MATH’ on it — an acronym for ‘Make America Think Harder.’ It reached an apogee after the Democratic debate last week when Yang memorably quipped, ‘now, I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors,’ before launching into his answer about how to fix healthcare.Many prominent Asian Americans, such as the former Planned Parenthood president Dr Leana Wen and the former governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal, found it amusing. Others bristled at what they perceive as Yang perpetuating the ‘toxic trope’ of the model minority myth... the model minority myth lies in sharp contrast to reality — what everybody seems to know and feel is right — and the data appears to bear this out.  According to Pew, Asian Americans are the highest-income, most highly educated and fastest-growing demographic in the US... close to 70 percent of Asian Americans think that a willingness to work hard will lead to success, which is one of the quintessential cornerstones of the American Dream narrative. While only 9 percent of the general American population thinks that their parents put too much pressure on their children, 39 percent of Asian Americans agree with the sentiment, bolstering the stereotype that landed Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and ‘Tiger Mom’, in hot (and sour) soup... The Washington Post article cross-examining Yang’s alleged racial insensitivities quoted a study which found that white primary care physicians (PCPs) outnumbered their Asian counterparts by nearly 7:1, an attempt to negate Yang’s joke about the Asian proclivity for the medical profession... Asians make up only 5.4 percent of the US population compared to Whites at 73 percent. At this rate, we would expect to see the ratio of white to Asian doctors be 13.5:1, meaning that at 7:1, Asian PCPs are overrepresented almost twofold. The pushback against Yang is part of a larger milieu of discontent involving Asian Americans, from the lawsuit alleging that Harvard University limited Asian American admissions to the proposal by Mayor Bill de Blasio to abolish the standardized entrance tests for New York’s elite high schools in order to boost admissions for blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asians and whites... what do we lose when we are compelled to gloss over differences in group outcomes and abstain from inquiring as to what might be the contributing factors? For starters, we lose the opportunity to learn lessons from the established norms and social behaviors from cultural groups that have been acquired and honed through the years. We also can’t help communities to improve and fix problems if we don’t identify them accurately first. Worse, ignoring these differences can lead to backfiring of policies that were crafted based on the erroneous assumption of complete uniformity between groups. Finally, when those who acknowledge these differences are dismissed as racist or this topic is publicly perceived to be illegitimate, people curious about the ‘inconvenient truth’ would begin to seek out rhetorical spaces where these conversations are permitted. Often, when driven underground, these spaces are filled with irresponsible actors such as racists who wouldn’t hesitate to exploit such facts to recruit others into their ideology."
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