Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a disarmingly simple theory that holds that the nominal exchange rate between two currencies should be equal to the ratio of aggregate price levels between the two countries, so that a unit of currency of one country will have the same purchasing power in a foreign country. The PPP theory …
Tyler Cowen makes the following points about Piketty’s Capitalism book. Overall, the main argument is based on two (false) claims. First, that capital returns will be high and non-diminishing, relative to other factors, and sufficiently certain to support the capital returns greater than world growth story as a dominant account of economic history looking forward. …
UAV Mobile Hotspots program makes progress toward goal of providing 1 Gb/s communications backbone to deployed units. Missions in remote, forward operating locations often suffer from a lack of connectivity to tactical operation centers and access to valuable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data. The assets needed for long-range, high-bandwidth communications capabilities are often unavailable …
Previously we reported taht John Fitzpatrick was forming a company that he says will provide competitively priced commodity cloud-based services on what he’s calling the world’s first Exaflop Supercomputer. He will use foreign currency trading as the main application. This is the Bitcoin mining of the Foreign Exchange market. The machine will cost $50 billion. …
Paul Krugman declares that environmental salvation will be cheap. This is based upon the IPCC saying that estimated reduction in economic growth would be around 0.06 percent per year [IF all nations began following IPCC energy, transportation and efficiency recommendations immediately, All of the countries of the world begin mitigation immediately, there is a single …
Scientists are admitting that it is too late to prevent carbon dioxide from getting to levels where 2 degrees of warming can be prevented according to climate models. The entire approach of asking for costly economic sacrifices Countries have delayed action for so long that the necessary emissions cuts will have to be extremely sharp. …
Physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that we start looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and out past Neptune, in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. He talks about what such life would be like — and how we might find it. On the topic of Europa, Freeman believes we could find life there …
Centauri Dreams has a look back at the Orion Project plans to fly to Enceladus. Project Orion was the rocket that was use about 800 small nuclear bombs for propulsion. It would drop each one through a hold in a massive metal donut/pusher plate. Project Orion was intended to loft 1600 tons to low-Earth orbit, …
Kazuo Furukawa （inventor of the miniFuji and Fuji molten salt reactors），and Masaaki Furukawa set up “Thorium Tech Solutions” (TTS) in 2011 to make Thorium molten salt reactors. Since smaller thorium molten-salt power plant are easier to construct, TTS will develop the 10,000kW micro-mini thorium molten-salt power plant ‘miniFUJI’ within five years (by 2016). This micro-mini power …
India has made encouraging progress by halving its official poverty rate, from 45 percent of the population in 1994 to 22 percent in 2012. McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has created the Empowerment Line, an analytical framework that determines the level of consumption required to fulfill eight basic needs—food, energy, housing, drinking water, sanitation, health care, …
A mixture of diamond nanoparticles and mineral oil easily outperforms other types of fluid created for heat-transfer applications, according to new research by Rice University. Rice scientists mixed very low concentrations of diamond particles (about 6 nanometers in diameter) with mineral oil to test the nanofluid’s thermal conductivity and how temperature would affect its viscosity. …