Aerosol Filtration Efficiency

ACSNano |  The emergence of a pandemic affecting the respiratory system can result in a significant demand for face masks. This includes the use of cloth masks by large sections of the public, as can be seen during the current global spread of COVID-19. However, there is limited knowledge available on the performance of various commonly available fabrics used in cloth masks. Importantly, there is a need to evaluate filtration efficiencies as a function of aerosol particulate sizes in the 10 nm to 10 μm range, which is particularly relevant for respiratory virus transmission. We have carried out these studies for several common fabrics including cotton, silk, chiffon, flannel, various synthetics, and their combinations. Although the filtration efficiencies for various fabrics when a single layer was used ranged from 5 to 80% and 5 to 95% for particle sizes of <300 and="" nm="">300 nm, respectively, the efficiencies improved when multiple layers were used and when using a specific combination of different fabrics. Filtration efficiencies of the hybrids (such as cotton–silk, cotton–chiffon, cotton–flannel) was >80% (for particles <300 and="" nm="">90% (for particles >300 nm). We speculate that the enhanced performance of the hybrids is likely due to the combined effect of mechanical and electrostatic-based filtration. Cotton, the most widely used material for cloth masks performs better at higher weave densities (i.e., thread count) and can make a significant difference in filtration efficiencies. Our studies also imply that gaps (as caused by an improper fit of the mask) can result in over a 60% decrease in the filtration efficiency, implying the need for future cloth mask design studies to take into account issues of “fit” and leakage, while allowing the exhaled air to vent efficiently. Overall, we find that combinations of various commonly available fabrics used in cloth masks can potentially provide significant protection against the transmission of aerosol particles.

Has Trump Crossed the Black Chasm?

tomluongo |  Do you remember the Zune?  I barely do.

Do you remember the iPod?  Silly question.

The iPod changed everything.

While the Zune was technically superior in nearly every way to the iPod, the iPod became a phenomenon.

Why?  Because Apple focused on how the iPod made your life better.

In marketing there is something called “The Chasm.”  It’s an idea put forth by Geoffrey Moore in the early 90’s.  Getting 16% market share is easy. There are nearly always one in six people who are willing to adopt the new or different thing.

But, to become a social phenomenon that ‘new thing’ has to ‘cross the chasm’ by shifting the marketing message from its newness superiority to why this ‘new thing’ will make your life better.

The message has to appeal to people’s sense of shared experience and community.  And if that shift is successful your product or message will ‘cross the chasm’ and begin to see mass adoption.

For that shift to win out conditions have to be right and the message aligned perfectly with it.

If you do your new thing will explode in the public consciousness literally overnight.

Look at how quickly Jordan Peterson has blown up.

Conditions were right for people to receive his message.  And all it took was for the right moment him to stand up to a virulent ideologue like Kathy Newman of the BBC to become a hero to millions.

The First Black President

So, what does all this 16% Chasm stuff have to do with Donald Trump?

Grinding Poverty In America

NYTimes |  There are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as many.

This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.

It is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.

Of course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries. With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt.

Yo soy Boricua. I am from Puerto Rico

SFGate |  One person in Arecibo died after being swept away by rising water. Officials believe there are probably others they haven't yet been able to confirm.

At the intersection of Routes 2 and 1o in Arecibo, employees of the Gulf Express gas station and their families - about 20 people in all - were hard at work Saturday. Their boots and sneakers were caked with mud because there is mud everywhere: On their pants and shirts, in their cars and on the walls of their homes. The makeshift cleanup crew was using brooms to sweep out the grayish brown slop that lay two or three inches thick inside.

After Maria blew threw the city, taking down trees and power lines, the flash floods came.

"The water had to be at least six, maybe seven feet high," said Nelson Rodriguez, an employee at the Gulf Express. "It took everything. All the medicine in the pharmacy, all the food, it's gone."

Every home and business in this part of Arecibo was affected by the flooding. Two blocks away from the gas station, Eduardo Carraquillo, 45, helped his father, Ismael Freytes, 69, clean the mud out of their yellow, first-floor apartment. Inside, a film, rising six feet high on the walls, marked where water stagnated for much of a full day.

"The water just pushed through the door, as if it had been left open," Carraquillo said. "We all evacuated the day after the storm, because we were warned about the flash flood that might come. Everyone left, just to be safe, except for two older men that lived a few houses away. They just didn't want to leave. When we came back, we found out the flood had killed them right there in that apartment."

Some Puerto Rico officials believe it could be months before the island recovers and that it will be at least a year before some sense of normalcy returns.

Officials estimate it will take three weeks for hospitals to regain power, and about six months for the rest of the island to have electricity. By Saturday, 25 percent of the population had telecommunications connections.

Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced efforts to centralize medical care and shelters for the elderly. He also plans to distribute 250 satellite phones among mayors to facilitate communication. He said he urged the mayors to develop a "buddy system" with other local officials.

Yulín, San Juan's mayor, said she has never seen such devastation, but she also said she has never seen such determination to make it. She described a phrase she keeps hearing from residents: "Yo soy Boricua. I am from Puerto Rico."

50 Years of Change Atop the Fortune 500

slantmarketing |  If you’re curious about the story of modern humanity, you’ll find few things more fascinating than the shapeshifting ways of our markets and industries, over many years and decades. These shifts reflect our whole society, our inspiration, our impulses, and our shortcomings. These shifts are us, as we make history, step by step, dollar by dollar, in good ways and in bad.

The Energy Problem Behind Trump’s Election

ourfiniteworld |  The energy problem behind Trump’s election is not the one people have been looking for. Instead, it is an energy problem that leads to low wages for many workers in the US, and high unemployment rates in the European Union. (The different outcomes reflect different minimum wage laws. Higher minimum wages tend to lead to higher unemployment rates; lower minimum wages tend to lead to higher employment, but unsatisfactory wages levels for many.) The energy problem is also reflected as low prices of oil and other commodities.

To try to solve the energy problem, we use approaches that involve increasing complexity, including new technology and globalization. As we add more and more complexity, these approaches tend to work less and less well. In fact, they can become a problem in themselves, because they tend to redistribute wealth toward the top of the employment hierarchy, and they increase “overhead” for the economy as a whole.

In this material, I explain how inadequate energy supplies can appear as either low wages or as high prices. Basically, if energy supplies are inadequate, workers tend to be less productive because they have fewer or less advanced tools to work with. Their lower wages reflect lower productivity (Slide 20).  Slide 6 offers some additional insights.

Trump’s election seems to reflect the cooling effect that our energy problems are having on the economy as a whole. Citizens are increasingly unhappy with their wage situation, and want a major change. Trump’s election may at least temporarily have a beneficial effect, since it may work in the direction of reducing complexity.

Long term, however, it is hard to see that the policies of any elected official will be able to fix our underlying energy problems.

2015 already looking to be an exciting year

IEEE Spectrum | Project Chrome, a massive layoff that IBM is pretending is not a massive layoff, is underway. First reported by Robert X. Cringely (a pen name) inForbes, about 26 percent of the company’s global workforce is being shown the door. At more than 100,000 people, that makes it the largest mass layoffat any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. Cringely wrote that notices have started going out, and most of the hundred-thousand-plus will likely be gone by the end of February.

IBM immediately denied Cringely’s report, indicating that a planned $600 million “workforce rebalancing” was going to involve layoffs (or what the company calls “Resource Actions”) of just thousands of people. But Cringely responded that he never said that the workforce reductions would be all called layoffs—instead, multiple tactics are being used, including pushing employees out through low ratings (more on that in a moment). And some managers are indeed admitting to employees that their job has been eliminated as part of Project Chrome, leading employees to coin a new catchphrase: “Getting Chromed.” 

U.S. delivering a staggeringly low 44% of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population 18 years and older...,

linkedin | Here’s something that many Americans -- including some of the smartest and most educated among us -- don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.

Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news -- currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.

There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

Yet another figure of importance that doesn’t get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find -- in other words, you are severely underemployed -- the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.

And it’s a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual’s primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity -- it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen’s talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream.

Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America’s middle class.

I hear all the time that “unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.” When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth -- the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real -- then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t “feeling” something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class.

the american dream and the quickening jobpocalypse...,

WaPo |  Mercedes-Benz wants to develop a driverless car. Google already has one. This is exceedingly bad news for auto body shops, ambulance-chasing lawyers and others. Soon, truck drivers might be replaced by driverless trucks. What then will happen to the nation’s 3.5 million truck drivers, not to mention truck stops, of which there are 276 in Texas alone? (You can Google anything.)

The conventional answer is retraining. Truck drivers will become something else, maybe teachers or dental hygienists, which is, of course, possible. It’s also likely that many of them will sink into the funk that is the loyal companion of unemployment. Family life will shred, and possibly an army of former truck drivers will enlist with others of the digitally ditched and wreak political havoc. Shippers will sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” For truckers it will be, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”

It’s clear by now that the fruits of automation, computerization and outsourcing are being reaped by the top 1 percent — in this case, shipping companies and not drivers. The old bell curve with the middle class bloating comfy in the middle is being replaced by what’s called the power curve, in which something called the 80/20 rule applies: 20 percent of the participants in an online venture get 80 percent of the rewards. Think Uber. It’s not the drivers who are getting rich. Something new and possibly awful is happening.

Many books have been written about this phenomenon, and in 2012, the Aspen Institute convened a meeting on this topic, with the resulting report bearing the jaunty title of “Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy.” One participant was Kim Taipale, a leading thinker in this field. I quote from the Aspen report on its summary of Taipale’s thesis: “The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over. . . . Education per se is not going to make up the difference.”

look at my gun!

salon |  Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.  

For instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however. Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park.  Freedom for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel endangered by him. 

After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in  Newtown where a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political point. There were no incidents.  Why would there be? When an armed citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon. 

unprofitable food-powered make-work

pbs |  Editor’s Note: If you’re reading this at work, you’re probably not all that busy. Don’t you ever wish you could just fit your “work” into fewer hours, then go home to do your own thing instead of being paid to look busy all day?

John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technological advancement would make that possible by the turn of the century. He foresaw a 15-hour workweek. Instead, Americans are now working more and more hours. But what are they actually doing, asks American anthropologist David Graeber? “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” Graeber wrote in a summer 2013 essay in Strike Magazine that we’ll call “BS Jobs.”

For one thing, he writes, we’ve created entirely new jobs to accommodate the workaday world. Administrators (think telemarketing and financial services) and the growing number of human resources and public relations professionals can’t pick up their own pizzas or walk their dogs. That’s why, Graeber says, we have all-night pizza delivery men and dog-walkers.

Graeber’s (rather rank) vision of hell captures the cycle of meaningless work he’s criticizing:

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. [...]There’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

Graeber is a professor at the London School of Economics. So isn’t that a classic example of frying fish (i.e., meaningless work)? He welcomes that question, but quickly dismisses it, saying he wouldn’t dare tell anyone who truly believes in their work that it’s not meaningful. It’s those workers who are already cognizant of the futility of their day that he’s after — like his friend, the poet-musician-turned-corporate lawyer, whom he told us about in his previous Making Sen$e post on the guaranteed basic income. Those are his fish-fryers, resenting the cabinet-makers for doing “real” work.

Paul Solman interviewed Graeber for our broadcast segment on the basic income (watch below). That conversation led to a discussion of Graeber’s theory that many jobs shouldn’t exist.

when people were ceaselessly around us, talk was cheap, and a manufactured good was a real luxury item...,

NYTimes |  What is going on here? It may be that, in a world rich in digital information, physical contact, and the personal trust and relationship that still comes by spending time with someone, has become even more valuable, since it is harder to come by.

“All aspects of human life are being digitized,” said Geoffrey Moore, an author and consultant to several Silicon Valley companies. “You wonder what that will do to the human mind. For sure, you want to put down some strong personality roots. Companies have to create human communities of supporters, advocates for what the company does.”

That personal advocacy, he says, will matter more than anything an impersonal company can do for itself. There are similar increasing values for human networks of connections: People with taste and experience who know you, people who value you because you have looked at them in that close human way.

Looked at this way, the ever-higher rejection rate of elite colleges despite the increasing popularity of high-quality free online alternatives like Coursera makes perfect sense. People don’t want to be at Stanford; they want the personal relationships they get from being at Stanford. In a fast-changing digital world, that durable human network may in a decade be more valuable than anything a student learned in the classroom.

It is a sharp shift from an earlier time, when people were ceaselessly around us, talk was cheap, and a manufactured good was a real luxury item. When things are digital and can be consumed whenever we want, valuable analog things, perishable in time, become more valuable.

For some technologists, this shift represents a source of hope. The rejiggering of values means that much of the work that currently defines people will go away, but the parts of life that can’t be encoded will become the basis of still-unseen economic activity.

“We’re moving towards a ‘post-automated’ world, where the valuable thing about people will be their emotional content,” said SriSatish Ambati, co-founder and chief executive of 0xdata, a company involved in open source software for big data analysis. “The only way to defeat the machines is if the world, including our brains, has an impossible level of complexity that the machines can never map.”

As the original article accompanying the chart implied, however, the expensive goods of our new world — being authentically seen, being heard in ways that matter — may be increasingly unavailable to the poor. Finding ways to make all that emotional content within humanity, at all levels, into something valuable would be a real economic miracle.

energy accounts for 33% of S&P 500 capex spending?!?!

BI | There's a lingering hope out there that America's corporations will unleash their cash hoards and replace their aging equipment.

"The whole debate about the S&P is about when this turns back up again," said Deutsche Bank's David Bianco back in November.

"We forecast capital spending by S&P 500 companies will rise by 9% in 2014 to $700 billion following a modest 2% growth in 2013," said Goldman Sachs' David Kostin in a new note to clients.

Based on Kostin's reading of the recent earnings season conference calls, growth expectations are currently trending a bit below that 9% rate.

"S&P 500 companies that provided guidance plan to boost capex by 7% in 2014, [are] slightly below our forecast," added Kostin. "171 S&P 500 companies provided capex guidance during recent quarterly earnings conference calls. These firms account for 50% of aggregate capex spending by the S&P 500. All sectors plan to increase capex in 2014 with the exception of Telecom Services, which guided flat."

For some context, Kostin provided this chart that breaks down how much each industry contributes to the capex story.

The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment, and Recession

ourfiniteworld | Since 1982, the number of people employed in the United States has tended to move in a similar pattern to the amount of energy consumed. When one increases (or decreases), the other tends to increase (or decrease). In numerical terms, R2 = .98.

I have written recently about the close long-term relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. We know that economic growth is tied to job creation, so it stands to reason that energy consumption would be tied to job growth¹. But I will have to admit that I was surprised by the closeness of the relationship for the period shown.

This close relationship is concerning, because if it holds in the future, it suggests that it will be very difficult to reduce energy consumption without a lot of unemployment. It also would seem to suggest that a shortage of energy supplies (as reflected by high prices) can lead to unemployment.

I tried to consolidate a number of employment-related issues into one post, so in this post I also show that employment is shifting to Asia and other less developed countries, as energy costs (and total costs) are lower there. I also show that the US appears to have reached “peak employment” as a percentage of population in 2000, likely as a result of this shift in employment to Asia. The Kyoto Protocol may indirectly have helped enable a shift in production to Asia, through its emphasis on local production of carbon dioxide, without considering the indirect impact on world markets².