PLAUSIBLE: If you prefer city living over nature, you might be a psychopath: study.
Thomas Piketty and Capital in the 21st century: accuracy in research and confusion in theoryCADTM (Micael T). So glad to see someone pick this apart. Picketty’s definition of capital struck me as all wet but I didn’t have the time or energy to pick it apart, and his r>g as an absolute rule, as opposed to a propensity with reversals, was also obviously nuts (trees do not grow to the sky as an absolute rule means capital will eat the entire GDP).
A biomedical professor has been sentenced to 37 months in prison for carrying out a scheme to use millions of dollars in federal grant money to advance research in China, according to the Justice Department.
Zheng Songguo, a former professor at Ohio State University (OSU), pleaded guilty in November to lying on his National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications, in order to use $4.1 million in research grants to develop the fields of rheumatology and immunology for China, the department said.
Did the coronavirus escape from a lab? The idea deserves a second look, scientists say.
Hijacked and Paying the Price – Why Ransomware Gangs Should be Designated as Terrorists Institute for New Economic Thinking. Confucius said that the proper naming of things was the beginning of wisdom. I am therefore not keen about the ongoing broadening of the use of the term “terrorist”. It comes off as a manifestation of NewSpeak, an effort to impoverish used vocabulary so as to achieve better messaging control. Better to take the (not much) time it would require to come up with more precise terminology (economic extortionists?) and corresponding criminal sentences.
Why is a Billion Dollar Pipeline Incapable of Defending Itself Against Ransomware? American Conservative
America’s Multi-Trillion Dollar Infrastructure Security Crisis OilPrice
Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals
Becker Friedman Institute Working Paper, May 6, 2021: Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals , Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, Christoph Siemrot.
“Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.”
How to change the default email app on your iPhone in just a few seconds
Mashable: “It doesn’t matter who you are. There’s simply no way of getting around the fact that everyone needs to use email at some point in their lives. Just because that’s true, however, doesn’t mean you need to stick with an inferior email app on your iPhone if you don’t want to. Starting with the release of iOS 14 in 2020, Apple finally did one of the things it should have done yearsago: Let users change their default web browsers and email apps. Safari and the iPhone Mail app are both perfectly usable, but freedom is always a good thing. Whether you like Gmail, ProtonMail, or Outlook, you can tell your iPhone to route all email-related activity straight to the corresponding mobile app. That’s good in and of itself, but what’s even better is how easy it is to do this. Here’s how…”
