Thursday, May 23, 2013

Thursday Links

  • The above is Markit's PMI index for Chinese manufacturing.  The scale is from the beginning of 2008 through May 2013.  Thus the big dip near the beginning is associated with the great recession.  The recovery, initially strong, has become anemic in the last couple of years.  It was a bit better in the last six months, but May's number is anemic again.  This is presumably associated with weak demand for manufactured goods in contracting Europe and the weakly growing US.
  • America's greenest office building.
  • Asset values probably are being propped up by the Fed.
  • Norbert Wiener back in 1949 on the coming age of the machines.
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4 comments:

  1. Luke The DebtorMay 23, 2013 at 11:37 AM

    With regards to Markit's Chinese PMI - there was a 7% drop in the Nikkei yesterday; US indices fell today before recovering and WTI went from $97 to $93 in three days (right before Memorial Day weekend of all weekends).

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  2. Robert WilsonMay 25, 2013 at 6:16 PM

    Time Magazine had an excellent science column when I was growing up. I read about Wiener in 1948. Was enthralled. His next book - The Human Use of Human Beings - was less mathematical and more political

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  3. Mike AucottMay 27, 2013 at 10:35 AM

    Wiener's words are lucid and amazingly prescient. His statement, "..if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we can do it by machine." makes me wonder what of significance we humans do not do in a clear and intelligible way but nevertheless do. Some things come to mind immediately - fall in love, laugh, write a song or a poem. Are these behaviors fundamentally different from things we do "in a clear and intelligible way" ? The answer is not clear and intelligible, to me anyway.

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  4. Robert WilsonMay 27, 2013 at 8:26 PM

    Link (partial) to the 1948 Time article. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,886484,00.html Three decades later while studying the effect of the Bunker Hunt silver fiasco on the quality of x-ray images (some companies attempted to reduce the silver content of film) I was surprised to find that that the Wiener spectrum was from the same Wiener. ----The film quality silver problem largely disappeared with the later development of digital radiography
    http://eprints.utm.my/882/1/JT34C5.pdf

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