Infoman

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  Infoman

  Culture and prosperity

  Economist (UK) 08/7/2023

  ST JOHN’S, A district in central Manchester, has long reflected the city’s ambitions. Thanks to its proximity to the River Irwell, the site became a hub for the booming cotton and timber trades during the Industrial Revolution. After the second world war, as the city’s economy turned towards services, Britain’s first purpose-built television studios were set up there. (Most of the studios were closed or relocated in 2013.) Now the area is undergoing yet another transformation. On June 30th a multi-use arts venue on the banks of the river—costing £211m ($268m) and spanning more than 140,000 square feet— welcomed its first visitors.

  The building, initially called Factory International but recently rebranded as Aviva Studios, was announced in 2014 by George Osborne, then the chancellor of the exchequer. It is mostly funded by the government and Manchester City Council and is the biggest investment in a cultural project in Britain since Tate Modern in 2000.

  Mr Osborne saw Factory International as part of his “northern powerhouse” policy, which aimed to boost the economies of places such as Manchester and Newcastle, and to shift jobs, investment and influence away from the south-east of England. According to recent data from the Office for National Statistics, London’s gross value added (gva, a measure of output) is around 10% higher than the total of 11 other “core” cities, including Manchester. Mr Osborne has since left politics—he is now chairman of the British Museum—but talk of “levelling up” continues.

  The venue was designed by Ellen van Loon of OMA, an esteemed architecture firm, and its façade evokes Manchester’s mishmash of period buildings. Inside, a vast warehouse space can be configured in various ways; thanks to high-tech acoustic walls, different events can take place simultaneously. It will be the permanent home of the Manchester International Festival, a biennial event founded in 2007.

  The venue can host enormous installations. The inaugural exhibition, “You, Me and the Balloons”, is the largest-ever show by Yayoi Kusama, a blockbuster Japanese artist (see picture). For the full launch in October, Danny Boyle, a Mancunian filmmaker, has created an immersive production inspired by “The Matrix”.

  Aviva Studios’s aims are grandiose, too: executives say it will contribute £1.1bn in gva in the next decade and directly and indirectly create more than 1,500 jobs. The Factory Academy, established in 2018, provides people with the technical skills needed by the venue and by the arts sector at large. “Yes, we’ve built a really exciting international arts venue that people across the world will travel to see,” says Bev Craig, the leader of Manchester City Council, but “that’s only half the story...It’s purposeful growth, not just any old growth.”

  Manchester is not alone in betting on culture as a catalyst of regeneration. In America, Jersey City hopes to become a “destination for the arts” and is footing the

  bill for Centre Pompidou’s first North American outpost, due to open in 2026. In 2021 Abu Dhabi confirmed it would spend $6bn on its creative industries over five years in an attempt to diversify from oil; Muhammad bin Salman hopes to turn Al Ula into Saudi Arabia’s capital of culture. China has opened scores of new museums in recent years, as has South Korea.

  In January the Australian government launched “Revive”, a plan for the culture sector. Adrian Collette, the chief executive of Creative Australia, says that funding will be distributed across “regional and remote communities” and help turn the country into a knowledge economy rather than one based on “extraction”. (Mining remains one of its biggest industries.)

  The idea of state support for culture can be a controversial one, as the well-off are most likely to participate in the arts; detractors would often rather see the money spent on hospitals or schools. Yet evidence suggests that a vibrant culture scene brings several benefits. Research by Centre for Cities, a think-tank, found that proximity to recreation facilities is important to 25to 34-year-olds and influences their decisions about where to live.

  Culture has an impact on well-being, too. Researchers at University College London analysed a series of longitudinal studies conducted between 2017 and 2022 in America and Britain. Controlling for income, education and other demographic factors, they found that enjoying the arts was good for your health. Whether you are reading a book or going to the opera, you are guarding against depression, dementia and chronic pain.

  In the 19th century, as Americans and Europeans moved to the city, governments built public institutions to enrich people’s lives. Some economists have long sensed that this kind of investment can pay dividends. In Britain the Arts Council was established in the wake of the second world war to distribute government money across England, Scotland and Wales. John Maynard Keynes, a lover of opera and ballet, was its first chairman. “At last the public exchequer has recognised the support and encouragement of the civilising arts of life as a part of their duty,” he said.

  David Throsby, a professor of economics at Macquarie University in Sydney, says that wonks started to define and quantify culture’s impact on the economy in the late 1990s. The British government set up a Creative Industries Task Force in 1997.

  The economic value of such institutions was further underscored by the success of Guggenheim Bilbao, also inaugurated in 1997. The Spanish city was undergoing structural change, says Juan Ignacio Vidarte, the museum’s director. Steel and shipbuilding, historically a large part of the city’s economy, was in decline; unemployment was high. The local government paid the $100m cost of the building, designed by Frank Gehry. That decision attracted opprobrium, but authorities recognised that the venue “was important for defining the future prospects of the city”.

  The risk paid off. Last year the museum attracted 1.3m visitors, two-thirds coming from outside Spain; Mr Vidarte says that visitors’ spending in Bilbao raised more than €70m ($76m) in taxes for the regional government. The regeneration of the city, spearheaded by the Guggenheim, has been dubbed the “Bilbao effect”.

  The wrong conclusions are sometimes drawn from the project, Mr Vidarte warns. The museum did not reverse the city’s fortunes single-handedly: just as important was the investment in transport infrastructure and the cleaning up of the Nervión river (on which the museum sits.) It is not enough to commission an architect to design “a flamboyant building and think that’s going to be the magic wand to turn everything from dust to diamonds,” Mr Vidarte says. “That’s so naive.”

  All that glitters

  A multitude of factors make a city appealing to tourists as well as migrants. Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, calculates a city’s “liveability” according to five broad categories: culture and environment, education and infrastructure, health care and stability. Abu Dhabi welcomed an outpost of the Louvre in 2017; in recent years, its score has risen thanks to improvements in public services. Yet it still ranks only slightly above the average rating globally.

  The authorities in Manchester know there is no single formula for growth. In 2022 it was announced the city would receive £1bn to improve its public-transport system; it is also focusing on attracting technology companies and startups. A wide cultural ecosystem has been established over the past 25 years, with Media City, a BBC outpost, the National Football Museum and HOME, an arts complex.

  “This building is a manifestation of Manchester investing in creative industries as part of its future,” says John McGrath, the artistic director and chief executive of Factory International (the moniker was retained for the organisation that runs Aviva Studios and the arts festival.) That name hints at the city’s particular cultural heritage: between 1978 and 1992 Factory Records, a music label, championed bands including Happy Mondays, Joy Division and New Order.

  At the same time, it emphasises the focus on economic output. St John’s has a long history of manufacturing and exporting goods around the world. That continues—only now, as Mr McGrath says, “We’re building a factory for artists.”

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  2023/07/10
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  Infoman

  Doctors’ YearsThe Wall Street Journal 08/7/2023 Is it bet­ter to be treated by a younger M.D. or an older one? Big data may hold the an­swer.

  Imagine you’ve been admitted to the hospital and you’re meeting the physician taking care of you for the first time. Who are you hoping walks through that door? Would you rather they be in their 50s with a good amount of gray hair, or in their 30s, just a few years out of residency?

  In a study published in 2017, one of us (Dr. Jena) and colleagues set out to shed some light on the role of age when it came to internists who treat patients in hospitals. These physicians, called hospitalists, provide the majority of care for elderly patients hospitalized in the U.S. with some of the most common acute illnesses, such as serious infections, organ failure and cardiac problems.

  In much of medical care, patients choose their doctors based on things like bedside manner, perceived expertise, responsiveness and other factors. Patients who are hospitalized, however, don’t get a say in which hospitalist will treat them—they’re cared for by whichever doctor happens to be on duty at the time. Those doctors tend to be scheduled to cover the hospital in blocks, perhaps one or two weeks at a time.

  Using data from Medicare on patients over age 65 and a database containing doctors’ ages, we identified about 737,000 non-elective hospitalizations managed by about 19,000 different hospitalists from 2011-13. We divided patients into four different groups based on the age of the doctor who treated them: doctors aged less than 40, 40-49, 50-59 and 60 and above.

  Older doctors obviously had more years of experience since completing residency, with doctors under 40 having an average of 4.9 post-residency years of experience, increasing to 28.6 years for doctors over 60. Older doctors were also more likely to be male: 61% of doctors under 40 were men, compared to 84% of doctors over 60, reflecting the shift in gender makeup that has occurred in our profession in recent decades.

  Some percentage of hospitalized patients will survive or die no matter who their doctor is, but for others, their doctor’s clinical judgment, decision-making and technical skill could be the difference between life and death. The next step, therefore, was to compare 30-day mortality rates among the four different age groups. Our statistical model found that as doctors got older, their patients had higher mortality rates. The rate for under-40 doctors was 10.8%, increasing to 11.1% in the 40-49 group, 11.3% in the 50-59 group and 12.1% in the over-60 group.

  To put these numbers in perspective, the results suggest that if the over-60 doctors took care of 1,000 patients, 13 patients who died in their care would have survived had they been cared for by the under-40 doctors. We repeated the analysis using 60- and 90-day mortality rates, in case longer term outcomes might have been different, but again, the pattern persisted: Younger doctors had better outcomes than their more experienced peers. But why was this the case?

  There are two possible explanations. The first is that there is a true age effect, wherein simply being older leads to changes in how a doctor practices, resulting in higher mortality. Perhaps older doctors are overly confident in their experience, feeling they have “seen a case like this a million times,” and thus miss tricky diagnoses.

  The other, which we think is more likely, is that there are things that older doctors and younger doctors do differently simply because they were trained at different times. Younger doctors possess clinical knowledge that is more current. If older doctors haven’t kept up with the latest advances in research and technology, or if they aren’t following the latest guidelines, their care may not be as good as that of their younger peers.

  One way that doctors stay up to date is simply by taking care of patients. When patients come to us with a given diagnosis, it may prompt us to check out the latest research, guidelines or recommendations for that condition. Medications are the internist’s primary tool. Since newer and better drugs are developed at a (relatively) rapid pace, seeing a high volume of patients is a good way to keep up.

  To see if this might be the case, we repeated the analysis but this time divided doctors based on both age and case volume. We found that for “low volume” doctors, older doctors had higher mortality. For “medium volume” doctors, the pattern was less pronounced. And for “high-volume” doctors, the pattern went away altogether. In practical terms, as long as a doctor is seeing a sufficiently large number of patients, the doctor’s age is irrelevant to the care they give.

  Does this mean that, on balance, younger doctors are “better” than older ones? This study suggests that if “better” is defined as a hospitalist having lower 30-day patient mortality, then we would have to say yes. But what about surgeons, who in addition to their diagnostic skills require technical abilities that depend on experience and muscle memory?

  To find out, a separate study by Dr. Jena and colleagues looked at about 900,000 Medicare patients who underwent common non-elective major surgeries (for example, emergency hip fracture repair or gall bladder surgery) performed by about 46,000 surgeons of varying age. We chose non-elective surgery since patients don’t have much control over their surgeon when they come in with an urgent or emergent problem. As with hospitalists, they’ll end up assigned to the surgeon on duty in an as-good-as-random fashion. Just as before, patients were divided into four groups based on the age of their surgeon, and we used a statistical model to calculate the 30-day mortality rate following surgery.

  The results showed that unlike hospitalists, surgeons got better with age. Their patient mortality rates had modest but significant declines as they got older: Mortality was 6.6% for surgeons under 40, 6.5% for surgeons age 40-49, 6.4% for surgeons age 50-59 and 6.3% for surgeons over age 60.

  Clearly something different was happening here. It may be that for hospitalists, the benefit of steadily increasing experience starts to be outweighed by their waning knowledge of the most up-to-date care. It’s different for surgeons, though, who hone many of their skills in the OR. Surgeons build muscle memory through repetition, working in confined spaces with complex anatomy. They learn to anticipate technical problems before they happen and plan around them based on prior experience. Over time, they build greater technical skills across a wider variety of scenarios, learn how to best avoid complications and choose better surgical strategies.

  What does this mean for all of us as patients when we meet a new doctor? Taking studies of hospitalists and surgeons together, it’s clear that a doctor’s age isn’t something that can be dismissed out of hand— age does matter—but nor can it be considered in isolation. If we’re concerned about the quality of care we’re receiving, the questions worth asking aren’t “How old are you?” or even “How many years of experience do you have?” but rather “Do you have a lot of experience caring for patients in my situation?” or “What do you do to stay current with the research?”

  Drs. Jena and Worsham are researchers at Harvard and practice medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. This essay is adapted from their new book, “Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients and Shape Our Health,” which will be published July 11 by Doubleday.

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  2023/07/09
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  Infoman

  Jobs and Inflation Keep Defying the Fed—Justin La­hart

  The Wall Street Journal 08/7/2023 An ex­pected slow­down still fails to ma­te­ri­al­ize

  America’s job market is cooling, and so is inflation. Neither one is anywhere close to cold.

  The Labor Department on Friday reported that the economy added a seasonally adjusted 209,000 jobs in June from a month earlier, down from May’s gain of 306,000 jobs and a bit shy of the 240,000 economists were looking for. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, slipped to 3.6% from May’s 3.7%, putting it a smidge higher than the multidecade low of 3.4% it hit in January, and again in April.

  Still plenty strong, in other words, and stronger than either the Federal Reserve or Wall Street came into the year expecting to see.

  In December, Fed policy makers’ median projection for the unemployment rate in the final quarter of 2023 was 4.6%. In June, that forecast got lowered to 4.1%. By a similar token, December’s Federal Reserve Bank survey of primary dealers—banks and other firms that deal directly with the Fed—had a median fourth-quarter 2023 unemployment rate forecast of 4.7%. In the June survey, released on Thursday, that slipped to 4%.

  Even those new, lower unemployment forecasts seem as if they could prove too high. Thursday’s report on job openings from the Labor Department showed that, even though the number of unfilled jobs fell in May relative to a year ago, there are still millions of more vacancies than there were before the pandemic. The hiring strains are particularly intense in services sectors that saw steep job losses early in the pandemic.

  Take healthcare: Friday’s report showed it added 41,100 jobs last month, which brought the sector’s overall payroll count to about 16.8 million jobs. That is more than the 16.5 million it carried in February 2020, but healthcare employment arguably should be much higher. Before the pandemic, and even amid the steep overall job losses that came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the sector steadily added workers to meet the needs of a growing and aging population, effectively never shedding workers. To get back to its 20-year, prepandemic trend, healthcare would need to add about 840,000 more jobs.

  Alas, the job market isn’t the only thing that is defying the Fed’s and Wall Street’s expectations. So is inflation. Last December, Fed policy makers projected that, excluding food and energy, their preferred inflation gauge would show consumer prices up 3.5% in the fourth quarter of 2023 versus a year earlier. In June, they lifted their forecast of that measure to 3.9%. Inflation’s persistence is the major reason why Fed policy makers are highly likely to raise rates when they meet later this month.

  The springing-eternal hope is that inflation will cool in the months ahead, and that high inflation readings prove less a function of a strong job market than other factors. There are reasons to think that cooling could occur—including lower used car prices, easing rents and a recent moderation in services inflation—but the big question has to be how fast inflation will cool, and whether it will do so more quickly than the job market.

  If it does, that would give the

  Fed cause to stop raising rates even if the job market still looks strong. Policy makers believe they have done plenty already. A newly published index from the central bank suggests that tougher financial conditions will trim about three-quarters of a percentage point off gross domestic product growth over the next year. So if inflation cooled it would then be content to step back and see how things play out with jobs. And the Fed would likely readily lower rates at the least sign of trouble.

  If inflation doesn’t slip enough, however, the Fed will decide more rate hikes are in order, and the unhappy game of chicken between the job market and inflation will continue.

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  2023/07/09
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  Infoman

  U.S. Oil Boom Blunts OPEC’s Pricing PowerBY BOB HEN­DER­SON

  The Wall Street Journal 08/7/2023

  U.S. petroleum production is on pace for a record-breaking year, helping to keep energy prices stable despite the efforts of Saudi Arabia and other major oil exporters to drive them higher.

  U.S. crude output this year through April is up 9% from a year ago, surprising analysts given that oil futures were sliding and the country’s shale boom was showing signs of peaking. The surge is being driven in part by improved production efficiency, and signals that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ power to control prices could be waning as output continues to grow in the rest of the world.

  After prices crashed in 2015, U.S. producers “went back to the lab and got much more efficient, with a lot of engineering-based gains and a lot of staff and cost cutting,” said Vikas Dwivedi, global oil and gas strategist at Macquarie Group.

  OPEC and its allies so far this year have announced cuts amounting to about 6% of last year’s production. Crude prices have nevertheless slid by about 13%. Along with weaker-thanexpected demand in China, prices are being weighed down by stepped-up production in other countries including Brazil, Canada and Norway. Increased output in countries outside OPEC is making up for about two-thirds of the alliance’s cuts, according to estimates by Rystad Energy.

  Half of that new crude is coming from the U.S., where major producers including ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, Pioneer Energy and EOG delivered strong production in the first quarter. Smaller private companies are reaping the rewards of a drilling surge they made last year when oil prices were higher.

  Companies’ efforts to improve efficiency are also giving them more leeway to remain profitable even when oil prices are slipping. Production improvements since 2014 have pushed down the cost of drilling and fracking in the U.S. shale patch by 36%, according to J.P. Morgan, even as recovered oil volumes have increased.

  Frackers have found ways to force more water and sand into rocks and create more oilfreeing fissures. ConocoPhillips said its planned wells this year will be 14% longer than those it drilled last year. Another major producer, EOG Resources, said it bored a well over 5 miles deep and nearly 3 miles long in South Texas early this year—a record length for the company.

  The increased efficiency means EOG can earn as much from oil priced at $42 a barrel today as it would have from oil trading at $86 nine years ago. People familiar with Saudi oil policy have said the government’s budget requires an estimated $81 a barrel. Brent crude is trading around $76 a barrel, down 13% from the start of the year.

  Exxon-Mobil and Chevron are both working to significantly boost their output in the next few years from the Permian Basin—a key oil-producing region that spans parts of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The industry still only recovers about 10% of the oil it theoretically could, Exxon-Mobil Chief Executive Darren Woods said at a conference last month.

  Woods has challenged his engineers to double that rate.

  Nudging it up even a little could result in a big jump in production, said Ben Poppel, director of field engineering for Liberty Energy, one of the largest fracking companies.

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  2023/07/09
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  Infoman

  https://youtu.be/h3vzWxFhXgM

  2023/07/06
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  Infoman

  Meta teases launch of Threads, a text-based app designed to rival TwitterBY LEO SANDS naomi nix con­trib­uted to this re­port.

  The Washington Post 05/7/2023

  While Twitter announced unpopular new rules that set daily limits on the number of tweets users can read in a day, Instagram teased an alternative app, Threads, due to be released Thursday.

  The new Meta-owned platform, which is billing itself as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” appeared on Apple’s App Store with no accompanying details other than a simple countdown website in its name.

  Threads appears to share many functional similarities to Twitter. According to its App Store profile, it promises users the ability to “share your point of view” through text or imagebased posts known as “threads,” which people can react and reply to, and share. Many of the app’s features appear to be closely integrated with Instagram, according to preview screenshots, providing users with the option to log in through their Instagram handle, keep their username and follow the same accounts.

  “Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things,” Threads’s App Store listing said. It also promised users the ability to “build a loyal following” and “share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”

  In an email Tuesday, Meta declined to provide further information about the app. But earlier this year, Meta said it was exploring the creation of a stand-alone, text-based social media network where “creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”

  The launch of Threads follows announcements over the weekend by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October, limiting the app’s functionality for many users. Last week, he announced that the platform would temporarily limit the number of tweets that users could read per day, and unveiled a “temporary emergency measure” that prevented non-logged-in users from viewing tweets on the platform’s web browser. He said they were to prevent third-party computer programs from combing the platform for data, saying: “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”

  On Monday, Twitter announced a further change: Access to its Tweetdeck platform — which provides users with an enhanced interface for viewing multiple tweets at once — would be limited to paying users starting soon.

  Meta has also been grappling with issues of its own in recent months. Threads’s scheduled launch on Thursday comes as the company embarks on a largescale downsizing effort, eliminating 21,000 roles, including teams that handle content moderation, policy and regulatory issues. Like other tech giants, Meta is facing an industry-wide downturn — and increased competition from Tiktok.

  On Monday night, Musk responded to a tweet about Meta’s release of Threads by quipping: “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run.” He also responded to posts that highlighted the lengthy list of personal data that users will be required to grant Instagram access to use the app, according to its App Store profile.

  Meta and Twitter’s commercial battle for users has been echoed by an increasingly public personal rivalry between the two men at their helms. Last month, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg accepted a challenge from Musk to take part in a cage match at a Las Vegas arena after news reports on Meta’s Twitter competitor. It’s unclear whether the fight — announced as Zuckerberg increasingly tries to make himself look more relevant to the tech elite — will actually take place.

  Meta’s decision to launch Threads pits it against other companies also trying to lure users away from Twitter with alternative social networks.

  Mastodon’s open-source decentralized model, which was founded seven years ago, saw a large influx of new users in the immediate aftermath of Musk’s

  Twitter takeover. Bluesky, which also runs on a decentralized system, was launched by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and is in the beta stage. Unlike Twitter, the platform says it intends to give users more control over their feed by allowing them to select from a variety of recommendation algorithms to curate their experience.

  Meta is no stranger to launching its own versions of innovations pioneered by rival apps — often with success. In 2016, Instagram copied Snapchat’s disappearing-photo feature, launching Stories, an offering that has since become integral to its user experience. Four years later, Instagram unveiled Reels, allowing users to create and share short-form vertical videos, just like Tiktok.

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  2023/07/05
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  Infoman

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  Video story, good accent, 2 days/week(Mon/Tue, Kwun Tong)
  

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  Video self, 19 year-old, good accent, 5 days/wk (Ma On Shan)
  

  10) Fehmeda Khan, Video teaching, poor accent

  11) Malik Nimra Khan, 1-2 years kinder / learning center exp, ECE, Kwai Fong, 51757447

  12) Aisha Bi, 1-2 years kinder / learning center exp, BS of Comm, Kwai Chung, 6297 6096

     video provided, Kwun Tong 3 days and 1 day Kwai Hing
  

  13) Pratik Vasandani, 2 years learning center / primary school, 55112627 (JobsDB)

  14) Khadija Ho, Australia Chinese, 8 years kinder exp, ECE / Music, 96422294 (Jobsdb)

  15) Martyn Bull, UK, 2 year international kinder exp, Social Science / TEFL, 60815734 (JobsDB)

  16) Maria Vargas, 7 year edu center exp, open u major in English, 91859269 (JobsDB)

  2023/07/04
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  Infoman

  https://accounts.wondershare.com/web/subscription

  email : arthurlaw2010@gmail.com as usual

  2023/06/25
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  Infoman

  Inflation in Britain is increasingly the result of poor judgments. Tackling it will hurt,The Economist (UK)

  24/6/2023

  THE LATEST, grim, inflation figures in Britain were not—truly—a shock. For each of the past few months a routine has emerged: the numbers come in worse than had been forecast, traders adjust expectations upwards for how fast, and far, the Bank of England will raise interest rates, and thus the cost of borrowing jumps. After that, mortgage holders fret and the government makes sympathetic noises. The figures for May, published on June 21st, followed that sorry script to the letter. The headline figure remained steady from the previous month, at 8.7%. That was above economists’ expectations of a fall to 8.4%. More ominous was that core inflation, without food and energy, jumped to 7.1% from 6.8% in the previous month.

  Britain is an outlier, and not in a good way. Core inflation both in America and the euro zone, though still high, has been ticking down gently—it reached 5.3% in May, in both places—and headline numbers in those economies, including food and energy, have tumbled faster. Among the G7 countries, none has higher inflation than Britain. Only Italy comes close, with a headline rate of 7.6%. Even its trend, unlike in Britain, is firmly downwards. You have to look to smaller places, such as Austria, Iceland or Sweden, or to eastern European economies still battered by war in Ukraine, to find examples of economies in the same—miserable—inflationary boat.

  What has gone so wrong? Britain is exposed to higher prices for natural gas. Put that aside, however, and it is clear inflationary pressures are overwhelmingly the result of decisions taken at home. Inflation, unlike much else, is made in Britain. Old excuses that it is imported, because of war, snarled-up supply chains or high global food prices, no longer wash. The rate of services inflation, overwhelmingly a domestic factor, rose in May to an annual rate of 7.4% from 6.9% previously. The rate of goods inflation did drop slightly, from 10.0% to 9.7%, in part because food-price increases are not quite so rapid as before.

  The culprits behind Britain’s problems are many. Don’t take seriously claims about Prince Harry, who recently published an overpriced but popular memoir. It’s true that inflation measured by the culture sub-index is soaring, in particular non-fiction books are up by 29.4% over the last year. But the real question is why sellers in that sector can get away with high prices. The answer: they operate where demand for goods and services has grown faster than supply.

  Demand is strong, in turn, because policymakers have long been trying to rev it up. Consider fiscal efforts. Britain stands out for the stimulus it gave to the economy in the pandemic and then, last year, during the energy crisis. One measure of this is to combine an estimate from the International Monetary Fund of covid-era support with one from Bruegel, an EU think-tank, of help for households and firms hit by painful energy bills. Only America doled out a bigger stimulus. Britain heavily outspent other peers: around 23.1% of national income, vastly more, for example, than the 13.3% in France.

  Those setting monetary policy are also to blame. In hindsight, they were too cautious. A so-called Taylor Rule for monetary

  policy sets a simple guide for the right level of interest rates given the rate of unemployment and core inflation. Even a version calibrated to avoid big changes in rates says the bank should have been preparing to lift them to around 5.7% at a meeting on June 22nd. The day before, however, markets were forecasting only a 25-basis-point increase in the main policy rate, to 4.75%. It is becoming apparent that—because fewer Britons have a mortgage than in previous tightening cycles and, in any case, many have fixed rates for longer—the effects of rate rises have, so far, been limited. The result: the bank will probably have to tighten more to achieve the same, dampening, effect.

  Come on down, the price is wrong

  Easy policy combines with a weaker supply side. Again, Britain stands aside from its peers (again, in a bad way). Labour-force participation remains below its pre-pandemic level. One portion of missing workers are those—perhaps half a million more than before—too sick or tired to seek work. EU workers are also missing. And whereas, post Brexit, non-EU migrants have poured in, many are refugees or students, not fulltime workers. Dario Perkins, of TS Lombard, a research outfit, calculates that total labour supply is down by about 3% from pre-covid trends. Pre-pandemic, the labour force was growing thanks to migration and a rising participation rate. He adds: “I don’t believe in wage-price spirals, but if they are going to happen anywhere, the UK seems like the obvious candidate.”

  High demand with constrained supply has left some parts of the economy, such as professional services and hospitality, running hot while others, including the health service, struggle with bottlenecks and strikes. Fullers, a brewer, says it is tapping under-18s and the over-50s to work in pubs this summer. Other bars and restaurants are just cutting hours, says Tony Wilson of the Institute for Employment Studies, a think-tank. In professional services, including banking, consulting and accountancy, year-on-year pay growth is in double-digits, he says, as “firms are competing and outcompeting one another on pay”.

  Inflation needs to fall, quickly. A study by the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, earlier this year found that British inflation is unusually persistent: previous increases in core inflation had more power to predict further increases than those seen in Canada or the euro area. No one should expect the workforce to suddenly grow: rates of economic activity have only modestly improved over the past year as fewer workers retired and more students took on jobs. The likely alternative is for interest rates to rise.

  That means heavily indebted mortgage holders will feel more financial pressure. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has ruled out government help, such as tax breaks on mortgage interest, saying, correctly, that would “make inflation worse, and not better”. He is due, however, to host a meeting with banks on June 23rd, where he is expected to ask them to show flexibility to struggling borrowers. Should he want to break Britain’s pattern of sticky inflation and ever-rising interest rates he could consider one other option: putting up taxes. ■

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  2023/06/25
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  Infoman

  Global economy running into a sharp slowdownBY DAVID J. LYNCH

  The Washington Post 07/6/2023 World Bank’s fore­cast cites war, in­fla­tion and higher in­ter­est rates

  A pair of central bank decisions next week will shape the outlook for a wobbly global economy that the World Bank warns in a downbeat new assessment is battling stubbornly high inflation amid the pandemic’s aftermath and the war in Ukraine.

  The gloomy forecast arrives days after one threat to global growth was eliminated when President Biden signed legislation Saturday to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avert a potentially catastrophic government default.

  But other risks remain: China’s reopening after the end of its “zero covid” policy is starting to flag, while the German economy has shrunk for two consecutive quarters, meeting one definition of a recession. Even in the United States, where growth remains resilient, most analysts expect that activity will ebb in the coming months.

  The World Bank said in a report Tuesday that the global economy is slowing dramatically as higher interest rates take a toll on both advanced and developing economies. Overall, global growth is projected to slump to an anemic 2.1 percent annual rate this year, down from 3.1 percent in 2022, and will remain “frail” through next year, according to the bank’s latest forecast.

  Investors now are focused on how much more work the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank must do to stem inflation, which has declined from last year’s highs but remains elevated.

  Fed officials have signaled they may pause at next week’s meeting

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  2023/06/08
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  Infoman

  Rent

  12/6 (Monday) 3pm

  https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/123706220?utm_campaign=property-details&utm_content=lettings&utm_medium=sharing&utm_source=copytoclipboard#/&channel=RES_LET

  2023/06/06
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  Infoman

  Oaklands Court, Leeds LS8 3TP

  https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/135558329?utm_campaign=property-details&utm_content=buying&utm_medium=sharing&utm_source=copytoclipboard#/&channel=RES_BUY

  2023/06/01
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  Infoman

  As AI becomes more popular, chatbots still routinely pass off false answers to simple questions as factual.

  The Washington Post 31/5/2023

  As AI becomes more popular, chatbots still routinely pass off false answers to simple questions as factual.

  san francisco — Recently, researchers asked two versions of Openai’s CHATGPT artificial intelligence chatbot where Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Tomás Lozano-pérez was born.

  One bot said Spain and the other said Cuba. Once the system told the bots to debate the answers, the one that said Spain quickly apologized and agreed with the one with the correct answer, Cuba.

  The finding, in a paper released by a team of MIT researchers last week, is the latest potential breakthrough in helping chatbots to arrive at the correct answer. The researchers proposed using different chatbots to produce multiple answers to the same question and then letting them debate each other until one answer won out. The researchers found using this “society of minds” method made them more factual.

  “Language models are trained to predict the next word,” said Yilun Du, a researcher at MIT who was previously a research fellow at Openai, and one of the paper’s authors. “They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.” The result is bots that act like precocious people-pleasers, making up answers instead of admitting they simply don’t know.

  The researchers’ creative approach is just the latest attempt to solve for one of the most pressing concerns in the exploding field of AI. Despite the incredible leaps in capabilities that “generative” chatbots like Openai’s CHATGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard have demonstrated in the last six months, they still have a major fatal flaw: They make stuff up all the time.

  Figuring out how to prevent or fix what the field is calling “hallucinations” has become an obsession among many tech workers, researchers and AI skeptics alike. The issue is mentioned in dozens of academic papers posted to the online database Arxiv, and Big Tech CEOS like Google’s Sundar Pichai have addressed it repeatedly. As the tech gets pushed out to millions of people and integrated into critical fields including medicine and law, understanding hallucinations and finding ways to mitigate them has become even more crucial.

  Most researchers agree the problem is inherent to the “large language models” that power the bots because of the way they’re designed. They predict what the most apt thing to say is based on the huge amounts of data they’ve digested from the internet, but don’t have a way to understand what is factual or not.

  Still, researchers and companies are throwing themselves at the problem. Some firms are using human trainers to rewrite the bots’ answers and feed them back into the machine with the goal of making them smarter. Google and Microsoft have started using their bots to give answers directly in their search engines, but still double check the bots with regular search results. And academics around the world have suggested myriad clever ways to decrease the rates of false answers, like MIT’S proposal to get multiple bots to debate each other.

  The drive to improve the hallucinations problem is urgent for a reason.

  Already, when Microsoft launched its Bing chatbot, it quickly started making false accusations against some of its users, like telling a German college student that he was a threat to its safety.

  In Australia, a government official threatened to sue Openai after CHATGPT said he had been convicted of bribery, when in reality he was a whistleblower in a bribery case. And last week a lawyer admitted to using ChatGPT to generate a legal brief after he was caught because the cases cited so confidently by the bot simply did not exist, according to the New York Times.

  Even Google and Microsoft have missed hallucinations their bots made during key announcements and demos.

  None of that is stopping the companies from rushing headlong into the space. Billions of dollars in investment is going into developing smarter and faster chatbots, and companies are beginning to pitch them as replacements or aids for human workers. Earlier this month OpeNAI CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress saying AI could “cause significant harm to the world” by spreading disinformation and emotionally manipulating humans.

  On Tuesday, Altman joined hundreds of other AI researchers and executives, including some senior leaders from Google and Microsoft, in signing a statement saying AI poses an existential risk to humanity on par with pandemics and nuclear war.

  Hallucinations have also been documented in Ai-powered transcription services, adding words to recordings that weren’t spoken in real life.

  “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems. All models do have this as an issue,” Pichai said in an April interview with CBS. Whether it’s even possible to solve it is a “matter of intense debate,” he said.

  Depending on how you look at hallucinations, they are both a feature and a bug of large language models. Hallucinations are part of what allows the bots to be creative and generate never-before-seen stories. At the same time they reveal the stark limitations of the tech, undercutting the argument that chatbots are intelligent in a way similar to humans.

  “There is nothing in there that tells the model that whatever it’s saying should be actually correct in the world,” said Ece Kamar, a senior researcher at Microsoft. The model itself also trains on a set amount of data, so anything that happens after the training is done doesn’t factor into its knowledge of the world, Kamar said.

  Hallucinations are not new. They’ve been an inherent problem of large language models since their inception several years ago, but other problems such as the AIS producing nonsensical or repetitive answers were seen as bigger issues. Once those were largely solved, though, hallucinations have now become a key focus for the AI community.

  Potsawee Manakul was playing around with CHATGPT when he asked it for some simple facts about tennis legend Roger Federer. It’s a straightforward request, but the bot kept giving contradictory answers.

  “Sometimes it says he won Wimbledon five times; sometimes it says he won Wimbledon eight times,” Manakul, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge and ardent tennis fan, said in an interview. (The correct answer is eight.)

  Manakul and a group of other Cambridge researchers released a paper in March suggesting a system they called “Selfcheckgpt” that would ask the same bot a question multiple times, then tell it to compare the different answers. If the answers were consistent, it was likely the facts were correct, but if they were different, they could be flagged as probably containing made-up information.

  When humans are asked to write a poem, they know it’s not necessarily important to be factually correct. But when asking them for biographical details about a real person, they automatically know their answer should be rooted in reality. Because chatbots are simply predicting what word or idea comes next in a string of text, they don’t yet have that contextual understanding of the question.

  “It doesn’t have the concept of whether it should be more creative or if it should be less creative,” Manakul said. Using their method, the researchers showed that they could eliminate factually incorrect answers and even rank answers based on how factual they were.

  It’s likely that a whole new method of AI learning that hasn’t been invented yet will be necessary, Manakul said. Only by building systems on top of the language model can the problem really be mitigated.

  “Because it blends information from lots of things, it will generate something that looks plausible,” he said. “But whether it’s factual or not, that’s the issue.”

  That’s essentially what the leading companies are already doing. When Google generates search results using its chatbot technology, it also runs a regular search in parallel, then compares whether the bot’s answer and the traditional search results match. If they don’t, the AI answer won’t even show up. The company has tweaked its bot to be less creative, but less likely to lie.

  By limiting its search bot to corroborating existing search results, the company has been able to cut down on hallucinations and inaccuracies, said Google spokeswoman Jennifer Rodstrom. A spokesperson for OpeNAI pointed to a paper the company had produced in which it showed how its latest model, GPT4, produced fewer hallucinations than previous versions.

  Companies are also spending time and money improving their models by testing them with real people. A technique called reinforcement learning with human feedback, where human testers manually improve a bot’s answers and then feed them back into the system to improve it, is widely credited with making CHATGPT so much better than chatbots that came before it. A popular approach is to connect chatbots up to databases of factual or more trustworthy information, such as Wikipedia, Google search or bespoke collections of academic articles or business documents.

  Some leading AI researchers say hallucinations should be embraced. After all, humans have bad memories as well and have been shown to fill-in the gaps in their own recollections without realizing it.

  “We’ll improve on it, but we’ll never get rid of it,” Geoffrey Hinton, whose decades of research helped lay the foundation for the current crop of AI chatbots, said of the hallucinations problem. “We’ll always be like that and they’ll always be like that.”

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  2023/05/31
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  Infoman

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  2023/05/28
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  Infoman

  Fixed-rate mortgages to top 5% as inflation hits money markets

  The Guardian 26/5/2023

  Households looking for a new mortgage deal have been warned to expect 5%-plus fixed-rate deals in the coming weeks, after Wednesday’s inflation figures sent the money markets back into turmoil.

  Nick Mendes, mortgage technical manager at brokers John Charcol, said yesterday that he doubts there will be any two-year fixed-rate mortgages and probably few five-year deals priced at less than 5% in the coming weeks, as lenders are forced to reprice their mortgages upwards.

  Within hours of his comments, one of the UK’s biggest lenders, the Nationwide, said it was increasing selected fixed and tracker rates by up to 0.45%, from today.

  The prospect of 5% mortgages would be a further blow to potential first-time buyers and households hoping to remortgage their existing deal. It’s the latest turn in what is fast becoming a year of mortgage turmoil.

  A household with an expiring 2.99%, £150,000 mortgage would have to find an extra £175 a month or £2,100 a year if their replacement mortgage was priced at 5.19% – on top of nearly 20% higher food prices.

  The publication on Wednesday of April’s annual inflation figure of 8.7% – which was higher than expected – prompted a sharp sell off on the London stock market, raised the prospect of a 13th interest rate rise by the Bank of England and pushed swap rates further upwards. The cost of fixed-rate mortgages are largely determined by the swap rates paid by lenders.

  “In the current economic environment swap rates have continued to fluctuate and, more recently, increase, leading to rate rises across the market. This change will ensure our mortgage rates remain sustainable,” said a Nationwide spokesperson.

  With Britain likely to experience a long period of high inflation and weak growth – known as stagflation – investors sold UK government bonds, or gilts, depressing the price and raising the interest rate. Shifts in bonds typically feed through into swap rates, which lenders use to guide their mortgage-pricing decisions.

  After Liz Truss’s disastrous minibudget last September, the yield, or interest rate, on a two-year government bond rose to 4.7%, pushing two-year fixed rate mortgages above 5%. The yield rose as high as 4.478% yesterday, up on the 4.35% rate the day before, and from 4% at the end of last week.

  “The market is now factoring in higher interest rate peaks and this will soon be reflected in fixed-rate mortgage pricing. Gilt yields have therefore shot up,” said Mendes.

  “When lenders have used up funds already bought I doubt there will be any rates available significantly below 5%. Anyone waiting to see what happens to mortgage rates following the recent announcement should look to get their mortgage application under way,” he added.

  David Hollingworth, of L&C Mortgages, said it was too early to say definitively what would happen to fixed rates, but the direction of travel was “very much upwards” at the moment. “Until recently there were plenty of five-year fixed-rate mortgages at or around the 4% figure, now they are mostly all gone.”

  Within hours of Wednesday’s inflation figure being published, two buy-to-let lenders pulled their mortgage products before repricing.

  Lloyds/Halifax increased the cost of a fixed-rate mortgage by 0.2%, and a number of other lenders withdrew their 10-year deals the day before.

  Uswitch’s mortgage expert, Claire Flynn, said the average twoyear fixed-rate mortgage (75% loan to value) had risen by 0.25 percentage points to 5.6% over the last week alone.

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  2023/05/26